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Valve Takes the Offensive on Warez Users?

Posted by Zonk on from the burn-warez-monkeys-burn dept.

Drull writes "It's claimed by a poster on filefront.com that Valve might have released a "Warez" version of Half-Life 2 to monitor and ban those who attempt to use it. This is the news from some guy with a filefront account, so take it with a grain of salt.

4 of 1,127 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Avoiding to piss off their consumer base? by Nos. · · Score: 5, Informative

    to actually play the game, in single player mode, it still takes several minutes from the time I click on the icon to start the game before I can even choose to load a saved game -- this time is spent starting Steam, then verifying that my copy is legit
    Sorry, but you're wrong here. That time is spent loading the game. Want proof? Exit Steam. Disconnect from the internet, and restart Steam. This will start steam in offline mode (it can't talk to Valve - you have no internet connection). Now launch HL2. I bet you won't notice a difference in load times. Why? Logging into steam authenticates you. It may check for updates when you first try to start HL2 (I'm not sure if it does this when you launch Steam, or at regular intervals whenever Steam is running), but there is very little network activity from Steam when launching the game.

  2. Re:Take a lesson by Tobias+Luetke · · Score: 5, Informative
    I knew it, and I'm waiting a few extra days before I buy the game, simply because I don't want that hassle.

    Or better yet. did the right thing and bought the game in advance over steam
    Buying over steam had many advantages:

    • You instantly got to play CS:S
    • You saved a buck or two in some cases
    • You money went to valve instead of Vivendi
    • You had HL2 preloaded on your harddrive (no cds)
    • You could start playing 10 minutes after the game was released
    For me Steam was a huge success. Its just stupid to distribute digital data over physical mediums like CDS when there is a boardband internet connection available. After purchasing steam stays incredibly useful. You will never have to search for your f$%^& cds and put them in your drive. If you want to play hl2 online in two years all you need to do is double click the game. You deleted the game ? NO PROBLEM. Steam downloads it for you. You are not up to date ? NO PROBLEM. steam updates you. You don't have the map / mod / whatever ? NO PROBLEM. People need to get used to the idea of steam. yes it might have caused some problems but that was to be expected.
  3. Re:Take a lesson by chowells · · Score: 5, Informative

    Sorry, but your post is completely untrue. Steam insists on logging online every time you play Half Life. And I'm talking about single player, not multi player. This morning it took me 10 minutes to load Half Life because steam had problems logging in. There is meant to be an offline mode for Steam, but this is only for dialup users. Somehow it automatically detects the internet connection. Am I really meant to fumble around the back of my machine, and unplug the ethernet cable (interrupting whatever else I might be doing online like downloading a large file) just to damn play Half Life?

  4. Re:Avoiding to piss off their consumer base? by yknott · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you want to play hl2 without going through steam, make a shortcut to "c:\(install path)\hl2.exe" -steam

    This allows you to run hl2 without going through steam at all.