You also have to remember to buy the game as a "gift" rather than "for me" so it gets put into your Steam inventory. Once there, it can be traded, but if it's "opened" and attached to your main games list, it's now untradable. Games bought "for me" are attached to the list automatically, hence you can't trade them.

How am I stealing anything? I haven't taken anything and left one less copy in anyone's inventory. I wouldn't have paid for it anyway - if it was impossible to pirate, I just wouldn't have played it. Either way no money would have changed hands.

Am I dishonest? ABSOLUTELY. Does it matter? Depends. I used to feel the same way about principles, but getting older I've learnt that sticking to being legal all the time ultimately fucks you over. Companies still treat the buying like shit with continually more aggressive always-on DRM and activation bullshit, so it's not like sticking to your principles is worth anything if you don't get anything out of it.

Also, the "pirated" edition doesn't have binary cracks per-se. Everyone uses the same technique as I do - offline cache files a license generator. The mandatory account is a new thing as part of the 2.0.4 update.

As for real change? Huh! Major corporations don't give a shit. I buy indie games, not AAA titles.

I'm not making excuses for piracy. I'm merely explaining why I do it. I don't care if it boils your blood - you can't physically do anything to stop me. But I will stop if it becomes impossible to pirate anymore - say if the majority of games are hosted on cloud servers and so cracks are impossible. But if that happens I'll probably just give up gaming entirely.

I thought I made it quite clear - I like the story and don't feel like spending money for it due to Blizzard's behavior. I'm not trying to hide under any sense of entitlement in the sense that they "owe" me for wanting to continue the story. I just don't want to pay money for it. I don't have to of course - I could just go without. But again, I don't have to since it's easy enough to obtain it in other ways.

In my experience, most LAN parties (both small and large LANs) have had net access for several years. The reason? Steam.

It was easier once - just have a shared drive with the latest patches for popular games so everyone who was out of date could just grab what they needed. No Internet required. Nowadays you cannot ensure people are fully updated to the latest version of something, or that Steam's offline mode would work properly for everyone (which it often doesn't). So having net access ended up becoming a necessity, given how much Steam has infected multiplayer gaming these days.

Giving this situation, LAN access for SC2 is moot because of the need for net access at a LAN anyway. If a LAN doesn't have net access, odds are the gaming being played are older ones like CoD 4 and the original StarCraft.

I could buy it, but then it would basically be showing acceptance of the idea that you need to create and log into an online account just for playing the single-player components of a game (to which it cannot be resold since the game key is tied to that account I believe). This is not the future I want to see for gaming, even if it's not reversible by this stage (everyone's falling for the Steam virus so this is becoming more and more accepted).

Having said that, you'd agree this is an excuse - if I really was against it, I'd not only avoid buying it but also avoid illegal versions of it. You'd be correct, of course. Unfortunately however, I enjoy the StarCraft story too much (going from the original SC and its BW expansion, both of which I also pirated) and so am curious to see how HotU progresses.

At least I'm being honest.

The bits about needing to go online once after patching and needing the game fully downloaded to go offline are true, yet. But the guest button definitely does not exist anymore - it did in the early versions, it did in 1.5.4 (even if it was buggy and locked out it was still physically there), but it's completely absent in 2.0.4.

Having said that, I've never actually bought the game. I just use a dummy Battle.net account, offline cache files supplied by someone on a SC2 cracking site and a license generator. I have no interest in multiplayer and only care about the campaign and the occasional skirmish game.

Not quite. Ever since the 2.0.4 update the Guest button has disappeared. The "workaround" is to disconnect from the net (I tend to just disable the network device in Windows), start SC2, log in using your account and when it fails due to a lack of net connection, you just click Play Offline. Previous you only had to click Guest and pick a guest account and off you'd go.

There's a category for nearly anything on those two sites. If you have a fetish so out there that you still can't find what you're after, it might be worth examining why you have that particular desire and whether it's healthy to do so.

The bottom line is: the police have realized that they can practically guarantee they get to go home at the end of the day if they treat every interaction like a military engagement and utilize overwhelming force to suppress their enemy.

Commander William Adama: There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people.

My god. Slashdot is full of autistics.

The guy was joking (I think). You should have realised that before launching into a spiel.

I loved Fallout 1 and 2, but just couldn't get into Fallout 3. The characters felt like cardboard cutouts, the music was nothing special compared to the atmospheric music of the previous two; I dunno, something just felt lost in the transition to 3D/Bethesda.

Having said that I've tried other Bethesda games like Oblivion and found that dull as well. Never tried Skyrim, though it sounds like it inherits similar problems as well. Yes I may be part of the minority for not liking Bethesda games, but at the same time I don't use Steam because I refuse to buy anything with DRM anymore and so I'm basically in the minority anyway.

Just click "Quit asking me" and ignore it. Or determine the offending script and NoScript it.

Or just avoid any site stupid enough to try this idiocy.

You're not looking in the right places. Heck it doesn't even have to be torrents or anything overly illegal. Here, I'll give you some suggestions.

www.redtube.com
www.pornhub.com

(Absolutely NSFW, needless to say)

I think there needs to be some clarification as to the nature of why the game thinks it needs to be always online. Some people have suggested that ALL the computing and simulation logic happens on EA servers, but this isn't true.

It has been shown that if you lose a net connection/connection to the server, the game will continue to run offline for about 20 minutes. During this time, YOUR city will continue to simulate properly. However, neighboring cities being developed by other people will freeze in time and be held in this state until such time that your connection is reestablished (if it doesn't before the timeout, the game session ends). Once it reconnects, the state of your neighbors is synced with your city and hence any changes to your neighbors' cities during the time you were offline will immediately be represented.

If you connection drops, your city lives in isolation. Once it reconnects, it returns to the world and is affected by the effects of your neighbors. If you happen to be developing a city next to a tard who is polluting like crazy, your city will suffer the effects. That's the whole purpose of the always-online feature - to provide this MMO-style relationship between players. BUT, given the game runs fine with your city if the connection drops, this is bullshit because it means it should be trivial to enable the player to just play on their own.

The simulation logic is there, available on the installed game. EA just doesn't feel it's worth having an offline mode despite it basically being readily set up for it - it thinks being interconnected with other players who might be dicks and ruin your city is much more important.

People are DESPERATE for a game with meat and depth like the old RPGs of yesteryear. There are too many games with more concerned with quicktime events and cinematics than there are with story and character development. The big publishers seem to think that fluff is enough, but a gamer cannot survive on fluff alone.