Hey guys,

Although it would make little difference now - and you guys wont change the bandwidth I have used so im uncapped.

but I thought that all "bigpond services" didnt count towards my monthly usage.


I had a hard drive crash at the start of the month and had to download and reinstall steam (CSS, TF2 and all the other steam games I have)

then at the end of the month i had to do another same install and re-install the same games - because of a virus (XP Guardian 2010 virus)

but both times i told steam to download from NSW - Telstra

and now I have been capped - go figure... so i dont know if or where something has gone wrong....

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ps on another note - your CSS guys needs to fix the links at the top - the twilight picture is stopping a user from seeing the links in the top right corner.. (white text on white background....)

you might wanna try actually contacting support,not posting in the forum.
Steam is problematic so if you trusted there services to only download from a bigpond server you have been fooled.

Think you'll find Steam and GA are not linked. Steam just downloads from what it percieves as being a GA download host, if it can't find the download you wanted it may well have chosen a different server for part or all of your downloads which is not GA's fault, that's a steam issue.

The other issue is if you have viruses so often there's something wrong with your connection or software. I can't remember the last decade i had to redownload everything because of a virus. Lucky i guess.

You can just backup the Steam folder too, you don't have to reinstall all the games everytime, just install the base software then copy over it with the backed up folder. hell it even has it's own backup process for installed games you can use

Oh well live and learn good luck with your problem

Selecting NSW - Telstra just makes the GA servers *preferred*. If steam can't get a connection there it *will* look elsewhere - either if the game isn't hosted or, as I imagine was your case, if the servers are just too busy. I recommend you find a program called Steamwatch, which forces steam to use a specific IP whitelist (which you set to be the GA servers).

Thanks for the reply...

Yeah last time I contacted support at bigpond - their service was absolutly pathetic

(
"No sorry we have no contact number for you to phone in regards to game arena for support "
"no sorry we dont have a billing department for game arena"
"well here is an email and they will get back to you within 3 weeks" )

I am well aware that steam and GA are not linked - rumour on the grapevine is that GA has a steam download server - and that they are (GA) in contact with steam about this..

My feedback was that maybe someone changed an IP on bigponds side and its now not working and to stop other people from having their bandwidth wasted all at once...and maybe they could look into it..

Backups are great i agree with you on that - that is of course unless your like me and dont have anywhere to backup too....

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thanks for the feedback Phyaran - i knew about steamwatch but was told that steam built one in and that it was no longer needed as a third party app...
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usually - from the IRC or the forums i get 100 times better services from GA then from the bigpond support....

oh well no need to respond - i will just have to wait it out

thanks guys

I meant contacting using the Contact us at the bottom of the web page, don't bother with Bigpond.

GameArena has nothing to do with Telstra Bigpond as such it's a seperate entity.

Thanks for the reply

.

Billing enquiries will have to go through Bigpond.

You've been misinformed. Steam will never lock itself into a content server in case the content you want isn't hosted on that server; not all content servers host all content. I'd say what happened here is that Steam chose another content server and therefore the usage you incurred is valid, even if you didn't intend for that to happen.

They have two of them, actually. But GA can't dictate to Steam how to handle content distribution, so the situation is highly unlikely to change.

Cheers

There REALLY needs to a be a sticky guide on how to use SteamWatch http://www.users.on.net/~marttinen/

with UP TO DATE ip addresses for all GameArena content servers.

i have to agree with maelstrom because THIS month i installed steam watch

and it doesnt download SQUAT from GA - now i have to wait till the end of this month and download it before the month rolls over...

Near as I can tell the default GA server ip addresses are long out of date.

Did a bit of google searching and managed to (eventually) discover the up to date addresses:

203.39.198.167
203.39.198.168

Those should work, and it should be unmetered for Bigpond Customers (it was for me!).

Regardless, the point remains that it shouldn't be neccessary to search around for the addresses - they should be available in an easy to find location, and kept up to date with any changes.

thanks heaps malestrom your a savior!