-----
witch:
Quote from: Anach on 2015 February 25, 21:17:55
I think you'd have a hard time not being spied on these days. Our phones do it, our TVs do it, our web browsers do it, web sites do it and our operating systems do it.
Always wondered why people would bother paying for internets on a 3" x 4" screen, never done it myself, I can sort of understand internet on tablets. My TV is merely a screen for my multimedia machine which runs on my home LAN. Yes, we ARE being spied upon in all sorts of ways, I acknowledge, but I figure I just disappear in the data mass unless I make myself noticed.
Quote
Buying Sims 3 was mostly about saving my sanity, as when it sometimes threw an error during patching, I'd have to reinstall it to fix it.
I've reinstalled about twice during the lifetime of the game.
Quote
As for Steam controlling if we can play the games we buy, or the possibility of taking our stuff away, well isn't that what you do yourself to a degree, by having a timebomb set into Awesomemod?
fyi this has now been removed since there will be no more TS3 releases.
So far I've managed to avoid both Steam and Origin and I consider this quite an achievement in the current gaming scenario. Level up.
Anach:
I forgot to mention, that even cracked games these days still try to phone home, as they don't remove those checks from them unless they mess with the protection.
My point though witch, is that there isn't much point avoiding them these days, as you're just shooting yourself in the foot, as even the pirated games require you to block them in your firewall. If you choose to avoid specific online stores for whatever reason, you are limiting your choices of games available to you, as well as having to suffer dodgy cracks that hinder performance. However, if you only play a few select titles, then it's not going to affect you much. In the last 10 years, I've probably got around 700 games on Steam, either through direct purchase, freebies, humble bundles, or retail games I've activated there out of preference; I also recently threw away my warez DVD collection of approximately 1000 disks. So I have a good amount of experience in both areas.
Steam also allows me to stream a game to a lesser laptop from my main PC and allows me to share all my library with my daughter and partner on the home network, outside of that, my friends can watch me play a game, which is handy if they want to see what it's like without leaving their house, and it allows me to instantly join my friends in multiplayer. So you can see, I've become a bit of a Steam fanboy. I still wont purchase an EA title though unless it's something that can only be played online, like Battlefield (mostly due to the crazy prices and inability to purchase elsewhere). Sims 3 was last offline game purchased, and that was for pure convenience.
My daughter recently reinstalled Sims 3 due to her HDD drying, and after installing 20+ disks, one of them didn't install correctly, resulting in issues with some of the content. So that required reinstalling that particular EP. I had to listen to her sighs the whole way through. If that was Steam, she would simply hit download, and it would all be done in one go. I used to keep my ISO version installed because during updates I'd continue playing the older version while I updated my mods on the new version, but to do that I had to keep a backup of the registry entries for whenever I would reinstall or upgrade my OS, as the game wouldn't run without those reg entries; where as the Steam version just recreates them upon launch.
witch:
You seem to have a talent for making things difficult for yourself. I'm currently playing 5 games and all of them downloaded and worked out of the box, so to speak. I've been playing this way for nearly a decade and have not had any major problems I could not solve.
Anach:
Quote from: witch on 2015 February 26, 12:39:13
You seem to have a talent for making things difficult for yourself. I'm currently playing 5 games and all of them downloaded and worked out of the box, so to speak. I've been playing this way for nearly a decade and have not had any major problems I could not solve.
Quite the opposite. I was tired of making things hard on myself. Having to install ISOs, manual patching, waiting for a release group to finally release the latest patch or expansion for a game I was enjoying, worrying about propers for dodgy cracks or broken content (Like initially base Sims 3 wasn't final and wouldnt patch correctly or Homeworld Remastered this week with it's non-final version and broken content) then having cut down content due to it not being legit. Then there's the problems of mods and modding. Some games require workarounds for mods (Sims 3 again, for some reason on some PCs it wont recognise mods in the mods folder and requires framework installation, which is a hassle, as then you have some content in documents and some in programs) or certain modding tools for some games. I remember cracked Skyrim having a lot of problems with mods and tools, but can't recall exactly what.
Unless you compare the pirated version with the cracked version, you often wont realise just what you're missing out on, in terms of functionality, user-friendliness and performance. I've lost count of the amount of times I've read posts from people reporting bugs that are only in the cracked titles, pr being unable to get mods or tools to work, essentially giving themselves away as pirates. Thankfully Sims 3 doesn't require a cracked exe to function, so that saves a lot of hassle right off the bat, but does require decrapifying sims3packs to get the content functioning, then you have to worry about doing that with mods that patch store content (FYI, there was no way I was buying all that over-priced Store content). Overall, pirating is the big hassle in comparison, so whenever I can afford it, I prefer to purchase, and the cheapest and easiest place for that is usually Steam.
As for Origin vs Steam. Whenever I bought EA stuff on Steam, I also got an Origin version along with it, but if you purchase the Origin version, you didn't get a Steam version, so I got to try both systems. Origin still requires me to install each and every Sims 3 EP/SP separately, where as Steam its just an all-at-once install, including patches. Origin is also somewhat featureless in comparison, especially for community friendliness.
J. M. Pescado:
Quote from: Anach on 2015 February 25, 21:17:55
As for Steam controlling if we can play the games we buy, or the possibility of taking our stuff away, well isn't that what you do yourself to a degree, by having a timebomb set into Awesomemod? You might say that it's to ensure people update, but there are always arguments for why people apply DRM and all of them suck. Even so, if for some reason Steam went belly up and the games didn't work without it, and the developers didn't patch them to work like they have with the recent vanishing of GFWL, then I'd simply resort to cracking them.
No, we never actually take anything away. Your AwesomeMod doesn't self-destruct, you just have to tamper with sharp edges. Also, that feature is no longer used because I no longer have to deal with out-of-date versions, and hasn't been in use for some time. That's pretty much the reason why the sharp-edges file existed, because I knew it would be annoying as fuck if such a thing were actually hard-coded and you NEEDED to use it for some reason. But seriously, that file has sharp edges, do not touch the edges of that file.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[*] Previous page