There is probably a period of time where a client "appears" to be up to date, but rather he just needed to wait a while for to update to get scheduled in for his particular content server
Yeah - I thought of that at the time. It had been half a day with numerous log in/out and I got them to check that the client wasn't updating etc etc etc.
there is always a little skew there at the leading edge of the release (in fact, there probably is an intentional scheduling skew to try and prevent an instantaneous demand of 1 million players all trying to get the update the hot instant it is released).
There shouldn't be a need for that. If there is, then the client needs to tell the user that they are queued for an update or that there is an update, but the d/l server is currently unavailable. Otherwise, people are going to think that something has been done, when it hasn't and then you end up with lost of angry, confused people on the forums. (Not least of all the annoying script kiddies)
Don't forget that those million players are spread world wide across a 24 hour time difference. Yes, you will get a peak when users log on when they get home from school/work etc. in the US, but this is the worst traffic peak. The rest of the traffic load should be reasonably evenly balanced and as long as you have sufficient servers and bandwidth (bandwidth seems fine - I can usually get updates down at 1.3mb/s), then peak times shouldn't be a problem.
By downloading 'the current" map to the players (instead of making the players log out and log back in, or wait a while for the update to become available), you have created a situation now where the next time that map is updated by Steam, the client will be guaranteed to suddenly have an out of date map (and any other updated content) that he now has to manually go and delete.
This quite defeats the purpose in having the GCF and auto-update system.
Like I said previously - not the brightest bit of development work I've ever seen sticking 400mb worth of files into a single closed file. If they'd left the file structure alone, then this would not be an issue. The map would automatically be updated from the server the moment the user connects.
Incidently, if there is a map file in a map folder, shouldn't the steam client download the map file from the game server if the local one is different to the remote one?
In other words, you have now sewn the seeds of the next wave of "your map is different" complaints.
I won't be the only person to have worked out this solution to the problem, not when there are a million plus users around the world and again I point you towards the foolishness that is the gcf file. Yeah it prevents people from tinkering with the maps, models etc, but it is a single point of failure. One minor corruption and the whole lot is gone, 400mb download here we go!!! Instead of a map or a model getting corrupted and the download being no more than say 6mb and may be as little as a few kb.
But there you go - just my thoughts on the matter.
Stephen
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