Why does steam's scheduled auto-update seem so random and inconsistent?

[TwoFaceTony]

Why is it that I have updates that are scheduled for almost 2 weeks later, when they could all easily be done within several hours?
Steam's auto-update settings seem to just randomly pick a couple games to update and then it just stops. If you schedule time for steam to update games, it should just be updating games that whole time instead of stopping after an hour or two. It instead schedule updates for random days weeks in advance even though the update is already out and nothing else needs to update.

To that point, why can't I decide the order that things will update during my set hours? If I want to play a specific game tomorrow, I should be able to tell steam to download/update that game first. The only way to do that is to just start downloading that, but that completely defeats the purpose of setting hours for steam to download updates.

[cSg|mc-Hotsauce]

Least/oldest played installed games get sent to the longest 2 week scheduling.

If you want them to queue immediately, set the games to Immediately Download Updates per game in their properties menu.

[TwoFaceTony]

Originally posted by cSg|mc-Hotsauce:

Least/oldest played installed games get sent to the longest 2 week scheduling.

If you want them to queue immediately, set the games to Immediately Download Updates per game in their properties menu.

:nkCool:

Except often games I haven't played in months will be set to download before games I've played yesterday. Often, games that are scheduled to download for a particular night also just don't download when I leave my computer on that night.
I also shouldn't have to go into the properties of every single game in order for steam to simply continue updating games during the set download times.There's no reason that another update shouldn't just download during the 6 hours that nothing is updating after finishing a single update. If there are 3 updates that are 30mb-150mb, there's no reason they should have to update weeks apart instead of all in the same night.

[TwoFaceTony]

Update: With 12 games to update, including one that I literally played the day before, Steam decided to instead update a single game (at 221mb) that I haven't played in almost a year. 221mb would only take a few minutes, so what was steam doing during the other 9 hours?
Steam's auto-update needs to be fixed.

[rawWwRrr]

You could set the game's update settings to immediate. Then they won't schedule at all and will update as soon as there is one available to download.

[TwoFaceTony]

Originally posted by rawWwRrr:

You could set the game's update settings to immediate. Then they won't schedule at all and will update as soon as there is one available to download.

I want them to download in the scheduled time but I don't want them to wait to download until 2 weeks from now.
And again, I shouldn't have to go into the settings of every game in my library just to make them download when steam already has global download settings.