I am a hardline anti-Steamist, I am opposed to the forced account, must-finish downloading this game I bought on disc to save on bandwidth auto-patching basically I see no "feature" it has is anything I want to deal with.

now, I know many love it to death. but for me it made piracy tempting, not so I could pass around the games but so I could try to enjoy without worrying about "bad patches" & "no connection" issues where there shouldn't be any (like a single- player game)

Well, maybe i didn't it notice then. What i do remember is that with the introduction of regional pricing some games got screwed up prices that were later "fixed". Bethesda's games are the main example.

Now i'm really curious to see which games went down when regional pricing kicked in, if you still have a link or anything i'd like to see it.

This is complaining thread. I decided to add my experience. So a couple of years back, I found this great deal on DA:O ultimate on Impulse ( before they got bought by gamestop). I don't like steam as I hate having a client running in the background for me to enjoy my game. Impulse only needed the client to install but after that, there was nothing needed. I decided that's fair enough, bought the game and played it couple of times.

Move forward another couple of years, I decided to play DA:O which I had make an archive using impulse client (supposedly I can install from archive in offline mode) but behold gamespot bought them and I must install new gamespot client to install my game (old one just refuse to work). No to setup the new client, you have to agree to this crap privacy agreement that gamespot put together which was a no for me. So I basically lost $25 as the company I bought the game from was sold and I have either to put up with a crap agreement to play my game or I am out of luck. That's for me I only use GOG as the digital copy can't have any relation with a client during any of the steps or a change in owner or agreement means I lost my purchase.

Just my complain

I'd love to quote some examples but I can't find the threads anymore (may have been purged already). =/

Not bashing per se, but a rather bizarre turn of events, I went to play some Saints Row 2 and noticed this (see picture) in my Steam games list. A Civilization fan, you may ask? Well, yes, only I never bought Civ 3 or 4 for Steam. I have them both on disc.

Turns out those entries are for Eets and UFO: Extraterrestrials, and launching them does actually start those games. No Civ 3 or 4 then, but this is very weird.

Edit: No it doesn't launch them - it tries to launch Civ 3 and 4 respectively, and obviously can't find them.

Did Steam scan your HDD content? It maybe found traces of previous installs?

Steam do not so any such things, and Jamykis says the entries are for Eets and UFO: Extraterrestrials, as they are the games actually being launched.

So there seems to be some mix-up in entries somewhere... restarting Steam do not help?

No, and it's turned out that its not launching the games after all. I assumed they would from the fact that clicking on the Community link brings me to the forums of Eets and UFO (I clicked on them in anticipation that someone else might have benefited from this 'free' gift - I was initially a little confused as to why I had Civilization 3 & 4 in the first place).

It's obviously an honest mistake that's been made somewhere along the line, but it does once again highlight the problems of relying on an external party when it comes to DRM.

I'm going to remove the games and reinstall them to see what that does.