Like others have said, I have used cracks for convenience/disc longevity

Yes, I used cracks. But I've been clean for a few years now.

Is there a new issue that im not aware of maybe? Where the gate at the start of the game does not open.

I never used a crack in my whole gaming life.

I used an official 'crack'. Taleworlds offered their own modification to remove Steam-dependency from Mount and Blade: Warband.

Nice gesture of them. :)

I had to use a crack for Fallout 3 to even get it to work :D

Yes, that is dreadful, your client connection will be terminated immediately - oh hang on, its still optional - bonus!

As for me, yes, I have a few nocd's. Other than that if i mistakenly buy a steam game - i.e. one with just the client on the disc, it just goes in the bin. And I avoid any games which indicate need for online connection, or mmos or that ilk.

interesting ill go have a look

A) It's a B&B
B) I don't think there are any cop cars up here. ;P

Did you get it from steam ? That might be what's different.

I've used them for various reasons on occasion. In some cases out of pure convenience, y'know, not having to find the disc and put it in the drive.

In other cases it has been a matter of compatibility. When the disc check simply didn't work (probably because it was an older game which couldn't handle a 64bit OS very well) I've had to use a NoCD crack if I wanted to play the game at all.

And in at least one case (can't remember which game) it was out of annoyance. I could tell from the contents of the installation folder that all assets were installed to the hard drive, but when the disc was in the drive, the game insisted on loading certain assets from there. This meant that A) it kept periodically spinning up the disc in the drive, and B) that there was a delay whenever it had to load those assets (I believe it was music). A simple NoCD crack later (which didn't copy any files from the disc, mind you) and the game ran smoothly, loading everything instantly, and without the CD constantly spinning up and down.

Well I was just thinking that the problem exists on my Steam copy but my disc version doesn't have this problem. So it must be a patch at a guess.

Yes, it only involves removing cd/dvd protection for convienience and occasionally also because otherwise the game simply won't run, like NFS Most Wanted (2005) and Carbon.