Im no drive expert, so ill defer that, but the key point stands that damage due to SF3 was never proven unfortunately. (I wish it was, I hate to see bad company's prosper, im looking at you EA)

Okay, I'll buy that for the time being. The debit card problem is...?

So, your response to someone that disagrees is to tell them to take drugs? Pity, and you showed so much promise. Considering you don't know what my tech background is, well I'll just let you flounder about with your "knowledge".

Proven by what standard? Sorry, but you are completely ignorant about the subject, go educate yourself about the methods SF used to do it's "job" and you should feel somewhat embarrassed. It frequently caused multi-format optical drives (the kind most everyone started using by then) to perform sequential and unrecoverable step down below operational spec in many cases. It doesn't blow up a drive in one shot, it DOES slowly degrade it as a result - and not just while you are playing your game but any time the drive was in use once SF was on your system.

The reason it isn't in use anymore is because it was defective, not just from a PR perspective, but how it physically manipulated the drives operation through alteration of operational parameters.

In addition, even if it were as you said (and it's not) having to reinstall your entire OS because of crappy DRM... not much of a "it's not so bad" in my opinion either. I've dealt with SF already, and thanks to SecuROM's mangling my shell processes to the point of inoperable with the only choice being a complete reinstall.

I'm no big fan of DRM, but I'll take a platform like Steam that lets me install whenever, however, and as many times as I want without requiring me to uninstall software it doesn't like, tamper with my OS security or shell processes, or meddle with the function of my optical drives and cause performance/stability issues with them.

Personl bankruptcy is more and more common these days, and in the UK if you are a bankruptee you can not get a bank account for love nor money. A friend of mine just recently got her first bank account in 3 years after her bankruptcy was discharged.

You assumed that I was calling 2 valid websites 'idiots' so yes, you need to calm down, Valium helps with that. Even when the quote you supplied didn't even refute my statement, if anything, what you posted confirmed my stance, that starforce is a horrible piece of software, that was never proven to damage hardware.

The "whole point of Steam" isn't DRM. DRM comes into it, but it's only one of the upsides for Game Developers of using Steam.

Steam takes DRM, distribution, re-issue of titles as they grow or age, and a lot more and bundles it. It does a ton of great stuff for the gamer, but the most important thing it does is lower costs to the publishers. Lower costs in publishing means more games getting made.



The bandwidth issue people keep brining up is a non-issue. Steam uses almost no bandwidth unless you ask it to. People are confusing a broken installer on Bethesda/Obsidians part with the way Steam works. I've installed dozens of titles to my machine associated with my Steam account that installed off the disks and then only used Steam for patching and launching. The fact that so many people had to download the entire game or close to it despite having the disks has nothing to do with the way Steam works and everything to do with what was sent out on those disks.

If one is a bankruptee, 3 years away from gaming might be just what they need.

3 years away from gaming working a second job and they might not have become bankruptees in the first place.

the problem I have with that. the 'lower costs means more games getting made'..... Is that the games being made for 'lower costs' are worse and worse. Fallout New Vegas, Civ V, Blood Bowl (and I know there are many others, i just don't do tha tmuch PC gaming anymore)... are all prime examples of BETA version games with game-breaking bugs or outright missing 'standard' features... And we're STILL BEING CHARGED FOR A FULL WORKING GAME.

I'll take lower quantity, for higher QUALITY 100% of the time.

If they're saving so much money. Then either reduce OUR cost, or make the game worth the f*****g money!
Giving us 1/2 to 3/4 of the product for 100% of the price is the reason why piracy is as bad as it is, and (theoretically) getting worse.

EDIT:
You know, this is at least the third time I've brought this up, and I haven't seen a single reply to fight this.

I don't know much about steam but one thing what I hate about it is automatic game updates because you can't freely play gameversion you want also I heard about one guy who used cheats(trainers) in GTA singleplayer and he go all his purchased games banned.
Another reason is I prefer boxed games because only then i really feel that I own a game :wavey:
Loos like I will have to install steam anyway.

Hold on there, you all seem to be thinking im defending Starforce, hell no, hell no, hell no. Starforfce is evil, but it has never been proven to damage hardware, and im talking court of law proven here. If that had happened, the company would not be in business today.

I was one of the people whos drive slowed waaay down, (Etherlords II if you're interested) and yes, a complete OS reinstall fixed the problem, which is unacceptable, anything that needs a complete hard drive wipe to remove should never have been allowed to be used as a DRM, let alone ever been developed.

Im done with the thread, Ive said my piece on steam, and starforce as I see it, if you think you can prove that Starforce damaged hardware, I strongly urge you to file a class action suit against them and drive the company into bankruptcy.

Sure. Happen to have, oh about half a million to start up an independent lab for at least a year and hire the legal muscle to get started, so I can prove it did cause premature failure in certain types of drive... because they sure as **** won't accept a drive that was damaged in a user environment and just say 'oh, yeah, it was obviously our software that did it... sorry about that'. They'd fight it tooth and nail and beyond, because the 'fallout' (pardon the unintentional pun) would be MASSIVE - not just for them but industry wide.

Heck they could claim air quality as an alternative reason for drive failure outside of a lab, and there would be no way of disproving it. The reason it was never proven is because the damage is a cumulative effect resulting from operation at speeds never intended nor supported by drivers, and damage is completely subjective outside of a dedicated lab environment.

Also: CAL's are usually just too onerous, the only ones who really see anything a great deal of the time are the lawyers.

I don't know where you've been for the last 10-15 years, but what you're talking about - games shipping with significant bugs - has absolutely nothing to do with digital distribution.

Every single Civ game has required significant patching to work correctly. Every single Bethesda Softworks game has required significant patching.

A game requiring patching is not a digital distribution issue, although a product like Steam does make it extremely smooth for the consumer when it is needed. Every single one of the 50+ titles I maintain on my Steam account patches flawlessly and as soon as the update is available with no action taken on my part.

The rest of what you said is pure fabrication unless you can show me something empirical that games are getting smaller in scope or worth. Seeing as I've already gotten more hours out of this one title in a single playthrough than I did out of any game put out by Black Isle Studios, Obsidian's predecessor, or any other Obsidian-produced game, I'm going to have to call you on that point.

The reason there is hardly any response is because it's useless to try and in/validate someone's subjective opinion. I could try and tell you that you are being absurd, but then that's also just my opinion isn't it?

Take off the rose glasses man, games have always been buggy... some more or less... it's always been that way and it will always remain that way because of how complex games have become. Sure, I'd love to buy a game that never had any day one issues, but then I'd also love to own a small island and have ten billion in gold bullion in a secret vault on it.

As long as they address the bugs in good faith, and reasonable time frames, I'm generally content enough. It's entertainment, not life support.

I also remember how the StarForce offered money or something if you could prove that the StarForce DRM could physically damage a drive, meanwhile you had to pay to fly yourself over to Russia, and use THEIR equipment in THEIR environment. It was such a joke, and the people behind StarForce were totally crooked. If you so much as made a thread about problems with using StarForce, they would just delete it and ban you, even if you were merely seeking tech support.

This part is pretty obvious.



It's very easy to disable automatic updates. Simply right click on the game, click on properties, go to the "Updates" tab, then change "Always keep this game up to date" to "Do not automatically update this game".



Nope. If you get VAC banned, it only effects that game and in some cases games that use the same engine (for example, if you cheat in CS:S your ban will carry over to TF2). Also, if he was only playing single player and he was cheating, why wouldn't he run Steam in offline mode?

I've been gaming for all of it. I've been doing PC gaming since it started. Console too. while no, PC gaming is no longer a focus for me, I do still do some.

As for Civ IV. Never had a problem, certainly not a game-breaking bug Was it improved over time? Of course.
I've played EVERY Elder Scrolls game (Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion) and the expansions for them. Unless patches were auto-downloaded (which on 360 Oblivion they were), I don't recall every downloading any myself. I enjoyed them all, and there were NO game-breaking problems I ever had. Sorry, but it's the simple truth. I'm not saying that there weren't bugs. Of course there were. But they were pretty damned minor. Hell, Fallout 2 had the car-cut-in-half bug. Again. Annoying but not game-breaking.

As an example.. Take Blood Bowl, released by Cyanide/Focus Interative.
This is a game based off a boardgame that has been going successfully for over a decade, closer to 20 years. Even the original ruleset that Cyanide was using, had been around for multiple years (LRB 5). At start, about half the basic and standard 'optional' rules either weren't included, or were outright broken. As someone who has been a programmer... It's really not that hard to write code-rules based on pre-existing rules. I'm not talking about AI.. I'm talking about simple IF-THEN-ELSE. If X happens, Then do Y, Else do Z. When the rules have been set for 3-5 years, there's no question about them. there's no 'lets figure out what happens if A pushes B'... because it's already there. There's an example

Smaller in scope games:
In comparison to games 10-15 years ago.. Gods I hope modern ones would have larger scope. But then I choose to compare Apples to apples. Not apples to oranges. Today we have software and game-coding tools that literally dwarf what people had back then. Given, games like New Vegas and Mass Effect ARE deep games. And are worthy, or at least worthier 'children' of the original RPG's like Curse of the Azure Bonds and the like.
But then you take (and yes, this is my opinion) the endless FPS twitch-shooters with less than a short-story of plot, JUST so they can focus on maps for multiplayer. And yes.. the depth and scope of games are gone. 99% of FPS games bore the living s*** out of me. I got bored with them back when it was Duke Nukem and Castle Wolfenstein. And most of them haven't gotten any better save for graphics. I was worried when I first heard they were turning Fallout 3 into a First-person basis.
Hell, for Halo, the best one was still the first, at least for me.
Games come out faster it seems, there are more of them, and many of them don't have a hair of improvement over the previous because it's a point-and-click cut&dry equation of 'what will people buy?'

then of course there's AI. We've had AI for ages, and some of them have been really VERY impressive... And of late, they've been getting dumber and worse. While there's not been much in FNV to worry about outside of some pretty bad Mob pathfinding, take Blood Bowl, or Civ V as recent ones, and I'd have a harder game against an ADHD 5 year old with Downs Syndrome.

Multiplayer on Civ V is barely even an Alpha level with the choices and saves (don't even get me started there. save-games should not be a problem)
The saves/fast-travel where the game crashes (on me some, but a lot have had the problem if you hadn't noticed) for FNV
That with having a good 5 years minimum of Multiplayer matchup lobbies that work great, that Blood Bowl and even some newer FPS's can't match or link games properly.
That Cyanide, having JUST released a 'new' edition of Blood Bowl STILL hasn't fixed some of the very basic rules-bugs
And yes. there's more.

So I repeat. If Steam/digital distribution is saving these companies SO MUCH MONEY... Then SHOW me by giving me a product that will run off the bat properly and won't break if you do a basic save-game or fast-travel.
Give me a game with more than 3 hours of story, because being an FPS 'it's all about the multiplayer'. I don't give a rat's a$$ about multiplayer shooters.
Give me a game I can lose myself in (yes, like Fallout or Oblivion)... and be worth my time and money to play. Because i want to have FUN playing it. Not pull out my hair because I can't get past a broken save-game. Or some other glitch that should have been found out in Beta testing.

I'M NOT PAYING to be a beta tester. If that's what I am.. then give me the game for free or pay me for it.

I don't understand why, after paying 60 dollars for a game, there is a reason I can't simply take it out of the box and play it. When New Vegas came out, I bought it in store, then I had to download it through steam instead of installing it, not sure why or if this is true for everyone. Why should I pay 60 dollars to download a game that I could pirate for absolutely free? For one, I want to support companies that make great game so they continue to make them, but I don't know about next time, if they use Steam again.

It sounds like you entered the key into Steam before the installer for the game, which would cause Steam to just download it instead. Steam's not designed to install games from the disk, much less check to see if the disk is in the drive.

If you're bankrupt, you really shouldn't be buying nonessential stuff like video games at all.



More than that, VAC bans only apply to VAC-enabled servers. You can still play on non-VAC servers, and you won't be banned if you cheat on non-VAC servers either, AFAIK.



Well, with steam the games would be greatly reduced in cost (ala the steam sales which generally lop off anywhere from 33 to 75% of the cost while still being profitable and lucrative), but Valve has agreements with retailers to sell at market value so the retailers aren't completely outcompeted, because while in the long term it leaves Valve as the sole distributor of PC games, in the short term it means none of those retailers are going to carry steamworks games at all.

How is steam saving PC Games? It's no harder to pirate games then it was before Steam came out. Also, why can you not switch what drive your Steam games save to? Ridiculous.

Knowing quite a few game pirates, I will not mention where from publicly, this is not the reason at all. The reason is mostly because, why pay money when they can get it for free?

You can, you just install Steam itself to whatever drive you want your games on...really simple actually. It doesn't however, allow games across multiple drives, though there are ways around even that.

Can't say as that has any appeal for me at all.

May be a lot like xbox live, except you don't have to pay for it to use the extra features.