"O.H. ... M.Y. ... G.O.G. I dunno what to say."

<adult>
Thanks gog and devs for the free game, appreciate it.
</adult>

<toddler>
Wahh, I don't want to give gog my email address, but more importantly, I want everyone to know just how MAD I am.
</toddler>

Why would I downvote your post? I don't even downvote most the people I should. Like the Winnie the Pooh, or the DRM-free is dead trolls. Or just the people who whine non-stop about the same thing, over and over again.

Expessing your opinion is fine, but the delivery matters, and there's also a time when it doesn't need to be driven into the ground any further. I'm sure GOG absolutely needed to here the same complaint from the same guy for who knows how many times it is now.

And truth be told I couldn't care less about vitual forum "rep", and I have no idea why you do either. Like what's the point? Are you looking for clout on a forum or something? It's nothing meaningful in anyone's life. You say you're spending most of your free time on this forum, so maybe that's why you're placing a value or importance on something that has none.

It's nice that you're here to help people or answer questions, and if that's what you're doing than you should feel good just from that alone. You shouldn't need forum "rep" or clout to reinforce the positive things you do.

Cheers GOG! Looks like a fun game.

Got this a long time ago on steam, glad to be able to add another title to the de-steamed pile! And for free to boot; thanks to the dev/publisher and GoG for the acquisition!

Simply put:
The current GOG system, designed in GOG's ultimate "wisdom" provides false sense of accomplishment and punishment.
By default you start with zero rep (unless something's changed).
It's notable that the system is designed that it is much easier to actually loose rep than gain it.
Also the way system is designed provides natural "balance improportion" fluke in the form of:
- massive upvotes going to people who A.Praise the platform/publisher/developer (for example for free things) B.Use overly "forced too cheerful" wording C.Use multiaccounts to "forge their rep" *
- massive downvotes to anyone saying something that goes against a flow, perhaps something controversial even if totally correct

* Well designed system would account for at least same IP address

If the rep could only go up, and there would only be "plus" button, while having limitation on burst upvotes (to remove possibility of "I will upvote every post on this page"), people would not get an encouragement to force their frustration out through button bashing, there would be less user hatred and toxicity, and people would have more equalized chances.
The forum would therefore loose a chunk out of a reputation that could be described as some dead legion where moderators either don't show up almost ever or they provide heavyhanded approach.
There's also no rep moderation of any kind.
While "low rated" sometimes mysteriously vanishes the rep points once gone are vanished forever.

The current system highlights whatever is considered trendy or popular beliefs and moves, while it punishes people who don't go with the flaw, regardless if they are right or wrong.
It's a system very badly designed, providing constant opportunities for phenomenons such as "negative rep forum bias", "social isolation based on rep", "rep appreciation circles", "accelerated rep gain threads", "user chierarchy based on rep", among others.
It is a common occurence that once someone reaches certain level of negative rep it's basically a one way ticket for them, eternally bashed by majority, if not directly then still in thoughts, with close to zero chance of redemption.
It's a race to the bottom post certain mark.

GOG's system promotes inequality, or more precisely, unequal CHANCES, especially with it's heavily evident ability to loose rep much easier than gain it while it DOESN'T actually prove anybodys reputation as a forum member nor RL person.
The way it is designed and operates does not even allow to see platform invovlment at all - after all a user heavily active while with "barely positive rep gain ratio" (for example due to saying many controversial things) will loose possibly hundreds of rep points over time while slowly getting up (perhaps "reaching near bottom" in fluctuation) and to anyone not knowing better present on this forum it will look exactly like somone who was barely active and got only + rep points in same amount of time.

Links/attachments posting should be tied to account age / number of posts made.
Who T F in their right mind would tie it to a badly designed rep system that encourages public lynches and superstition.

Thanks for the freebie ^_^

To provide more detail about the situation mentioned in the current "most helpful review", the game appears to always try to connect to a server. The first screen of the game shows gives you the option to choose between Funselektor servers and GOG servers. However, the game seems to work fine with no internet connection (at least when selecting GOG servers and I'd guess it would be the same either way) except that you can't see even your personal best ghost without a network connection (it doesn't seem to store that info locally at all). I didn't try it since my game system is fully offline, but I'm guessing something like TinyWall should be able to conveniently prevent it from accessing the network (game engine is Unity).

Also, it is quite a challenge, I'll be stuck on the first tutorial track for quite some time :/.

Perhaps the next freebie is Plokoth - it's now free on itch.io and is going to be released as freebie on Steam.

Cool cool, I don't own that many racing games.
Art of Rally is probably the only one I have my eyes on.

You see what happened? We are just talking, exchanging arguments which - while a bit OT - are not unimportant for several people and we discussed them really civil. Still not just mine but now also your post is downrated. That's the purest example of the rep system being harmful or at least unfair. If you google it first discussions here on GOG started in 2008! And yet still GOG did not change a thing.

Please don't reply - it will only lead to another post being downvoted as this will be and you don't deserve this. At those who donvoted because it was OT, don't worry, I've said all I had to say about this problematic and won't bother this thread no more.

Thanks for your post, was going to post something similar today! ;)

Let me add some bits to your post: There's no need for third party apps for those who don't want to mess with them for any reason. Actually, it's very easy to just create a firewall rule using the default firewall of Windows and block any incoming/outgoing traffic.

For those not tech savvy, here's how to create a firewall rule on Windows 10:

- Type "firewall" in the search box that's on the taskbar (look at the screenshot below), then choose "Windows Defender Firewall"
- Click "Outbound Rules" (it's on the left side), then "New Rule..." (it's on the right side)
- Check "Program" (it should be checked by default), then click next
- On "This program path:" click "Browse", navigate to the game's directory, then click on the "absolutedrift.exe"
- Check "Block the connection" (again, it should be checked by default), then click next
- On the next screen make sure everything's checked, then click next
- On the next screen, type a name. Something like "Absolute Drift Block Rule" will do.

Congratulations, you've just created a firewall rule and, hopefully, learned something useful as well! If you change your mind and decide to delete the rule at some point, find it in the list, right-click it and choose "Disable Rule" or "Delete".

ps. I tried the above in a quite old version of Windows 10 that I keep on a separate VM for academic reasons and it works like a charm, though I can't be sure if anything's changed after a recent Win10 update since I don't use them. If you have any problems following the above, ask and I'll (or someone else) reply asap.

It's from the same Team.

A problem might be that this is a game freebie thread and this whole discussion diverges very much from the game (again in a long series of agains) and is also extremely repetitive. And I say that as someone who produced his own offtopic and (ultimately) repetitive posts in threads like these (some of which were downvoted).
I'm trying to actively limit my participation in this (because it's just a circular mess). Maybe you want to create a dedicated thread for that and instead of vomiting the same posts into each topic again and again, whoever is interested can just point out that there is some controversy associated with this and link to that thread. That way, the whole mess is reduced to a single post per thread.

I'm pretty sure (or at least hopeful) this is going to be my last active participation regarding this issue (and I sure as hell won't bother to touch that dedicated thread if it ever gets created) since I managed to mostly drop my youthful issue (unless I'm too hungry for some reason).