Torchlight fans rejoice over Steam achievements, Cloud support

Alright so this is what just happened to me. I was playing Torchlight, having a blast on my day off and had been playing for about 6 hours or so. When I decided to run back through an area I had already completed because I seemed to be missing a quest some how. Now I don't know if it was a steam problem or a problem with the game, but it crashed soon after I reentered the level. I thought, no problem, the game autosaves so I can just load it back up and continue.

I double clicked the shortcut and up pops this message that says something like "the files stored locally appear to be newer then those on steam cloud, would you like to use them instead". Well boys and girls, since the fine people at steam never bothered to mention anything to me about how "steam cloud" now stores my save games on their servers and all that pointless BS, I thought i would play it safe and instead of clicking Okay, or even Cancel I would just close the dialog box and do some research first. So I closed the dialog box, and guess what Torchlight started anyway.

That is when I got a very bad feeling, followed by the realization that my bad feeling was correct. My character I had just spent the last 6 hours building up was back to what it had been before I started to play tonight. Gone were about 7 or 8 uniques, I was 6 levels lower, about half my progress through the storyline was gone, etc. Somehow though the character I created tonight still existed and even had the gear I had passed to it to make room in the shared stash, however the items where in the stash still as well, in effect duplicating items I had no use for at the time anyways.

Now I have to wait for valve technical support, and last time it took them literally weeks to answer a simple question. I have a bad feeling about what they are going to say to, probably something along the lines of "we are sorry we are working on a solution and will try to make it better in the future…blah blah blah", and never give me any kind of compensation.

In summary, this lovely feature "steam cloud" which is supposed to back up your characters in case of a crash, in fact can reset your characters to what they were before a whole day of playing when otherwise they would be fine. After giving you a choice in which nothing is explained and you can't cancel out of.

P.S. Those of you who like to cheat, all you have to do to dupe items is create a new character, and put all the items you want to dupe on it. Then you have to cause the game to crash, off hand I can't say I know a way to do it, but look around, shouldn't be hard to figure something out. After you crash it just hit cancel when given the choice to use local files, and presto you duped your loot. You also lost all progress from the last 24 hours, so I suggest you not play at all for a 48 hour period before duping just to be safe.