Hi Hatter. Typically there are two annoyances to be had when dealing with these services. The initial annoyance is of creating an account, which gets more convoluted if you buy certain game on Steam made by the owner of Origin or uPlay, requiring you to sign up with those services also. More and companies want to start their own digital distribution platform, and one day this house of cards will collapse and kill us all. Won’t that be lovely?

The second annoyance is many of the games are tied to the services and will not function without them. You are Steam’s life jacket, and if he goes down, he’s taking you with him.

Other than that you’re pretty much golden. Steam is extremely convenient to use and has an offline mode for single player games. Losing progress due to Internet loss is generally a uPlay thing. I've not heard the Origin spy rumours for years, though it goes without saying you should use an array of passwords because hacking publishers seems to be the latest fashion.

This is sort of derailing this topic a bit, but I just felt I had to step in to support this part of your comment 100%. Even in a country like the USA where money is fundamental to survival and is a primary basis for having increased opportunities and freedoms, I find it stupefying that there is so little emphasis given to proper education on the matter. It seems like one or two years of personal finance should be a required subject for at least high school students, and probably the earlier healthy financial habits are instilled the better.

It may sound like a conspiracy theory, but there are likely many corporations and high powered interests that do not wish for the masses to practice sound financial judgement, as it allows for more potential for exploitation and profit. The recent subprime mortgage fiasco is just one glaring example of this sort of behavior.

A large majority of the US has debts, usually credit card debts. Survey in February says at least 51% (and 35% have trouble making payments) link

I remember getting a slap in the face, not due to my own failures but those around me. When i was in Korea, soldiers would get paid, then 2 days later have no money and have no idea where it went. Which is one reason they don't give them separate rations. I myself decided how i should buy things (even spontaneously), and issues with the bank and overdraft charges went away as i kept a positive $1,000 in my account just about at any time.

Conspiracy or not, it's very sad that such a simple problem is out of control. My GF has a friend who is not good with money management and very poor at the moment. Give then $50-$100 to help them with gas and a few specific things, and they say they had to buy cigarettes and diapers. They are practically starving but have 3DS's and 1-2 cell phones.

Just so it doesn't seem like I'm picking on the USA here without objectivity, I am an American expat living in Japan.

There is definitely something that seems to be ingrained in American culture right now with respect to entitlement and feeling rich without actually being rich. While this phenomenon exists everywhere to some extent, living in Japan over the past decade I sense that the average sensibilities here are much more geared toward humility and living within ones means than the average case in the USA. It's sort of like... in Japan it's normal to be frugal and live a basic life and actually somewhat garish to be too spendy and show off your wealth. In the USA, if you live a normal existence without fancy things you think of yourself as 'poor' and of a lower social strata. I really feel like a basic, well-structured primary education curriculum that teaches basic personal finance and also espouses the notion that it is actually OK to NOT be "rich" would go a long way to healing the problems many people are facing. In fact, a lot of the financial education I DO see tends to always be about investing and making big returns as opposed to budgeting and cutting extraneous expenses, so a poorly done course could actually make thing worse if people only take home the mentality of "spend money to make money" all the time, which in turn further fuels the idea that debt now can help make you rich later.

And it's not just the poor who are uneducated about good personal finance. In fact, sometimes people who grow up feeling "wealthy" are much worse off in terms of financial education as they are sometimes never taught the true value of money and are not accustomed to the idea that there might not be an endless supply of it at some point. I'm talking more about the top 20%, the upper-middle / low-upper class types that make 100k+ annually rather than the 1% who are actually shielded from just about anything and are exploiting these people. These 20 percenter sorts often get a harsh wakeup call when their company downsizes, their investments suddenly disappear, or their lavish lifestyle choices catch up with them and millions of dollars in risky investments and flashy purchases turns into millions of dollars in debts. When that happens and the money is all gone, all that's left is a sense of entitlement and the continuation of their old lifestyle, despite not having the means to sustain it any longer.

That pretty much hits it right on the nose.

I read somewhere mortgages were actually a special mechanic for transferring/loaning large sums of money between banks, and never intended for the general public. As for homes, in the old days you either built your own, or inherited it from your family, there was no 'let's move across the country and buy a house' mentality.

I personally am probably in a upper lower class bracket. I live within my means, and by that i don't have a credit card or debit card, just a visa bank card. I have one debt which is for the house i'm paying off as quickly as possible.

I wonder how much of society would be different if the minimum/average house size was greatly reduced. In order to buy/build a house it's currently something like 1,800 square feet, which costs tons of money to invest in in order to get up and running, while apartments quite often are 500 square feet or less; What's really stupid was the size was increased twice so banks/house sellers can make more money (which backfired when a large number defaulted on their mortgages, causing the government to give millions to banks to keep them from going under).

I think for years i lived in 385 square feet. With reduced space means you have reduced clutter of items, which means less spending. A house based on 150-350 square feet (a Tiny home) can be self built for something like $10k, while having someone else build it costs double that; And these tiny houses are small enough to tote with you on a small trailer. Compare that to the 10x-20x for the minimum size for a home which is going to be between $100k and $800k.

Honestly the US really needs to back up and start living within our means a lot more. Of course that means a lot of larger companies that are selling tons of stuff in the form of the newest consoles, computers, games, cars, attachments, camping gear, swimming pools, and others won't like it as much as their sales decline radically simply because you don't buy the 80 inch screen when you have a 40 inch screen and it does the job just fine.

*sigh* i'm probably rambling. Maybe we should move the topic about living frugally, although i've created a nice long article about how to live very cheaply until you start making enough money to actually afford stuff...

Good idea to move it out of this topic, this'll be my last derailment post. Sorry to OP and thread followers.

I'd love to see the article you've written. Got a link?

Some split personalities become serial killers while the other half is unconscious.

In my case, it's something even more sinister; my split personality buys Steam games. I woke up this morning and there were 200 games in my Steam account. There's DRM on my hands, and I can't explain how it got there!

while it's true that steam's support has said that, it is not stated in the TOS. and even if it was, they have already changed their TOS unilaterally. and if you didn't agree to the new game, their solution was... to close you account. see, THIS is what I don't like about steam.

only thing that could save you steam's library if steam disappears, is keeping the client offline (... since you won't be able to connect to the servers, anyway). while that could work, I have already lost my HDD info enough times to not consider it a reliable method.

also, I don't really believe the will keep providing downloads once they disappear. you know why? bandwidth and server maintenance cost money. it's okay for them if they earn more money with that, but if they aren't around anymore... then WHO is going to pay for those costs?

(on the other hand, I have to admit that most of my library is on steam... so I really believe they are going to be around for quite a long time. )

[[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed]Citation needed[/url]]
It's like an urban legend at this point...

No he is not. I have submitted a ticket about the issue. They'll investigate it and hopefully they'll notify me.

I've noticed another serious issue: when I go to log in, I see another person's email address already in the bar to log in. I haven't seen any passwords, but already I've seen two different people's email addresses, indicating their real world names. This is disturbing.

Strange. But this not not GOG's doing - it's your browser. Either someone is using your computer (and account) or your browser is synched to someone elses account (both Chrome and Firefox have the option to sync across multiple machines, don't know about IE).

I don't know how this would be possible, though. I recognize none of the name's from the email, and there's only a small list of people who would use the computer's I've used.

I'm sure you also understand why it's hard for me to dismiss that right away after someone managed to get logged in as me yesterday. And it seems that this happened totally accidentally and unintentionally.

Well the auto-form-filling on Login is done by the browser. Or did you mean there was just the email adress ("printed") and a password input?

In this case I suspect some hash/id collision. The user object has some id attached, that is sent to the user in a cookie. It's not a plain number but some kind of hash (I guess), like "wQEkWwsjiBXba9Pq5FDdUe2VAgSdOmS0Ssx". GOG uses multiple cookies like this Those identify session, userauth etc. If these ids collide, you effectively share part of the same session as another user (on the server). This could lead to very unexpected results (like i.e. posting in another's name or haveing a "shared" shopping cart). It should be very improbable to happen, but you know... bugs and manually messing with the database to fix something else...

Steam never closes your account or locks you out from playing your games. If anything, they'll lock you from activating new games or trading. That's all.


Then don't use any VAC enabled games. It is really that simple.

When you launch VAC enabled games, you agree to their terms and condition to playing on secure servers. If you don't agree then don't launch it.

The one that hits 'yes' is you. Steam doesn't force you in any way, shape or form.
Get Skyrim Legendary and Morrowind. Well worth it. Skyrim with Workshop is virtually unmatched.

Steam is not that horrible.