Well, they sure break their game a whole lot. This is the third different game-breaking problem this week alone, though from the lack of Internet chatter about this, I'm not sure if it's broken for everyone (as was the case twice earlier this week) or if it's just me.
Normally when I try to launch Tree of Savior, there's a window briefly to acknowledge that it's launching, then it goes away and looks like it did nothing for a minute or so, then the game window opens.
I played for a while earlier this evening. When I tried to play again, the game locked up my computer at the title screen. I hadn't previously seen that happen at the title screen, but it wasn't that surprising, as Tree of Savior alone accounts for most of the crashes that this 7+ year old computer has seen.
So I reboot the computer and try to launch the game again, and there's a giant patch to download. Who patches a game on a Friday night, anyway? I read stuff in a browser for a while, and about ten minutes later, the patch is long done, but the game didn't launch. Try launching the game and watch Task Manager and the game starts to load as normal (while displaying nothing on the screen), then abruptly closes and frees all of the memory it had allocated, before the game visibly launched. No crash error message or anything, but just the program vanishes.
Reboot the computer and try again. Makes no difference. Uninstall the game and do a complete reinstall. Makes no difference. Reboot after the reinstall. Still no difference.
And this, of course, from a game that doesn't have tech support. Steam does list an e-mail for tech support, but I e-mailed them about a problem three weeks ago and still haven't gotten a reply.
Comments
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
It doesn't make it to the title screen where you select a server. So it doesn't matter if servers are down, because the game client doesn't get far enough to search for them.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/372000
The page also crashes almost immediately for me, so read fast.
But even once logged in, I can't submit a ticket. I found a button that says it should submit a ticket, but when I try, it just gives me a "Please authenticate your Steam account" error message and sends me back to the game's home page.
So I use a Google login, then found the tiny Steam login button that is about 1/4 of an inch across. It wants my Steam username and password, so I enter them and it doesn't accept it. I try again several more times, working through various CAPTCHAs, and it just won't take it. Finally, I go to Steam in a different browser window to re-reset my password to be the same as it already was, which I know what it was because when I typed it to log in to Steam earlier today, it worked there. Just not through the Tree of Savior web site.
And then after re-resetting my Steam password without changing what I was doing when trying to log in through Tree of Savior, it finally accepted the password. And promptly logged me out and threw me back to the site's home page. After yet another login attempt, I finally managed to submit a ticket.
Requiring you to log in to their site by giving your credentials of multiple other major web sites is a seriously awful security practice. Making it seem normal to enter your login credentials to a bunch of external web sites is how people get accounts stolen. I can kind of understanding wanting your Steam login, as Steam is the game publisher and they want to connect it to your game account somehow.
But they have no business asking for your Google or Facebook login. Many people don't have accounts with either of them, and shouldn't have to get an account just to submit a ticket. Note that the accounts aren't required to play the game, but only to submit support tickets.
The file in question, incidentally, was:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\TreeOfSavior\release\user_c.xml
Upon opening the file, it was pretty obvious that the file was corrupt. Rather than being a valid xml file, it was pure whitespace. Deleting the file fixed the problem, and the file it was replaced with actually looks like XML, in addition to being a significantly smaller file size.