Any updates from the staff while I was gone?

Nope. Nothing.

For me among the worst things is that your profile page gives away your friends (yes even those who are supposedly hidden by their choice) even if you set friends page to "me only". That's just ridiculous and dumb.

Always showing the numbers is probably a (yes, bad) conscious choice. I wrote about what these numbers could tell here.
DeepL is pretty impressive even with technical and legal texts.

nice word: leery havent heard or read the word that much so i had to look it up and it is a interesting word.
i learned many words from as many movies i watched (90% are american movies) but cant recall i ever heard the word leery now i do know what it means.

(google)
adjectiveinformal
adjective: leery; comparative adjective: leerier; superlative adjective: leeriest

cautious or wary due to realistic suspicions.

That aint bad ... they call it 'progress ' ..... our govt always encourages progress, globalisation,( they love it) and they also dont mind abandoning dividend tax of 1.4 billion , which could be used for the Dutch people, they love to expand like crazy and always want to compete with the big boys.

Anyway, sooner or later everything will change and not for the better, and it is called : "progress"
all good things have to go to make room for more innovation a welknown word and easy cause we call it innovatie which sounds almost the same.
Too much innovation imo is bad..... they should take small steps but they won't cause they love to showoff.

If you personally decide to boycott, there's nothing wrong with both the action as well as the statement.

Yet if you compile a list, it becomes a strength in numbers strategy. That's a call to solidarity. That's a strike with the potential to ostracise the deviants, the strike breakers. That's an us versus them narrative. It's the beginning of something the possible end of which we both don't want to see. As a mod in another forum I've practically defined this rabble rousing behaviour as the red line to cross before we yank out the user. Then again, in comparison to what I've seen there, the discussion here is still practically civil, I must concede that.

“The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.”
~Ursula K. LeGuin, The Lathe of Heaven

Pressuring concessions out of the company by ruining their forums for them and others will totally "work". But to what end? Because then you're stuck with a situation that's only just and only temporarily acceptable to you. Company intent, you can be certain about that, will in this case be to weasel out of as many concessions as humanly possible over time, a volatile and wearisome relationship with no real common ground or even common ideals.

If that's the "desired" outcome, possibly even the only outcome you see, I wholly suggest switching to Steam (at least for those who use Galaxy). You have all the screwing over going on over there, a community that is wildly enthusiastic about being screwed over, and the client works so much better as well. At this point, anything besides the "real deal" i.e. bringing GOG to actual honesty about their business practices tantamounts to nothing achieved at all.

I suggest to be absolutely clear about the things we wish for the platform and the reasons we, in part individually, have to ask for certain things and certain red lines that have but should not have been crossed. That is why the - of course in part "academic" - discussion must take place beforehand. If you're starting from the wrong place and target the wrong goal for the wrong reasons, you almost certainly end up with "All we have is means".

I'm certain that the highest GOG officials have already had hot debates about what to change for the better and what to communicate. Sure, I'll watch closely what will change for the better, but it's the communication that's the actually revealing part. It's the communication that decides whether the mutual company-client relationship can sensibly continue.

(And, believe someone who's been on the other side of that fence, keeping the topic relevant, explicitly without resorting to outrage, is an incredible strategy. It counteracts pretty much exactly what some companies hope for without giving them the opportunity to call the debaters a mob and ignore their claims in the process. Tone it down, keep it going, clarify, specify, reiterate, reconsider, refine. You yourself have been doing a lot of that)

The name shown as user name is part of mailadress, i dont see a field to enter a username like Steam has, you create an Steam account and enter a name your email will not be used in or as part of a visible name.

When i signed up at GOG it used my name in the forum from my mailname, the countries can be changed ( list) BUT there is NO option button to HIDE it... or a list entry that says not disclosed or other,or just show no text location.

('evil') Steam however has one.... to hide it , just because a company is a European country and EU member doesnt mean its okay to show one by default....

Hi,

after a break the dragon is back. I was away for a day because I have to do dragonlike things sometimes, like hunting for food, guarding the hoard and cleaning the cave - you know that stuff :-). Now let's read some of the 20 to 30 pages or so I have missed in the meantime and (if rather late, sorry) also answer some posts.

First and again thank you for
- keeping up the the pressure on gog.com in the forum
- continuing to vote for our feature request for privacy
https://www.gog.com/wishlist/site/disable_view_profile_function_for_customers_who_care_for_their_privacy
- and spreading the (bad) news abouts gog's criminal activities and break of European data protection laws as well as breaching the trust of their customers on the web!

BTW as suggested in a previous post I have also forwarded my original e-mail to support to the new(?) privacy e-mail address ("privacy@gog.com") and have not yet received an answer (since Thursday). The second e-mail has just been attached to the still open support ticket...

To answer a few posts in one go:

@jorlin: Very nice find, thank you for...
http://killapenguin.com/random/gamestuff/dear-gog-what-are-you-doing/
..it's great that the web is picking up the story even without our posting it on social media!

@Zrevnur: thank you for informing us about that - the outrage about gog's new feature becomes international :-)
http://www.pcgames.de/GOGcom-Firma-256620/News/User-wollen-mehr-Privatsphaere-1255358/

@nightcraw1er.488 - re telemetry and phone home from games (victor crab and grim dawn do that, and unity games mostly do the telemetry) in your post #1470:
You may add some games that have been published recently that will not work without allowing them to connect to the internet OR without deactivating BOTH the internet connection of your PC and any third party (non microsoft) firewalls! Examples:
Into the breach - no sound was working for me in the game until I allowed - just once and for testing purposes - the game to connect to the internet. And all of a sudden all game functions were active, sound included. So far for DRM-free gaming! After complaining to both gog and game publisher subsetgames in the end I got the game refunded. That's not what I really wanted but obviously they rather refunded one game before really making it drm free...

"Pandora - first contact" is not even starting on my PC when I do not allow it to connect to the internet OR completely deactivate my internet connection and stop the firewall... DRM-free, eh?

@gamesfreak64 - re...quote start ...
many sites do that, some newspapers sometimes print an article but all of a sudden they are 'corrected' by their boss or a govt and voila : "oops that page doesn t seem to exist, or the page you are looking for... or other dumb texts telling the page is gone because it was removed or had to be removed by order of law or something similar.
... quote end ...
ah, yes, THAT reminds me so much of a certain scene in a book & later film:
The weekly chocolate ration has been increased to 30 grams ... later "corrected" to: the weekly chocolate ration has been increased from 20 to 25 g! All praise our big brother ... ok gog, now we know you have arrived in 1984...

again @gamesfreak64 regarding "gog shows you are from cairn islands" (and already answered by Nokatus) - that information you can still correct in your account settings under "account & locale - Country (displayed in forums)". I have set it to "other" to maximize privacy... but don't tell that to too many other forum users because then gog will for sure take it away from us in one of their next no-need-4-privacy-updates...

@joppo - thank you, I have updated the list and believe that this
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/list_of_drmfree_video_games_digital_distributors
is very good to know for those of us who now may have to leave gog.com and do our shopping where we are still respected customers and on sites that DO respect our privacy rights.

So... regarding the "list"...
Disclaimer ("copyright" SpiderFighter :-)): this is NOT a recruiting list, just a (most probably very very incomplete) list of angry users who will not buy here anmyore until gog get's their act together and stops publishing data without their customer's consent!

*** Number of users who will not buy from gog.com anymore until gog.com respects our privacy ***
#1 Breja
#2 PrivateProfile
#3 SpiderFighter
#4 jorlin
#5 monsieurcaillou
#6 RainbowDragon
#7 NovumZ
#8 ZenWan
#9 Dalthnock
#10 Lifthrasil
#11 joppo

@Mueslinator
re: If it wasn't for this regrettable snafu, I would gladly shove some money down GOG's throat.
... same here, but as long as they refuse to address this situation they will see no more money from me, no matter how many sales and offers they make, not even at 99% discounted will I ever buy another game here!

... manytimes they decide what will happen... not the community

example: distrust of parliament members

a Dutch example: Dutch PM was in heavy debates (again) because he could not remember or recall things (again) (selective memory perhaps?) the opposition was very 'angry' ( they always are) so they asked for a debate... BUT as usual chicken out and end up only with a weak motion of disapproval .
So in the end nothing changes .......

Thank you for your post! The "list" might not go anywhere but it is - together with the feature request and the growing interest in this matter on other sites all over the net an additional - if tiny - point we would like to make in our effort to make gog do the right thing.

I also agree that most users will not even actively use the forums and just use the site to buy games. I have not posted much until the new profiles were published but now we have to draw a line and make our stand. gog will either give us our privacy or lose us as customers. I may come back to get updates to the games I have bought but the numbers illegaly published by gog will remain useless for any data mining because they will now remain static data as I do neither use galaxy nor will I buy any additional games.

Well i am very sad because of the sharing of user data especially while many other 'evil' companies like big Evil Steam
do have options to hide info maybe its because they are USA or so i dont know... seems that many Euorpean companies think they are allowed to share the livingdaylights out of all users data living in Europe ...

If the 'evil' drm companies like the big evil Steam as they call it do have options to hide user info it is very sad that the DRM free lovers and huggers pull this stunt of user profiles on us, thats what hurts the most cause in a way GOG used to be special and different, someone you could trust cause we all knew about the evil DRM loving companies that were evil which was told by our friend GOG so it is sad we all seem to have lost a good friend: our buddy GOG.

Aaargh,...thanks, edited.
Shouldn't leave too many tabs open in my browser. :)

It's a drop in the ocean. Even if there's another 10 people for each of those listed who do the same you must realize the number of new customers this will bring Gog will offset the loss of a few old customers who likely don't spend as much as they used to because they've reached saturation point with their older game titles.

Yeah, let's not go that far.



Didn't scroll down enough to even see that.



The element of appeal to emotion is in every community wishlist entry, no matter what side of the emotional spectrum the targeted emotion comes from. People that know about and/or use the community wishlist are the ones that in some fashion motivate the uninitiated to vote for entries on it, whether you are for them, against them or indifferent. You can't have it both ways.

I think it's reasonably safe to say that both of the profile wishlist entries gained a lot of the total votes in the first few days/(weeks?) following their creation with those wanting profiles (actively) motivating others to vote, just like I imagine all popular ones do, and kept trickling in votes as they remained unfulfilled. So, claiming that the votes this one has accumulated in the past five days because people are easily motivated by anger comes across as bias at best.


And right after saying that you think comparing number/progression of votes is pointless, you take it upon you to link to the wishlist entry that has more votes accumulated in a shorter time-frame...

Again, you can't have it both ways.

Perhaps the reason people post/talk about the old one is because it calls for public display of games bought the Steam fashion for everyone using GOG. Now you can argue that since it predates Galaxy, that's expected, but that's also the main contention point; if private profiles were actually truly private and treated as such by public ones, nobody would care.

One could also argue that the Galaxy wish is meant to be contained on Galaxy/ among Galaxy users, which would take a chunk of people out of the equation, though there are Galaxy users that aren't happy that their Galaxy stats are broadcasted the way they are now. And that's leaving out the fact that there's no mention of amount of games with everything that entails.



[emphasis added]

Here's something I realised yesterday. If one has up to five friends, setting their friends list to "only me" or "friends" becomes a useless choice if they or even just one of their friends have a public profile.

It's hard to draw any kind of conclusion as Steam had social features since the beginning, and everyone seems to have a lot of friends by now, but cursory looking at, randomly chosen, public profiles, suggests that friends that have a private profile are not included in that list of six friends.

Nicely written!