Developer Forum

... at $7.99, from Circuit City of course :-)

Gotta gen up a disposable email account.. on hotmail, most likely....
so that I can sell it used, at say $12 plus shipping, on Ebay.

John Lewis

At least you can have an informed opinion - good or bad.

Let us know when you're going to take a shit also.

We're on edge already.

Knight37

In article < XXXX@XXXXX.COM >,
XXXX@XXXXX.COM says...

It's a new X-treme eSport!

The inaugural 2006 J. Lewis X-treme Tight-Fist eSport competitions begin
in August. Sign up today and get $.03 off the $.07 entrance fee!*






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MRSisson (who throws his rich parents money around with abandon)
--
LOAD "GPL",8

SEARCHING FOR GPL
LOADING
READY.
RUN

This will be my first (and possibly the last) venture into the
wonderful world of Steam. I have no intention of ever buying any Valve
games at anything except loss-leader prices if Valve continues to
distribute single-player games that require on-line validation and has
EULA prohibitions on the disposition of used product. No rewards for
"screw the paying customer" behavior by arrogant developers.

John Lewis

XXXX@XXXXX.COM (John Lewis) writes:





There will be no loss lead price for a download John : the servers are
running anyway :-;

On Thu, 15 Jun 2006 09:47:51 +0200, Walter Mitty < XXXX@XXXXX.COM >






Correct.
Hence only retail purchase at loss-lead discount by me.. And any time
the retailers lose by having to pay more to Valve than the prices that
they sell the games, it will make them disinclined to stock them.
Valve with download-only sales using the Steam model will die.
Just want to help that process along -- or help persuade Valve
to change their distribution model to a customer-centric one.
A model that treats the (non-pirate) honest customer as a true partner
with all the use and disposal freedoms currently enjoyed by purchasers
of single-player games with on-disk ( or zero ) copy-protection.

John Lewis

Well why don't you just Bit Torrent (etc) the full cracked no-online-sign-up
thing down ..and play it..
You will be bored half-way to next Christmas within an hour or 2 and can
then have the pleasure
of uninstalling the beast.. ...now (the clever bit) cut the Game file up
into small, say 100kb bits
so you can email them to Valve/Source/Steaming people place.
Say it was no theft as you were only having a quick try..and returned it.in
the original condition...having bravely
rescued it from those wicked Warez Pirates...
Mouse
@@@@

I'm not quite sure how retail *** works, but I'm guessing here that
it's the _retailer_ that takes the loss, and not the producer (Valve)?
In which case, your pseudo-boycott won't affect Valve one bit; it's
still a sale.

Just finished Episode I last night and, have to say, was a little (just
a little) underwhelmed. I think one problem was the lack of novelty
compared to HL2; sure, it was an add-on, but a few new
weapons/creatures(*) wouldn't have gone amiss (judging from the Episode
2 trailer, this looks likely to change).

(*)Ok, there's one, but you don't interact with it. No spoilers...

Also, the balance was a little off; I can normally play HL2 at Hard
level, but in this case, I was forced to whack the settings down to
easy twice. And near the end, an almost hidden (up on a balcony)
ordinary Combine soldier can take almost all your health in one shot;
damn hard.

Still, a slightly underwhelming HL2 game is still great, and I'm
looking forward to Episode 2.

P.

On Thu, 15 Jun 2006 21:36:16 +0100, "Trimble Bracegirdle"



Sorry, I don't pirate any games... ever. Regardless of my distaste for
the game, the publisher, or (in this case) the authentication scheme.


Seems like a $8 value. Since I have never played HL2, maybe I can
enjoy it for a couple more hours ?

John Lewis

Seriously John, if you like FPS there's little to dislike. Steam has it's
faults but making decent games available isn't one of them.

It is extremely difficult to make those that oppose a
particular copy protection to totally boycott and not
buy the game, but at least if they do it in the 2nd hand
market and then sell it again in the 2nd hand market it
is some sort of penalty for those that are using copy
protection means like product activation

Translation: I have so little willpower I'm unable to stick to even the
limited dumb-ass boycott I fill up this newsgroup with rants about.

I'm glad you weren't leading the South African boycotts of the 80s, or
poor Mandela would still be in jail ("Hey, guys, I guess it's OK to
drink _cheap_ South African wine, right?")

P.

Very UNFAIR your remark...
Haven't I tried enough to make developers and publishers not use
any kind of Product Activation in a Retail PC Game?
I've been doing my best!

I haven't bought a single unit of any Retail PC Game with Product
Activation.

I haven't bought any of the PC Games featured in my list and some
of them I'm still dying to be able to play them.

http://www.yqcomputer.com/

I would ABSOLUTELY love to buy, install and play:
. Half-Life 2
. Sin Episodes 1
. Half-life 2 Episodes 1
But I haven't and I will not buy any of them if they use any kind
of humiliating Product "ask for permission" Activation.

And I still say... BOYCOTT Retail PC Games with any kind of
Product Activation!

Now having said that I have to admit that now Lewis which was one
of the most active opponents to steam and Product Activation in a
single-player game is now "surrendering"... and he is not alone...
Unfortunately Valve got away with all the abuse they brought into
PC Games with Steam.
If a game is very good then the majority of PC Gamers will do the
sacrifice of using abusive copy protections like steam to be able
to play the game.
That was exactly what happened to Half-Life 2, the majority do not
like Steam and if they had the choice they would never choose it
or use it to play Half-Life 2 but Valve forced them to use it.
So Valve got away with it the first time... but can this system
survive much longer?
I do not believe it can... if you are doing something against your
own customers you eventually will suffer the consequences and I
hope Valve will get its pay.