You think having to waste 3 minutes of your precious time - or not so precious, if you spend more than 10 minutes a day on these forums - on having to fill out an endless series of craptchas in order to access your legally purchased games, you should try accessing your Humble library from within the People‘s Republic Of China.

You see, not too long ago, gog would also require you to fill out a craptcha in order to redeem keys. Luckily, the Chinese higher ups have realised that google is the devil‘s spawn, so they block the shit out of it. Which is cool if you want to set a sign against Silicon Valley imperialism, but unfortunately, it also prevented you from redeeming your keys, since the craptcha wouldn‘t even show up. It was a massive pain in the ass, as you‘d either have to use a VPN or send detailed instructions on how to redeem a key on gog to your mom back in a non-Great Firewall‘d country. But for the most part things worked fine, at the very least you could access your library without hassle. And ever since gog opened a Chinese storefront, they - THANKFULLY! - got rid of craptcha altogether. Instead we get this really cool minigame where you have to fit a missing puzzle piece into the right spot. Fun!

Unfortunately, Humble has gone in the opposite direction...

As soon as you try to log in - that is: EVERY TIME you log in! - you‘re greeted with a craptcha. Unless you‘re in China, of course. You log in, you get the spinning wheel of death and you wait, wait, wait for a craptcha that will never ever show. You‘re literally locked out of your account. You literally can not access your legally purchased games. Thanks, IGN! Thanks, google! Or should I say: screwgle!

The funny thing is: Humble now offers regional prices in Chinese Yuan. You‘d expect the small matter of a potential userbase of 1.5 billion people being unable to use their platform due to their choice of challenge-response authentication provider would be of some concern to them, so I took the liberty to take this up with Humble support. The response came swiftly... Well, gee, I want to thank you guys, you could've given me help, but you've given me so much more. I wish there was more of a punchline to this rant, other than a bunch of PR-rhetoric, but yeah, this is where you‘re at as a Chinese Humble customer: "Can‘t access your games? Whoops. We appreciate your feedback!“

But since you made it this far: I‘m giving away a gog copy of "Return To Castle Wolfenstein" for no particular reason whatsoever. No rules per se, just let me know whether you‘re in or not. Winner will be drawn on christmas eve (so make sure you enter by the end of the 23rd) via random.org. If I don‘t like the person random.org draws, I will continue drawing people on random.org until I come across someone I like. Please note that "Return To Castle Wolfenstein" is prohibited in Germany, so German users are explicitly verboten from participating. Protip: I can‘t stop you from switching your location to some other place in order to circumvent this arbitrary restriction, so don‘t do that, mmmmkay? I wash my hands in innocence.

Isn't communism fun? :/

And then China really thinks they should be recognized with the "free market status" in WTO, something that EU and USA are opposing? Well, first China should start unblocking international services and companies. :D

Maybe the rest of the world should block Alibaba, Huawer etc., any Chinese company with international business?

As for CAPTCHA in western countries, I recall some people complaining that GOG CAPTCHA nowadays takes them like five minutes to solve, with countless new picture puzzles. Just yesterday and the day before I got CAPTCHA in GOG for redeeming the keys (Hard West and Master of Orion), and GOG CAPTCHA gave me only two pictures to solve, done in 5 seconds or so.

So either GOG has changed something just recently, or I have no idea why some have to spend five minutes to solve CAPTCHAs in GOG. I hadn't seen CAPTCHA in GOG for a very long time, but it indeed appears you get it when redeeming keys (I hardly ever do that, I guess).

I also yesterday went to Humble Bundle to redeem the free Company of Heroes 2, and I think I got only 1 CAPTCHA page to solve.


EDIT: Not in. I have this principle that free games are worth nothing.

I am in. If you purchase someting even a digital game you should have accesss to it.

Yup, Humble support is really heavy handed on PRspeak... I guess the only thing you can do is giving your HB account info to someone you'd trust with your life and let them get keys for you. I volounteer.

Anyway, sorry to hear you're having troubles. If you have any further needs please let me know and I'll be happy to assist you!

You'd be welcome to paypal me some money if you were to win! :D

GET TO DA CHOPPA! DEFECT DEFECT, NOW!!

I feel for you on this, at a point here I had to deal with captcha's that lasted 10 whole minutes almost which was driving me insane and made a forum post about it and had death threats from an individual over it...

Every time I log out and re log in. Humble is somewhat annoying but not as bad as GOG for me.

I'm in. Something tells me that the managers of humble bundle weren't in any way aware of this problem, but eventually they will try to remedy it, for the enjoyment of all of us.

I'm waiting when Captcha becomes (more) esoteric. "click on sadness" or "Select all images below that display: ambivalence"

As it stands, I had to re-program myself to think of street signs as *just* the ends of the poles rather than covering the entire street sign. But maybe that's because I don't think "rite".

Sorry but if I lived in China, loggin in to Gog would be my very last problem.. O_o'

Thank you for getting in touch to let us know how you feel about this matter! Your feedback is sincerely appreciated! I will make sure to bring this up at the next team meeting! Please feel free to post again if you have any further questions!

Have a nice day!

Ok, I learn something new every day, and forget something old too.

I was under impression from some of those complainers that they see this problem only in GOG (and elsewhere Google CAPTCHA is less intrusive), but maybe they use different browsers or settings elsewhere, or it is some other sort of CAPTCHA that they face elsewhere.

As said, I am using Google Chrome in its default settings specifically for GOG.com and HumbleBundle (and Firefox for most of other sites), so yeah I guess I am letting Google to keep track how often I visit GOG.com and what games I buy.

Not in, but thank you for reminding me that there IS a worse country than mine,