f13.net

http://www.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?s=d3b90ec4e604ae4974c5a1b30ab9c3c6&threadid=185474

Apparrently some people who actually bought the game but tried to use a no-CD hack to get around having to use the CDs have been unfortunately banned also as a result.

Bruce

Yay for digital distribution!

Of course, the post you linked actually said the number of legit accounts banned was "VERY SMALL" in their words. Which could mean 1 account or 1,000.

I'm all for digital distribution, but removing the ability to play because the user didn't want to put a fucking CD in the drive is ass.

First you want to buy the CD, then you don't want to use the CD.  Make up your minds, people!

Don't be stupid.

Being serious, I'm all in favor of banning bona fide pirates, since most of the myg0t griefer kiddies don't actually pay for the games they grief in.  For HL2 it doesn't matter, but I suspect that most of those 20,000 banned Steam accounts are people I wouldn't want to share a CS server with either, and now I won't have to.

Using a no-CD hack for a purchased game is another matter entirely, but those will no doubt be appealed.

I hate 'CD MUST BE IN DRIVE' games. Drives me nuts. I always use a NoCD crack if I'm going to have to use the CD drive anytime between play sessions.

Thus, I'm glad I downloaded the game via steam; but now I run into another issue: What if my Internets is down?

Guess I could do those DVD backups, but I don't really want to buy a DVD-R drive. Oh well..

You don't need a DVDR to play offline.  As far as I know, as long as you've unlocked the game via Steam once (and not logged out to re-lock it), you can play the game without needing to reconnect.

It's also not clear to me whether no-CD hack users actually did get banned, or whether the most widely used no-CD hacks function differently enough from the no-paying-for-the-game hack that they weren't caught by this sweep.  Does anyone who was using a no-CD hack have any tales of woe to tell us?

Not sure I follow you there.. are you saying as long as steam is always running it'll work? I don't normally have steam running unless I'm playing.

Supposedly, if you have steam set to remember your account details and password, and you have already sucessfully run HL2 at least once, if you start-up steam with no network connection present it will go into "offline" mode, and let you play HL2 while not online.

Whether you can actually get this to work is another matter, since it seems to work for some people but not others. I've not tried it myself.

Bzzzt.  Valve has surpassed my irritation threshold.  Not buying HL2.

Do the people who have bought Hl2 online via Steam even require a CD?

No.

Which is also the way you can get around needing a CD for the retail version if you are patient enough -- just have Steam download it.

Where's justice?!

Out to lunch again, I bet.

Lazy ass justice.

Oh, there it is.

It's still a lazy sob, though.

Still, banning 20,000 accounts of people who were trying to avoid using steam to redownload the thing... where are their heads?   Crammed firmly up their asses with all the mighty silver dollars they've earned from the game's success?

Might want to re-read that initial post.

Wow, the stupid is strong in this release.

/me is not buying HL2. Nor anything else from Valve or Steam. It's just so Fing stupid that I couldn't bring myself to buy something from them.

And that would be the correct response.  The fact that people will willingly swim through this stream of shit to play a (admittedly very good) game saddens me.

I actually don't know a single person in real life who's had any issues with it.  At no point have I or any of my friends had to swim through any shit, unless clicking the "Half-Life 2" button counts.

Of course, we all pre-bought via Steam, and it sounds like all the people with problems got the boxes.  

Vivendi was in charge of the boxes, so I'm not surprised there were fuckups in that area (Vivendi poisons everything they touch, as far as I can tell).  I'd buy another game over Steam in an instant, but after my experience with Evil Genius, Vivendi will need exclusive rights to something really tasty before I'll give them any more money.

The point is that Valve made the game, and Valve both made and runs Steam. It's up to them to make sure the CD/DVD version works on their system. They didn't, and it's all their fault.

Publishers put in the cd-checks and verifying themselves after they get the gold disk.  As far as I have seen they place that stuff in there after the developers of the game are done and so I'd place cd verifying crap on strictly the publishers fault.

Presumably if you go the whole hog and find a no-steam patch then the steam account banning is not relevant.

Making the whole thing a waste of time and effort of truly heroic proportions.

The CD-protection was a minor issue. People unable to authorize their copy via steam or log into steam, that is the big issue.

Agreed on that, took me 4 hours to log on to steam to unlock my account.  Inexcusably bad launch when they knew how many people prepaid and did the preload thing.

Well I bought it over Steam without pre-loading on launchday and only had some minor disconnects. In fact, I didn't even have Steam on my PC when I decided to buy it. I downloaded the game overnight and played the next day without problem.

Since my pc is 10' away normally, I always try to dig up the NOCD cracked .exe if possible. I am vehemently against pirating. It's just an issue of convinience, but I'd be pretty pissed if I got banned for it /when I have a legit key/. Pretty odd, imo.

We should be fair here, Sky. For every one person who was banned mistakenly, I would wager at least 15 were people who illegally downloaded the game. It does more good than harm in that case for Valve. Is there an appeal process yet? If not, it is definitely a major faux pas.

Do you honestly believe that even one person capable of illegally downloading the game will not be able to get around the triviality of a steam ban on HL2?

Most of my warezing is spoon-fed, so until someone bothers to teach me how, I'd be slowed down considerably by a ban.

In the interest of full disclosure, I did in fact buy HL2 yesterday, but only so I could work on Java bindings for the SDK.  Control freaking all over your customers still sucks.

Since we're ressurecting old dead threads, I might as well mention Valve banned another batch of accounts (http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=212674) shortly before x-mas.  Over 30,000 that time.

I'd heard that a patch fixed the sound stuttering in HF2. For me, it did not.