Larian Studios Forums Beyond Divinity (English) General After all the Starforce Complaints, HL2 is worse..

A lie you say? Well its all about the wonderful subject at university known as "media criticism" What says gamespy isnt wrong or didnt lie to us? <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> Its all up to us who we trust and dont trust and due to this and how people normaly deal with it, it makes propaganda possible in the world as people rarely bother to look up on the sorces. Is it in a paper or teh news its true thats all they bother with. Look past the news you read and see on the TV etc. What are they NOT telling you? etc. What is a fact? Is it a fact just cus its printed in a book? Are books infaliable? and so on. Can be an eye opener. Anyway In this case gamespy are wrong.

anyway about the subject at hand, Halflife 2 IS checking the internet for auth while you play. I should know as i bought the game. It does it after certain time periods on your computer clock from the time of first execution. Thats why people thats trying to make a pirate warez version of it have problems cus sure they can get past the first authenthication and such but after they have played a while the game kills the AI and script engine cus it cant get a valid steam connection. Sure the pirates can reenable some of it with the built in console commands but then the scripts etc are out of sync with the sound and flow of the game. Wich means it dosnt work :P Gabe himself from the Hl2 team has posted that they made it this way as an experiment now after the release. If you had not removed your internet connection and ran a pirated version your usage would be registered with steam and Valve now. Wich is nothing the crackers could have predicted as there wasnt "supposed" to be this kind of protection <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />


Now its not surprising that the gamespy review people havent discovered this as they usualy havent played long enough before printing out the review to experience it. The market for reviews etc has a lot of builtin stress. And you can be pretty sure of that they havent spent all their hours on that day playing hte game. And even if they have, its nothing you notice if you have a legit copy on an already internet connected computer as it wont tell you its checking unless it messes up.

I have the UK version of the game. Atleast this is how my version works. I cant speak for hte american version etc but i see it as highly unlikely that it is any different.

This is of course nothing we law abiding people need to worry about but it still means that if you dont have internet dont bother with HL2. I have internet
and that means i prefer valves version to protect their software rather than Starforce 3 cus that the game auths at the steam servers dosnt negatively affect my computers performance when im not playing the game like starforce does. Negative about this kind of protection is that if Valve now goes belly up in a couple of years how will i even install my game when they arent there to auth it for me? Does this mean we are now buying a licencse for the game for a limited amount of time whereafter the game will be unusable? Seems so in halflifes case atelast.

Finaly let me say that calling something a lie just because you do not belive it yourself hardly makes it a lie. So be careful with how you respond to people. Im a very understanding person but had it been someone else they might have taken offense and gotten upset. Guard your words, Good lesson to learn for RL to save you a lot of problems <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />