Hahahahaha! Dude, I'm being serious here, quit trolling! XD

Buy GOG a pair of designer shoes. Sometimes an online store just wants to have pretty feet, you know?

Hardly trolling, I did actually send them a hat :)

(and the recipient still has it, last I heard)

nice reply :D so anyone who doesnt want to show things is/are :

"trolls, spammers, scammers and alt-accounts spamming here with an agenda."

Well that was a surprise! After ignoring us for a week, when I come back after being away for a day, we finally got a response from gog, and even more so they even DID update the privacy settings in our accounts! I love my new 404 "profile" page and now we have the best solution for all customers because those who like the new profiles may keep them and the more privacy minded customers are able to just turn them off. Thank you gog, it took you a while but in the end you have done a good job!

And THANK YOU very much to all who voted for the feature request and who actively requested more privacy options here in the forums!

weird cant properly edit my post to remove typoos, cause the text i can edit is not the entire text.....
seems parts are cut off ....

You did? I thought you were joking about the new virtual hat for real money trend in games.

Well, isn't that nice. You're a real charmer, GOG is lucky to have you as a customer.

(Mocking tone aside, that really id nice of you, and I would value you a lot as a customer.)

So there is a Santa Claus, and he does out-of-season deliveries! I got the Profile disable option I wanted! Thank you!

Tin foil is over-rated and ineffectual, portable Faraday cages are the way to go. :P

And to answer your question - NO! We are never satisfied!

Huh. Wonder why elcook's degrading response wasn't pinned in this thread like most updates to hot items are...? Could it be because even that was not well received?

If I go back years and years in my post history (if history worked even halfway decently) I'd probably find posts where I already said the bigger GOG gets the less relevant it's most loyal fanbase was going to become. Didn't think they'd actually start stating it so publicly though.

Yep, said words to this effect myself too.

The response and feature appreciation
I'm not particularly happy with this response. As always facts are twisted.
You claim that the new feature has been well received and so you were right implementing it. That would be true if the information given to the public were true and complete.
You get good comments if:
- you hide the fact that this feature was opt-out and not opt-in, so forced on your users
- you hide that even at max privacy setting some information are still visible. You get good comments if you
- you didn't communicated your users this changes in time
To sum up, you get good comments if you lie to the media and the users that follow those news.
Some news outlet actually dug a bit and expose some of the issue and that's were you don't get good comments.

Feature reception on the forum
About the profiles, I believe someone misunderstood what a lot of users wanted to express.
- The feature is not useless, it's just so much less important than providing a good service as there are a lot of graver neglected issue that are waiting to be fixed for years. So seeing it implemented instead of the other one is kind of disheartening.
I believe some users want that feature and that for some of them is what would make them come to GOG. But I strongly believe that the lack of quality and customer care is what keeping people away.
- The feature should be optional and opt-in. The lack of control is what make people angry. The lack of communication is what make people furious.
- Most are against the poor implementation, with a total lack of end users consideration, rather than the implementation itself.
- Right now there are probably a majority of users that still doesn't know that you exposed some of their information without warning them.

Ultimately if you really thought that this was a strongly requested feature you would have:
- rolled out the update with max privacy settings and opt-in feature
- communicated in details the features
If the customers were really waiting for the feature they would have simply opted in and it would have been a success. But the way it was implemented seems just like a way to force choices on unaware users, and that is clearly anti-consumers and a lack of trust in the usefulness of the feature.

What hinder your business
Some suggest the community here is driving away potential customers. I strongly disagree. Rude people are everywhere, here, on social media or the other sources you claim gave you positive comments. But the forum here and these threads are here for a reason, to expose what is really happening. Other than an utility for the users of the forum is also a service to the potential customers that doesn't know what they are getting into if the sign up with GOG.
What's really hindering your business is the lack of quality of your releases (product, updates, support and management) and the pr department that brought so much fiasco to the store for the lack of truth and transparency. People don't trust who lies to them on multiple occasion. If you want to make happy and emphatic news, build them upon actual improvements for your users instead of trying to make them believe that is the case.
What drives people away is the fact that you want to do something, knows how your users think about that, and still do what you want regardless of those feedbacks. And then lie about all the matter because you have to make things look good for the press and general audience. Users feels like they are not heard and also made fun of. One. maybe two time, it could be a mistake, but if you methodically do that it shows a clear intention.

I think that the issue is that GOG was born taking advantage of the gamers first gimmick and the feature a lot of users wanted that later become the pillars of GOG (drm-free,...). Now that GOG has more users they feel like they don't have to pander to the old core userbase as that would limit their options and make harder to make deals. Their pillars, especially drm-free, have become an obstacle too and they would gladly ditch that. But drm-free is actually the only thing that make them relevant as they are sub-par to every other store options. So ditching old values and old users is something they are still not sure they can do right now and it is not clear if the new customers they would gain would compensate that loss. At some point they'll have to drop the facade and deal with the fact that they cannot claim to be different and pro-consumer anymore and they cannot wave their principles (or what remains of them) around to make themselves look good.

Lastest changes
About the latest changes, it's really a poor solution.
You waited weeks to apply a 5 minutes changes that simply block the profile page of users with max privacy settings. Now the profile page return a 404 error and that is something that another 5 minutes testing would have caught. The site now seems even more broken than before and an error like that speaks of bad design choices and shouldn't happen on professional websites.
This also is not a solution as there are many ways users want to share (or not) their information. You could have left an option to have the profile active but choose what information to show, like the 3 numbers above.
Now you can either disable the profile completely or be force to show fixed unwanted information.
Disabling the profile would still show you in your friends activity feeds, which was part of the issue and has not been corrected.

It's still baffling that even after that you still decided to keep the profile always as default. You really don't believe that that was a mistake and to me that's the most worrisome thing.

I still do not understand why the hurry in release this feature as it was clearly not ready. It's seems like you had to do that before a specific date so it would not be strange to argue that GDPR could be involved. Maybe you needed to roll out that feature before that.
That's when so many services right now are contacting their users to make them confirm their agreement to use their information or contact them for the use of their services.

Suggestions for GOG
- apologize for your anti-consumers behavior and take responsibility for the issue you have caused
- fix the 404 error on the disabled profile page and disable the menu that lead to the profiles from the forum
- disable friends activity in the activity feed if they have disabled their profile
- disable all profiles for users that didn't changed their privacy settings after the profiles had been rolled out and send and email to let them know how to opt-in. You'll have to do that anyway now that GDPR is near as your users have to reconfirm your permission to deal with their data.
- if a user has his profile enabled make no information visible for users that don't have the requirement to access the page. Even those infamous three numbers.
- let people edit or reset some of the profile information

Thank you very much for the update, it changed my mind about not buying games here anymore.

That is good, however, could you confirm whether or not Facebook and Google are your "Trusted Partners" receiving our data?
Who are those "Trusted Partners" exactly?

@miko

Many users are tired of users like you. Yes, the profiles have been a success accepted by the majority of the user community. Whether you like it or not, that is reality.

You have created a petition on the wish list where we have voted many users who like profiles or achievements and even then you have not got 800 votes yet.

And yes this forum does not represent anyone because most users write in other forums because here there is a small group of users who do not respect those who think differently. Just read several forums dedicated to gog to know who they are.

Now gog has put the private profiles for anyone who wants it and even so you keep pestering others, it's sad. You already have what you want, many have voted to have it but now leave us alone.

I join all the users who thank gog to listen to the users but also ask gog.com as they have already done other users in social networks to control these annoying users more.

And I say that I am the first to be in favor of each person deciding their privacy

@MIK0: You got it. Well done.

That is what baffles me so. They have one USP and that is DRM-free. They can't hope to compete with Big Bad Steam without this one thing. Adding a client for convenience, profiles etc... for me those are attempts to bolster the one USP they have. Make the transition easier for people coming from Steam. I personally know a lot of people who use Steam only grudgingly, because they can't get the games they want elsewhere.

What would be the sensible thing to do is set GOG even more apart from Steam, if you can't beat them on their turf, choose your battles according to your strengths. But I can't see that happening. They could score with better service, being closer to their customers (and not submerging for a week when people have concerns and are unhappy...).
That said, I think the problem is higher up (gag orders...), because all visible staff members I've been in contact with over the years - be it the blues here or the support slaves have been exceedingly friendly and helpful.

Only recently elcook wrote about "our happy family" - the next instant we're treated like consumer cattle. This simply doesn't add up.