Carrot dangling

So I like to play this game called Team Fortress. It's an online (and offline) first person shooter type thing created by a company called Valve. Some years ago they incorporated a thing called "Steam" into the game. Steam is sort of a wrapper application that updates your game automatically and includes all of the games you've bought so you can launch all of them from there. It is not optional. If you want to play a steam game you have to run steam.

I've been waiting for oh, about 8 years for the follow up game to Team Fortress. They said it was coming out 8 years ago. They showed us screenshots, told us what it was going to be like, even had interviews. Vaporware. (That's where an application or game is supposed to come out during a specific time frame and doesn't get released). It's been on the vaporware top 10 for 8 years now. But it's coming out. This I am certain of. A month from now. YAY, right? Well, no.

See, I have a lot of money invested in this little thing called steam. I have personally purchased 3 copies of half life 1, 1 Half life 2 collector's edition, 2 half life 2 standard edition, and possibly even more that I have forgotten about. One might wonder why a person would need so many copies of one game. The reason is I have a kid that loves the game and a brother who also love the game. To say I have "a couple hundred bucks" into it would be an understatement. I don't mind that though, I do love the games and we all enjoy playing the games. They are well worth the money.

But.

I recently had an issue with steam. See, the neat thing about steam is if you know your username and password you can log into some random computer, download the installer, put in your username and password and after a bit of a download you're up and running the game that is rightfully yours. Pretty cool indeed. No need to bring the cd's or anything, they take care of the software for you. My problem was that steam would not install on the computer I was at. My son came to work with me on Friday since he had the day off and I did not. I plopped him down in front of my secondary computer and he decided he wanted to play a steam game. No problem, we have a T1 and a backup dsl line so it wouldn't take long to get the data and have him occupied for several hours. Alas steam wouldn't install. I did everything I could think to do and then as a last resort I went to their website and submitted a support ticket. 2 hours later I received an automated reply saying I was in queue and would be helped in order of arrival.

Your question has been received. We answer incidents in the order received. Please be patient and we will provide you with a solution as soon as possible.

Well here it is, Sunday, and I've yet to hear from them again. Saturday morning, after not hearing from them, I started checking their forums and asking questions of the other users of steam. One would think the answer would be straightforward. Here is a direct quote of my question:

How long does it take for steam support to start?

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I'm curious to find out from other steam users how long it takes, on average, for a user to get a non-automated response from steam after submitting a support request.

I received answers from two users that directly quoted company employees even though I continued to stress I wasn't looking for what the company was telling users, I wanted to know, in reality, how long should I expect to wait. The install issue was by this point moot, but since I started the support process I was wondering how long the support process actually took. I never did get an answer from a regular user but did find at least one report per page of their forum where it had been more than two weeks and a support request had yet to have a response. There is a sticky post on the forums (good god, could forums have more sticky posts?) regarding an unusually high call volume... oh wait, no, that's the typical dsl company's response...

Please read if you have an open support request

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Currently we are experiencing a very high volume of support requests.

If you have opened multiple support requests for a single issue, please close all but one of your support requests.

If you have updated your requests, please leave the request open that contains the most pertinent information.

I don't know what you all are accustomed to as far as support goes but this is most certainly NOT what I'm accustomed to. Here I am, figuring out how I'm going to afford two copies of their upcoming release at likely $60 - $100 each when I find out that two weeks is quite likely the minimum amount of time I can expect to wait if the product doesn't work for whatever reason. I'm a pretty technical person. I'm a programmer/sytem adminstrator in real life. This is the first issue I've had in the 10-ish years I've had the game(s). I really want Team Fortress 2. But is it worth it? Is that carrot really that sweet? Aren't there other carrots out there? Well this is something I will stew on (pun intended, sorry) for the next month while I await the release of Team Fortress 2 (which is packaged with some other pretty cool looking games.)

I suspect I will cave this time. I will likely chalk it up to experience and know what I'm getting into. But I'm open to suggestions.

In related but unrelated news I have switched to a linux setup for my home pc. I'll get windows working for the game mentioned above but if I decide not to go with TF2, which is still a very real possibility, then I'll not be going back for similar reasons. Windows is moving in a direction that I no longer like. I've always hated change in the windows world, but vista... have you seen this monster? I have. And it is the death of windows for me.