Can Steam be forced to keep a game in queue?

cliffordcooley

Posts: 13,141   +6,441
I bought Witcher and Witcher 2 a few days ago. Witcher downloaded and plays just fine. Witcher 2 is the only game I have in queue. I've had Witcher 2 in queue for 3 days and have less than 300MB out of 16GB downloaded.

Game content has been deleted a few times to start the download over. I click to queue the game download and in less than a minute the queue stops and doesn't start back. Out of all the games I've downloaded this is the only one not downloading.

So!! Is there a way to force the queue to stay queued?

Or is there a way I can download and update Steam, without using the internal download facility? I know I should be asking Steam, but wanted to ask here first.

BTW: I've spent an hour or so searching for a solution. I've seen several people having issues at the Launcher stage but none during download.
 
It's bad when you have to manually queue the game 20 times or more to get 10MB. I now have a little over 300MB.
 
Perhaps change the region you have set in your preferences.

Check your hosts file to make sure you aren't using any 'steam download tools'.
 
C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc

Open the file 'hosts' in notepad. Check it to make sure there's no entries that look odd.

Also check your AV to make sure traffic isn't being blocked. Any restrictions on your router that could do this?
 
Host file:
Code:
# Copyright (c) 1993-2009 Microsoft Corp.
#
# This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP for Windows.
#
# This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. Each
# entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address should
# be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host name.
# The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least one
# space.
#
# Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on individual
# lines or following the machine name denoted by a '#' symbol.
#
# For example:
#
#      102.54.94.97     rhino.acme.com          # source server
#       38.25.63.10     x.acme.com              # x client host

# localhost name resolution is handled within DNS itself.
#    127.0.0.1       localhost
#    ::1             localhost
Also check your AV to make sure traffic isn't being blocked. Any restrictions on your router that could do this?
I'm not quite sure how this would be an issue with just one game. If there are restrictions in-place, they were not manually put there. In-fact I wouldn't know how to identify a restriction that allows Witcher to download, while blocking Witcher 2.
 
The download server/IP for that particular game could be different to the rest. It's possible.

I see nothing wrong with hosts file. Perhaps it's time to lodge a Steam support ticket.

Edit: maybe things will magically solve themselves if you come back to IRC. ;P
 
I see nothing wrong with hosts file. Perhaps it's time to lodge a Steam support ticket.
I was hoping, I wouldn't need to start a support ticket.
Edit: maybe things will magically solve themselves if you come back to IRC. ;P
LOL - I have been thinking about dropping by for a bit lately.

Edit:
BTW, I now have 340MB downloaded. That is about 60MB since I started the thread. I'm actually finding it comical, though at some point I do want the game downloaded.
 
Good News!
Witcher 2 started downloading full throttle sometime this morning. I currently have about 6.6GB. That is about 20 times more than downloaded the first few days.

I wonder why Steam doesn't utilize P2P networking? I'm positive they can manage updates and file integrity through P2P.
 
See, we looked through your PC to see if it was anything there blocking it. The next step is actually ISP, to see if they are throttling/barring any IPs (but this step is hard to get through) so the final step is seeing if Steam has problems with that game.

Good news, that it's working for you now.
 
I could not see any thing wrong based on cliffordcooley's statement regarding steam games download.

as far as I know (and I have a small steam games library), the default setting is ''while playing game, should steam be allowed to download other games or applications?''
'follow my global settings (stop background download) '

as for my experience based on my 1mbps (actual download speed ~ 150KBps), some games queued for download are downloaded faster than others regardless of installer size.
 
Curious problem. You're sure that it's set to continue downloading while you're playing other games? I've had that problem before after purchasing game bundles -- I download some small title and start playing it while waiting for the big AAA title to download, only to discover afterwards that it hasn't progressed :)
 
Downloading has finished, I may never know why the difficulty.
Curious problem. You're sure that it's set to continue downloading while you're playing other games?
Nah that is not it. I mean the download does stop during game play. But I'm talking about anytime, even while I'm not on the PC and all other apps are closed.

I did notice downloading worked a bit better when set to unlimited bandwidth. But even then it would stop for very long periods of time. If I ever set a bandwidth limit, it would stop completely. It is sad really because, I set a download limit for a reason. If I wanted the downloading at full throttle, I wouldn't have bothered. At first I didn't think of this as being a potential problem (all other games downloaded fine), but then it wasn't the whole problem either.

In the end I am a happy camper, even though it took a week to download. :)
 
I know it is a bit late for the conversation but just for anyone else reading this, I had the same issue. It turned out I just ran out of room on my hard drive and had to make room for it. It probably doesn't apply to everyone but it's something I discovered at about the same time I was reading the thread and now the download is running smoothly.
 
Just fyi on the HOSTS file:
the first non-commented entry should ALWAYS be present and read
127.0.0.1 localhost
several windows services relay upon the name LOCALHOST

if you want ipv6 support, then add
::1 localhost
The comment "localhost name resolution is handled within DNS itself."
is bogus for two reasons:
  1. all 127.0.0.1 addresses are non-routing
  2. the name will still resolve if the DNS CLIENT is stopped.
thus relying upon host file lookup
 
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