Steaming pile of ... (pt.2)

on Thursday I finally get into a clan match. Hop on 1/2 hour early to play a couple of warmups and get Ventrilo set up. Inside the server itself it's fine until a minute before it goes live when there's wierd lag issues. Teh game starts and I'm seeing almost everyone running around as scouts or heavies. Obviously they aren't because 1/2 of them are shooting rockets at me. The doors on Well are also stuffed, showing a seethrough backface of the door model instead of a shut door. I log out and relog and it's still stuffed so I play 1/2 the game like that. We're down 0-4 so I relog again, this time fixing the model and lag issues. We stop the rot at 0-5, but the damage is done.

After the game I kill TF2 only to find a happy Steam update screen telling me that there's a new update that it happily downloaded while I was playing, as well as a new game coming out that you're sure to want me telling you about. AAAAAARRRRRGH!!!!!

Steam, get the hell off my computer. Just leave it alone. I don't want your popups, I don't want your automatic downloads, especially for games I'm not playing anymore, and ESPECIALLY WHEN I AM PLAYING A GAME! You are supposed to make my gaming time enjoyable, not ruin it. This hasn't been the only time either. I have had it update 3 times when I'm playing other non-steam games. I could have excused it for not knowing that I'd be wanting to use MY computer outside of its little steam world, but an update in the middle of a TF2 session, for TF2 (that couldn't possibly be applied until I finished anyway). Whatever happened to the common courtesy of asking if I would like to download it before you kill my bandwidth and processor.

I had a dig around the settings (3rd time doing so) and finally found an option to turn the auto updates off. Or so I hope. There was also an option to turn off the daily ads they keep ramming down my connection, but it doesn't work. I swear I'm gonna throttle some valve developers if the autoupdate removal option dosn't stick.

There are still issues with the friends system not giving up-to-date status information (If you're telling me they are in the game, they should be in a game, not offline 1 hour ago) and the join friend's server option just doesn't fit well with TF2's full server problems.

If there was ANY way to play TF2 without steam I'd uninstalll it in a flash, even forgoing Half life2 if need be. Just .. please .... go away.