Dragon Age 2 Disappears From Steam

[tipp6353]

So help me if Mass Effect 3 is not on Steam, I don't know what I will do.

I would have worried about the same thing... but then I remembered I already ordered the Mass Effect 3 Collector's edition on Amazon... so I'm covered anyway.

It'll be a cold day in hell before I support Origin. I'll go to D2D first if I'm really desperate.. I already have a few games on there anyway.

I actually hope they do make BF3 exclusive to Origin. I wasn't planning on getting it anyway... So hopefully it will crash and burn while MW3 does as well as ever. Stupid EA.

No I really don't want MW3 to do well because Activison wants money too, not to mention 15 dollars for every damned mappack. Everyone will buy the game, say how great it is for 1 or 2 weeks and then ***** about how crappy it is.

 

[Garrett Richey]

I find it interesting, funny and worrying how everyone is saying how stupid and evil EA is doing something like this. All we know at the moment about the reason is this:

EA claimed that Crysis 2 was removed from Steam because EA had a deal with another distributor that violated Steam's rules , rules, EA added, that other distributors do not have.

ie: It's Valves fault. I know that's coming from EA etc. etc. But it's certainly not entirely wrong, and probably mostly right.

I like Steam a lot, but I find it a bit worrisome that people basically bash EA for something that Valve has done. Valve has earned a lot of credit over the years, but that isn't a reason to stop reading and just assume Valve/Steam = right, other guy = wrong. Even if that other guy is EA.

I can't speak for others, but for me it's the fact that EA is a big publisher and publishers having complete control of the content distribution (and the ability to switch it off on a whim) is why I won't be using Origin. I know Valve requires Steam for all their games but they're the developer as opposed to the publisher and have a great track record as far as their treatment of customers (adding value through steam as opposed to locking legitimate purchasers out of games). It's not that Valve can't do anything wrong, just in this case they're the significantly lesser of two evils. I'm all for competition but it won't come from publishers because all that leads two is every publisher only selling their games through their own proprietary service which means assuming you don't buy games only published by one company you've got 4 or 5 (more?) different services you have to deal with as opposed to one (even if there are competing services to allow for choice).

 

[Strazdas]

it is sad that it takes an awful company to take the first step into destroying the giant monopoly that steam has while the good companies are acting like puppies on short leashes and comply with ridiculous steam rules.

 

[DeaconSawyer]

Not to break in between you two, but I just wanted to add that this is a concern of mine too. I've heard that if your Steam service gets shut off, you can lose access to all of the games you paid for, regardless of the reason for the service shutdown.

That's way, way out of line. The last thing we need in our civilization is for private companies to be able to take away something you've already paid for. And I don't CARE what the lawyers got put in the EULA, if you paid money for a product, you either get to keep it, or the company should have to refund the money to you.

If you are caught hacking game binaries (Mind I do mean hacking not using mods, but things like adding dlc and replacing a launcher to crack or things like that) your account may be suspended, and if you get caught but VAC (valve anti-cheat) you may lose multi-player privileges, but you always have access to your games as far as I know, even if your service is blocked. Consider the fact that you can still play games in offline mode. Offline mode does stop you playing games like CSS or Brink which require steam play, but all access to your game still works, and other services like Games for Windows live or Gamespy also function.

If you want to see what I mean, just unplug or disable your Ethernet when you start Steam. Then when the program is launched in offline mode, plug it back in. Personally I think we should be able to mess around the files without hindrance, but I understand why the measures are there, and since it does hinder modding, I really see no problem. Apart from that, not hacking or cheating are in the terms of service (as frankly they should be) so if you get caught, they are in the right to respond.

 

[w00tage]

Not to break in between you two, but I just wanted to add that this is a concern of mine too. I've heard that if your Steam service gets shut off, you can lose access to all of the games you paid for, regardless of the reason for the service shutdown.

That's way, way out of line. The last thing we need in our civilization is for private companies to be able to take away something you've already paid for. And I don't CARE what the lawyers got put in the EULA, if you paid money for a product, you either get to keep it, or the company should have to refund the money to you.

If you are caught hacking game binaries (Mind I do mean hacking not using mods, but things like adding dlc and replacing a launcher to crack or things like that) your account may be suspended, and if you get caught but VAC (valve anti-cheat) you may lose multi-player privileges, but you always have access to your games as far as I know, even if your service is blocked. Consider the fact that you can still play games in offline mode. Offline mode does stop you playing games like CSS or Brink which require steam play, but all access to your game still works, and other services like Games for Windows live or Gamespy also function.

If you want to see what I mean, just unplug or disable your Ethernet when you start Steam. Then when the program is launched in offline mode, plug it back in. Personally I think we should be able to mess around the files without hindrance, but I understand why the measures are there, and since it does hinder modding, I really see no problem. Apart from that, not hacking or cheating are in the terms of service (as frankly they should be) so if you get caught, they are in the right to respond.

Thanks, I knew about offline mode, but wasn't sure it could be done without a Steam login. Re denying access to multiplayer, that's my preferred answer to hackers and griefers.

However, putting the tendency of carrion birds to flock together and the recent trend to "bombing" ratings together, I am concerned that griefers and cheaters can falsely flag you as a cheater or griefer just by reporting you en masse. From what I understand, Valve does not actually look at game logs, just goes by how many reports you have (which is about as unprofessional as you get) so this is not an impossible scenario.

One other thing (what started me thinking about this in the first place), I learned that the Left 4 Dead series (which I own and play) don't let you restrict your play to official servers, instead connecting you to private servers at their whim. Then I discovered that private server admins can change your game's autoexec files to some extent (saw it happen when I was connected to a "competitive" server and I had to reset the changes by hand afterwards).

I'm not sure how much a server admin / plugin can do to your config, but you can personally make your game's autoexec run other scripts on startup, so if that's possible on the server-side, then it's perfectly possible for someone to make your game run hax scripts just for the lulz of getting you VAC-banned.

So those are my three main concerns about Steam or any other service that holds my apps for me. They're not guaranteeing a proper investigation into reports against you (do they even notify you?), they're not providing a trusted online service to connect to, and they may not have properly secured the game against remote hax.