I knew Plaid would come back into fashion! Advertise it as "Urban Camouflage for the Ludicrous Pace of Life!"

I'm not sure about the "started with". Maybe "started when"? Or if you want to keep "with":

(I also agree with the out of/outside change)

FTFY

I have more than enough other games to keep me happy that I find no value in what I see on Steam, thanks. Yes, it's only a matter of $5. Yes it's cheap as I can recoup that in about 5 minutes at a terminal. But what is it really costing? By paying up, I'm telling Valve okay. I'm telling Valve that I'm willing to pay additional money for a service that was supposed to already have been paid for with my purchase of the initial game. I'm telling Valve that there's nothing stopping them from charging $10. I'm telling Valve that they could start requiring a small subscription fee to use their service. $65 a year? That's not bad. $10 a month? That's about what Netflix charges. I'm telling Valve that it's ok for them to invade my privacy, it's ok for them to lock down my games where I can't make hard backup copies of them, it's ok for them to delete games out of my library, it's ok for them to trample - with a smile and a handshake - over whatever promises they've once made with their Users and Developers... and charge the people who are gullible enough to fall for it and spinless enough to not fight against it... a measly $5.

No Dumbass. My beef is squarely on Steam and your attempts to deflect are getting you buried deeper and deeper in the shit you wallow in. Bethesda made a contract with Valve for Steam to provide Bethesda's End Users with access to the Steam Workshop for a modding community. This was done as part of the agreement Bethesda made with Valve for Bethesda to use Valve's DRM (Steam) in their game. The agreement was made, and now Valve is reneging on it and demanding that Bethesda's End Users shell out an additional $5 for services that Bethesda already paid Valve for on our behalf.

To put it a bit more simply: The service was working until Valve dicked with it and now it no longer works as advertised. This isn't Bethesda's fault because Bethesda has no direct control over Valve's servers. As you said, they're two different companies. Bethesda made proposed an agreement with Valve, Valve agreed, Bethesda advertised the service Valve provides for them, everything worked...everyone was happy. Now Valve changed their service agreement after the fact, nullifying the agreement, and expects direct payment and you expect me to be pissed with Bethesda over what Valve did? The only thing I have to be pissed with Bethesda about is that Bethesda used Steam in the first place..which I've always been leery of, and now it's come to fruition.

As for your offer... keep it. You obviously need it more than I do. I mean, it took you 3 and a half hours to get that money in the first place where I crap out a Lincoln almost every 5 minutes. How else would you not be able to recognize when you're getting shafted unless you were stuck in a minimum wage job where that's all you ever get?

I paid for the services when I plopped $60 on a game that advertised full advantage to Steam Workshop. Also, my credit union doesn't have membership fees/deposits; The only requirement to opening the account is living at an address within a county that they have a branch office in. After that initial opening, you can move to Germany and still have your account with them. Also, I don't care how much more effort it's required to revoke pirate keys, if they want my business in the future they can make that extra effort. I paid for the service already. Give me the choice of paying for it again or walking? I've got good shoes and could use the exercise. Anyone else with a brain on their damn shoulders should do the same, but I forget... we're a nation full of Stockholm Syndrome.

No, I don't expect them for free. I expect Bethesda to have paid a onetime service fee negotiated for bulk sales for extended use of the Workshop servers. Bethesda then has the ability to take the $60 per copy they made on release day and subsequent months and use accounting to allot so much $$$$ per copy sold to cover the cost of services that THEY PROMISED ON THE BOX as part of the features of the game. In paying good money for the game on release, by extension, I have already paid for the time on the server to use the full features of the Workshop.

I don't expect access to the Workshop or its community for free. I already paid for them and your attempt to redirect this to say that I'm expecting something for nothing when it's actually Valve that is now expecting something more for a service it's already agreed to provide is suspiciously painting you as a Steam Shill account. Next thing you know Valve is going to say that if we don't pay a $5 tax to them we will no longer have access to Workshop Items we already use; when that happens, my Skyrim characters will be permanently retired and I'll have only Oblivion and Morrowind for my Elder Scrolls addiction. I see the writing on the wall; Valve has already got my money for two games via what they consider an indirect route and they no longer honor those purchases. This is no better than Comcast. They want both me and the game company I purchase from to pay for access to the same service. I now say, they can die in a fire along with all the other DRM.

Because a $50 emergency FM radio with a hand crank to charge the battery over the course of a week is so much more expensive than a $600 smartphone with 3 hours of continuous use per charge. With 3 backup batteries at $50 a pop...you're still not getting to the level of the hand crank radio. A lot of times those crank radios will also have AM, Shortwave, and WX stations available. That said, if the manufacturers are adding the cost of putting the radios into the phones already, why in the hell don't they just activate it instead of shipping the phone with dead equipment? Or, just leave the radio out since no one can use it, and charge the same price for the phone; instant margin increase for taking away a service that no one can use anyway!

The ISP with the best service cap has a 400GB/month cap to share between 4 gamers and 5 different devices you insensitive clod! The best way to mitigate the cap and ensure that we still have enough bandwidth to do other needed/desired functions is to buy physical games in boxes.

Except when...You know... I plopped down $60 on a retail game that used Steam for DRM way back in the day with the promise of access to all features of Steam Workshop. Now I have to plop another $5 for some crap I don't even want just to continue with the functionality I had before? Nice to know your soul is good for the price of -$5. Tell me, what can you do for me that I can charge $5 for just so I can allow you to continue to use a service that I used to provide for free?

I've never bought anything from Steam since I activated the account in 2011. Not. One. Thing. I have however bought 2 games that used Steam DRM, starting with Skyrim. I used to leave feedback and help requests for Skyrim Mods in the Steam Workshop. I also on occasion put up some of my own Mods. While I can still download mods, I can't leave feedback or submit Mods anymore with this setup, because though I've paid $60 for Skyrim and got Batman:AO as a free gift from Newegg, Valve doesn't recognize those purchases for this purpose. So a major functionality, a functionality that was part of the reason I bought the game in the first place, a functionality that has been a staple of the Elder Scrolls series since at least Morrowind, has just been effectively ripped out of Skyrim by Valve (can't even blame Bethesda for this beyond putting Steam DRM into the game in the first place) for the "helpful" purpose of reducing spammers. If they wanted to reduce spammers they should have made it either or; as in you can use Steam services for games if you EITHER purchased at least $5 worth of items in the Steam store OR have Retail Games in your library.

What if I am buying games that require Steam to run DRM, just not buying those games through Steam? Retail purchases or purchases through venues that are not Steam don't count towards that $5.

Read the parent again. Particularly the part of

Because these people put down on a AAA title in a retail outlet that isn't counted towards the Steam ecosystem, they have lost the ability to take part in the Mod discussion for the game they just put a good chunk of change on. They've also lost the ability to post Mods they've created to the Workshop. Valve just made the declaration: "Oh...you want to use the features of the game you just paid for? You need to pay us at least an additional $5 for that privilege. Sure we'll give you something from our library in exchange, just to give you some numbing lube so you can't exactly feel how hard we're screwing you"

To give an example, I have Skyrim. I paid $60 for it when it came out. I have not paid a dime into Steam's client. I use the workshop heavily to download mods for my game (some would say to make the game useable)...but now I'm locked out of the discussion to ask for a feature or give praise to a modder because I haven't paid the $5 tribute directly to Valve. I'm a paying customer of Bethesda and I just got dicked over on participation in the community because they chose Steam DRM and my purchase means dick-all to Valve. There's only 2 other games I have on my Steam account, and not a single one of them count as a contributed dime to Valve: Batman: Arkham Origins (acquired as a free gift from NewEgg when I bought my nVidia GTX 760) and the Kerbal Space Program Demo (only thing I got from the Steam Store, but it was free, so no dice).

Because of this small...minor..."harmless" move to reduce spammers, they've now guaranteed that they get none of my money, and my diligence in ensuring I do not purchase any future games that incorporate Steam has just ramped up to Sony Boycott levels. They would have done better if they did an either-or type of thing where you can participate if you have legal games in your library OR you've contributed $5 to Steam in some way. $5 is a small amount, I'll admit...but how much are your individual principles worth? How much can you be bribed for? Everyone has their price; but there's something seriously wrong with a person if that price is a net negative (they're paying other people for the opportunity to break their own principles)

Eclipse. Visual Studio. Code Blocks. Dev-C++. BlueFish. NASM. gdb. Vi(m). Emacs. Pico/Nano. cat & sed... need more?

Anecdote here... but it's valid to the point. I am Male. This can be generally known by the type of posts I've made, but for this discussing that point must be made clear. In my education, I was a great writer, epic scientist, shitty mathematician. This statement is made by evidence of the grades on my report card. My parents helped to nurture the sciences only slightly, but mostly focused on my literacy and ability to calculate. When given a creative writing assignment of writing a 2 page essay, I gave the teachers 12 page epochs that they always complimented and never made less than an A+ "Very Entertaining." Math, I understood the importance of but the feeble attempts by everyone involved to make Math relate to the real world I couldn't understand. I couldn't understand it because everything was contrived.

Science on the other hand no one pushed me into...because no one had to.

I hated Language Arts and writing (even though I did well). I hated math for the sake of math. Science, however - Especially Mechanical Physics, Earth Sciences (patterns and cycles of the Earth's ecosystems), and Astronomy - I took a natural liking to not because of any kind of push from any party, I was just wired for it. Apparently I was also wired for creative writing, but it takes external effort to make me want to churn anything out. There was one thing though...one thing that I was never exposed to anywhere until later in childhood. One thing inexplicable that blindsided everyone, even though the signs were there. Going past the classic RadioShack stores I'd always eye the monitors with a keyboard in front of them. If I got to touch one, I used to love the loud *CLACK* they made. I only got to work with an Apple ][ for about 15-20 minutes each week in my early elementary school years, playing "Where In the World is Carmen Sandiego"...I remember despising that game, and I still do. It wasn't until 3rd grade that I got to play with the Trash 80's...again only running existing programs like Oregon Trail, Hangman, etc. I was more interested in what I could do at the RUN prompt...but I was actively discouraged from doing anything there for fear that I'd "break" something. Then, in 7th grade, my parents got an Apex 10/100 IBM Compatible by Epson...and everything changed.

It was the family computer, but my parents put it in my room. It wasn't long before I knew the ins and outs of the system...and after researching other computers, I found that my parents got mega-gypped. But even so...this. This was the turning point. I was given full access to a device that had been taboo and mysterious for so long that I needed to know everything about it. I found the QBASIC program on it, and that was it. The machine became mine and would bend to my will from that point on...and I vowed that all other computers I came into contact with would do the same... well, I haven't been able to live up to that vow due to various workplace policies...but everything up to the limits of policy I owned. Computers became my life, and Computer Science became my field, and it's been that way ever since.

The moral to this story? Well, for me it worked that I hated being a part of the mold that everyone tried to tell me to fit into. My interest in a field was inversely proportional to the amount of push other people had for me to go into that field. The only exception was sports...no one really pushed me into sports, and I never had an interest. Hell, I can't even go to the Gym without feeling a sense of anxiety over the opportunity cost not working on one of my many other projects. Note that I also accept that I'm very ...different... and for (most?) other people the inverse is true where they don't take an interest in something UNLESS they're pointed in that direction and told "do this!" I tend to be a big proponent of let a child do what they show an interest in and let them show you what they discover...giving little tweaks to morality where it's needed. "No Johnny...it's not a good idea to pull the limbs off little Jason to beat him with them. no...I Said...PUT THAT DOWN NOW!"

Making an interface look JUST the way one wants is often a heck of a lot more investment than "a couple of mouse clicks." I've spent hours configuring a desktop environment before. Tweaking everything from colors to window behaviors to terminal transparencies (not only for looking good, but good compositing can really help with maximising screen real-estate by allowing informational/reference pages to reside behind a well positioned terminal) to button positioning to general aesthetic fixes to allow myself to adjust to a better mood just by viewing the desktop (I usually set my wallpapers to my favorite picture of my wife, so at a click of the button - there she is). While the financial cost for doing this is generally zero, there's certainly an opportunity cost involved in configuring ones workspace to be appealing in such a manner that it doesn't make one's eyes bleed out of the sockets to have to look at the thing...like metro-stylized graphics do for me.

I had no complaints for the look of any User Interface I've had to use for most operating systems, even Unity...until tiles became a thing. It's not that it's different. I can handle different, and have....It's that metro is visually harsh and feels like razorblades having to look at it. I don't even like looking at websites that use tile-like themes (though my super likes putting those into pages he develops for the Company).

I don't know...I tend to like being able to arrange my workflow in 3 dimensional levels on my screen, allowing active panes to take the front, with informational items filling the screens behind. Transparencies facilitate this even more, along with slight blurring to give more a feeling of depth...which I can use as prioritization organization on a filled screen. The clearer an object, the closer it is, which means the higher priority in the flow it'll have. Having Metro, where everything is forced flat, or forced to look flat...It breaks the way I flow.