I haven't played EU4 in about a month, because booting between Windows for games and Linux for fucking everything else is a pain, and I'm not going to start using Windows for anything except games and a little bit of Internet browsing while I wait for them to start up.
Once again, I'm reminded of three things that I fucking hate about Steam, particularly if I come back after a long time (in other words, more than 48 hours or so):
- Steam decides it wants to update itself, a process that takes ten to fifteen minutes. I don't understand why it needs to update itself. If you're updating the shopping cart, you can update when I decide I want to buy something. I don't want or need anything else Steam might be updating. I don't. But there's no option to not update Steam.
- - After updates, Steam forgets my password. I don't just mean it doesn't autocomplete, though it doesn't do that either. It literally insists that the same password I've reset roughly a dozen times. I have to reset the password, I reset it to the same thing it was, and it insists that it's an invalid password after the next update, forcing me to update again.
- - After all that, I have to update the game, which takes ten to twenty minutes, and cannot be avoided or even delayed. So I'm wasting forty minutes of my time on Windows. I can't leave the computer because I need to wait for Steam to update, then try to login twice to confirm that Steam lost my password again, the reset my password so I can log in, then wait for updates, then get to the game launch screen, then launch the game which takes another five minutes. So I'm stuck browsing the internet, and if I wanted to spend almost an hour browsing the internet, I wouldn't boot into Windows to do it.
What's frustrating is that these are Paradox games, which lacking DRM should be playable without logging into fucking Steam. In fact, Paradox customer support has told me I can avoid Steam's BS by clicking on the EU4 icon itself. But if I click on the EU4 icon? It logs me into Steam in order to launch the game.