Valve is watching you. Every time a lone head crab takes you out, an overweight game designer mashing a Snickers bar between his teeth lets out a long belch then guffaws at you. When you spent five minutes in the crouch position, checking out the denim seams on Alyx's ass, Valve knows. Data gathering statistics are thoroughly embedded into Steam; everytime you do anything, they send back the data to the mothership.

And now they've done something with the technology: the first patch for Half-Life 2: Episode One makes the elevator section significantly easier, based upon the incompetence in aggregate of the players in that section of the game.

I'm not a big fan of this at all. This isn't really improving the game: it's dumbing down the difficulty level for the lowest common denominator. Given that this section really wasn't that hard to begin with, this is a really weird way to employ the technology. What do you guys think? Florian Eckhardt

Half-Life 2: Episode One Update Released [Steam Powered]

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