Welcome to the website.
A shame about your experience with the downloader. Never used it myself, downloading form the browser was always easy and hassle free as it was so I never saw need to.

Anyway you should let GOG know if you’re having a problem with it, if it’s a problem on their end it means they can fix it after all. Stick around a little longer, the downloaders crummy but the actual business of offering old DRM free games that work on current operating systems has never done me wrong. Although support can be a little slow to respond sometimes, they were quick for me but others apparently have had a wait on their hands. To be honest as far as support goes I’ve herd worse horror stories from various places, including Steam.

This thread is crazy.

GOG has several very objective problems, the downloader being one of them. Everyone who is familiar with this site and its operation should be able to see that, even if they are the kind of people who think the concept of "DRM free" is the best thing since sliced bread.

What's more, GOG's behaviour regarding these problems is simply inexcusable. The younger members here may not know that the downloader has always been problematic; it was taken down (without any explanation, as usual) after "leaving beta" (and, as one of the more disgruntled fans put it, "entering alpha") in September 2010. After dozens of complaints by users who needed it and a vague promise from GOG that the situation will be remedied, it resurfaced after a month or two, again in near total silence. And it was the same fucking downloader as before, with exactly the same issues. Call it "optional" all you wish, it should have been rewritten from scratch a long time ago.

Remember this is the same site that wasn't able to throw together at least a rudimentary PM system for the forums in two and a half years. I'm not an expert in this kind of thing, but I wrote PHP code for a site or two in my day and I believe a skilled coder should be able to have a working prototype of something like that running within 24 hours, because it's quite a primitive job.

GOG's business model is amazing, their catalogue and publisher persuasion skills quite impressive, site design awesome. Communication with the community (about stuff that matters, not just chatter), product support and web development? Not nearly as good. Wake up, fanboys, and smell the ashes.

Well, the whole point of my portrait was to point out what I think is a moronic attitude, ie fanboyism, uncivil behavior and so on. I did not set out to insult anyone, if i did I am sorry, I only want to point out that this attitude does exist, it is not only in this thread. I did not set out to portray anyone in particular. And I and am possibly to old fashioned now any way. maybe to whole point about society today is to be cold, sarcastic, uncaring etc. I just don't like it...

But you where - you tried to make quick little joke to disarm me (about my personality) - it might not have been the your intention but it was the result. You did go after me as a the person not at the cause.

No you didn't. You made some presumptions about me and turned them into a joke. If you wanted my perspective you only have to ask, there where no need to second guess me. There was no question meant for me there, but a possibility for someone else to take you up and go with it. You where trying disarming my argument as not valid and based on "snapping" because I have had to many bad experiences? How can this be seeing it from my perspective when you don't know anything about me? I am not saying this was a conscious approach from you, but it was the end result.

I am slow on the uptake, but when I do go off I tend to steam right ahead without breaking, and I also apologise for coming on to strongly. However I am not quite sure what you are trying to say here? Stand by my ideal and act the hero (which I am nowhere close to being) and set an example but not act? One of my fault is that i start lecturing (force of habit), but how can I do anything on a forum except to talk? how can I stand by my ideal without saying anything. I tried to do so now by talking in quite general terms, how else could I do it? if I did nothing would I then live to my ideals? I never singled you out, only responded to your response to me, I did not even think you where in the worst group before this... maybe one of the faults with society is that people actually have stopped caring and telling people behave better? (thats a bit rhetoric and philosophical, not to say wrong place... Note to self - coffe before any forums...)

am I going crazy or are the last 10 posts in here bolded for no reason?

edit- and so is this one

yeah

I suppose a closing tag was omitted somewhere in the wild nesting posts above. Which is sort of the thing I was talking about before.

However, it looks fine to me (50 posts per page, Opera browser).

Which means it would be time to feature WinUAE as third big emulator (after DOSBox and ScummVM), include a little cheap ROM and sell plenty of neat Amiga games! ;)

Which is a pity really, given that it would seem to be rather 'easily possible' with only very little resources dedicated to it, while having a rather large positive impression on some customers.

He may have been venting. But then if you'd just spent money only to see you'd seemingly pissed it down the drain because the place you bought your game from is too broken to be able to deliver it you'd probably be a little bit angry too.

Realistically speaking anyone who has used GOG for a while should be aware of the failings and whose fault those failings are. So yes, the fact that the downloader is broken is GOG's fault. The fact that they haven't removed that option is GOG's fault. The lack of technical support and incredibly slow progress on fixing existing titles that are still up for sale in a broken state is GOG's fault. The fact that for some they make a terrible first impression is GOG's fault.

This is all a part of the service they provide.

So while it may be perfectly possible to work around GOG's shortcomings, all we can do is point out to others how they can do this. There's no sense in blaming them for not seeing how to when there's no clear indication available that a browser download would be any less truncated.

Sorry to hear you've had problems, though i had the same experiences when i started using Steam. Lucky for me in not put off by first impressions and tend to give things a second and third chance. GoG and Steam are the only two DD services i use, and i enjoy using both, though more so GoG because of its awesome community. Others have suggested to download through your browser so i wont make a big paragraph about it. Guess what im trying to say is dont base your opinion of GoG off a known crappy software they offer. While ive never had issues with the downloader a lot of people have, so just use your browser from now on if the downloader is not working properly.

And, Welcome to the site.

Very well said... Personally I have experienced zero problems related to games and only some minor annoyance with the downloads now and then, so i can say that i'm more than happy about the service as a whole.
However there is stuff that is not handled the way it should be, and it's only fair to point out these flaws too.

Object lala = new Object;
int n;
lala = while (n=1;n>0) {MessageBox.Show(lala)}

A joke has to be the intention for it to be a joke, and it wasn't one. Take my word for it -- only I know for sure, because only I am I.

I didn't see why you came here to argue in the first place, so I tried to find a reason for it. I knew you were a person so that you could actually reply, and thus bring the truth forth, and so you did. And you proved me wrong. Just don't think it was an attack, it was anything but it. Trust me. I had no bad intentions, but I apologize for how you took it.

Let's move on.

Hmm... You seem to misunderstand me again. What I think you should've done is not being quiet, but to answer this guy in the good-spirited way you wanted us to. We could see the comment and think for ourselves that this might be how we should've done it, and in the future take that into account. Of course, by you telling us to be different we can also consider or discredit that, but alas, I do not think it is that easy. A big, fat disclaimer saying "be nice" isn't enough for people to be nice. I think we have to live and learn.

That said, though, I think your ideal is a nice one, just somewhat pointless. But this is just my opinion, and I have no extensive knowledge of people or the human mind to begin with. I know people only through myself, and evidently, I can be wrong. We're all different and I guess it is to be expected.

Maybe it's not "very new", but for a service like this, yes, it's new in my opinion. Especially considering that it just recently went out of Beta state. Also, read my post that elaborated on the size thing, please. :) Hopefully it will make more sense to you.

I don't care for sliced bread at all. :( More convenient but never as tasty.

Can't argue with any of that, but most of us did point it out. Point out a way for him to get his precious game and be a happy chappy. That's why I don't get why we're arguing in the first place. :S Even if our replies seemed rude, they were probably very helpful to him. He probably didn't even expect a solution when he came on here ranting, but he was given one.

The thing about the community is there's blind devotion and tactless communication.

We should just have a "be informative" attitude instead of "you should know this" attitude for questions. There are some posts in this thread that display the former and others that display the latter. Whether knowingly or unknowingly, it doesn't matter. Just... be nice.

Well, I'm blindly devoted to tactless communication, and you smell like bananas.

You make that sound like a bad thing... and that from a hamster! *winks*

I'd dare and say that the GoG team itself is rather bad with it's communication policy, even though the service is great.