I shut down a game, but Steam refuses to acknowledge it.

[Jamie A. Rose]

Recently I've had a problem with playing The Secret World over Steam. When I close the game out, Steam continues to show me as still being in the game. If I try to restart the game, Steam refuses, claiming I'm in the game. I can start a different game. But if I try to shutdown Steam, it will again refuse, claiming I have not shut down the game. The only work around I've found so far is to go into Task Manager and end the process on Steam. Mind you, not on TSW which shuts down on it's own. Although it seems to open a bug report window everytime I turn the game off, which is weird.

Is there a real fix to this? Or am I going to have to uninstall this game from Steam and redownload it as a seperate file?

[Spawn of Totoro]

When this happens, push Ctrl + Alt + Delete.

Go to the Task Manager and look under Processes. See if the Secret World's .exe file is still running.

[Jamie A. Rose]

I already said that TSW is shutting down properly. If that were the case, I would not be having to End Process on Steam.

[Spawn of Totoro]

Did you try and verify game cache?

Sounds like TSW isn't closing properly if a bug report is popping up.

May want to check the TSW forums and see if anyone is also having this issue. May have to to through TSW Support as well for a fix.

[Jamie A. Rose]

The game cache checked out fine.

Apparently the cause of the bug report window is that the in-game browser conflicts with steam overlay. They suggested not using the in-game browser if the overlay is on. Hopefully this is the fix I need.

[Jamie A. Rose]

Took care of the crash report window, but not the problem where I can't relaunch. I'll go talk to funcom support, but I imagine I'm just going to have to uninstall the game and re-download it as a file seperate from this Steam.

More evidence that Steam is a freaking boat anchor.

[dirrtymartini]

Originally posted by Dead Herald:

Took care of the crash report window, but not the problem where I can't relaunch. I'll go talk to funcom support, but I imagine I'm just going to have to uninstall the game and re-download it as a file seperate from this Steam.

More evidence that Steam is a freaking boat anchor.

WTF? "A boat anchor" because one game has an issue with the steam browser? Talk about throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

[Spawn of Totoro]

Looks like you are one of the few with this problem. It would mean that the issue is with your system, not Steam.

[Jamie A. Rose]

Originally posted by dirrtygsharp:

WTF? "A boat anchor" because one game has an issue with the steam browser? Talk about throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

I'm sorry, no fanboy comments please.

This is hardly the first game I've ran into steam related issues with. Not to mention the fact that this issue is all over the place with lots of people running afoul of this in many games. But only one other person had the same issue with this game and he got the same useless advice I did. (It must be the game not closing, which I already said that was not the case.)

I could go on for hours about all the reasons that I find steam to be a drag on one's system in general. The term "boat anchor" is simply a faster way of saying it.

End result of all this, uninstall and redownload.

Yay...

[dirrtymartini]

Originally posted by Dead Herald:

Originally posted by dirrtygsharp:

WTF? "A boat anchor" because one game has an issue with the steam browser? Talk about throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

I'm sorry, no fanboy comments please.

It wasn't a fanboy comment. Considering all of the useful and WORKING features that Steam provides, to condemn it because one feature out of several hundred doesn't work well (or at all) with TSW seems silly.

Would you stop using Windows because notepad doesn't include a spell checker?

Espceially when the Steam Client includes the ability to disable the overlay for specific games.

Originally posted by Dead Herald:

I could go on for hours about all the reasons that I find steam to be a drag on one's system in general. The term "boat anchor" is simply a faster way of saying it.

End result of all this, uninstall and redownload.

Wait a minute. You say the Steam Client is slowing down your system so your fix is to uninstall and reinstall it? How does that help? I'm not being fanboy here -- I'm really trying to understand.

[Jamie A. Rose]

Originally posted by dirrtygsharp:

Wait a minute. You say the Steam Client is slowing down your system so your fix is to uninstall and reinstall it? How does that help? I'm not being fanboy here -- I'm really trying to understand.

What I meant was that Steam Client and TSW don't play nice together. My solution was to uninstall TSW, disassociate the game from Steam, redownload it and run it seperately.

Forget the boat anchor comment, I was in a bad mood that day. Although Steam could do with ironing out a few issues. (Namely memory usage and download queueing.)

[dirrtymartini]

Originally posted by Dead Herald:

Originally posted by dirrtygsharp:

Wait a minute. You say the Steam Client is slowing down your system so your fix is to uninstall and reinstall it? How does that help? I'm not being fanboy here -- I'm really trying to understand.

What I meant was that Steam Client and TSW don't play nice together. My solution was to uninstall TSW, disassociate the game from Steam, redownload it and run it seperately.

I checked with a buddy who plays TSW and that's what he does too.

Originally posted by Dead Herald:

Forget the boat anchor comment, I was in a bad mood that day. Although Steam could do with ironing out a few issues. (Namely memory usage and download queueing.)

Understand completely. We all have those kind of days. Thanks for explaining things.

Agree on the memory usage and download queueing.

[dirrtymartini]

Originally posted by TheBDK:

Why does steam stop people from running two games at once in the first place? Makes no sense. When I was playing Anarchy Online, I would usually have that game running 3 times because of my alts. So yeah, dont buy mmo's if they require steam lol.

Now, now, Mr. Thread Hijacker. Go open your own thread. :P

[H3X]

About the OP's issue with TSW, I recently found a similar bug with some of the Tomb Raider games when run from steam. The dosbox application calls a windows function for command line (conime.exe) to let it all work and doesn't close it after the game session is ended. TSW might not use dosbox, but it could well be something similar going on here.

So, Dead Herald: take a look at your windows processes in the task manager (ctrl-alt-del) and see what you can find that's not usually running, or if the game leaves something open like a launcher or server checking tool, anything like that. Chances are there's something that's not being closed and because it's still running, steam thinks the game is still open.

[=|Lexx|=]

The only thread I found so far on this problem.
I have the same one and looking for a solution.
Could it be because of the patcher, that starts before the actual game?
Also I copied my nonsteam TSW folder into steam (to speedup update process) - it still downloaded around 20GB but said it's fine afterwards.
So I started the game and could login. I was on the character creation menu when I quit but steam said I was still "in-game" so I tried to verify the game-cache ... Oh man ... it said 18GB and so I downloaded the game again (as it seems) - cos after that (now) I have to patch-up again 1.66GB as the time before... I guess I should not try to verify the gamecache again this time.
Any solutions?

Sorry for diggin' this up but unsolved problems are unsolved!

[brian76400]

;)