It's much cheaper to buy it retail. I got AvP retail for £11 and it was £25 on Steam.

No point in pre-ordering this then. Chances of Valve unlocking this for Japan is going to be near zilch considering how Bethesda have pulled most of the catalog from Steam for us. Not to mention then having to piss around getting it gifted.
It's crap like this that makes me fucking hate SteamWorks.

Unfortunately you probably can't put the blame of behavior of pro steam fanatics on Bethesda, their behaviour seems the same everywere as seen in Civfanatics forums when it was announced that Civ5 will use steamworks. Like here and bethesda forums people who said anything negative about steam or decision to use it were attacked by dozens of froth mouthed steam cultists spouting lines from steam bible.

RAWR RAWR RAWR no discs!
GRUG GRUG GRUG auto patching!

I my self dislike steam i have one game on there and i dislike the fact of it auto patching.
Why do i dislike auto patching?maybe its dead now a days but don't you remember player made mods and all the great fun they could bring to your gaming joy.
As i know sometimes a great mod can't be used with the newest patch or has yet to be updated to work with the newest patch. I could just take out my disk install and patch it up to the patch it needs and stop updateing after that.
if it used steamworks i would be unable to play this mod thanks to forceing me to update my game to the newest patch. If the mod don't work on the newest patch and the game can only be used with steamworks....Guess what i am shit out of luck.
No disks?Come on how can you call your self gamers. Part of the joy in geting a new game is to open up that box and take in that new disk smell.
Yes i use gog here.Why you ask?Its the closest thing i can find that feels like its still a box copy for old games and drm free.

Looking at Fallout 3, autopatching in New Vegas might turn out to be a major pain in the ass for modders/mod users (me). While Fo3 did not have autopatching, some of the patches messed up modding big time, which made it very practical to be able to just reinstall it with an old patch if something messed up.

You know you can just turn off auto-patching for a specific game if you want, right?
As for the whole
there is at least one Steam basher that doesn't have logical arguments for each of those cultists.

That doesn't help when mods mess up, and you have to reinstall the game. Having had to do that has happened countless times with Morrowind, Oblivion and Fallout 3, with only F3 ever having any problems with patches, can make this quite a problem.

No, there is a problem with that as I recall. I don't remember what it was, but there is a reason you can't just leave it on that setting.
Or maybe there only used to be.

I have auto-patching off for some games and haven't got any problems like the game not starting (both games with Steamworks and without). Might have been an issue in the past or with specific games but for all the stuff I've tried it worked flawlessly.
Yes, but look at it from a developers perspective as well: you want your game to be always patched at the latest version and this makes it easy for you to do so. The problem with mods is that, despite being nice, most of the time they're written half-assed.
If a mod developer is worth his air intake he needs to make sure that his mod is always compatible with the latest release of the software his mod is based on, it's common sense and courtesy. I wouldn't blame Mozilla for example for keeping Firefox up to date because it breaks compatibility with a plugin for a short amount of time, and if that plugin isn't updated then, at least in my opinion, it shows that the dev hadn't really much interest in keeping it current any way.

Mods that I would class as essential like any UI or texture mods *shouldn't* be affected by patches unless the patch replaces an asset used by those mods. It's only mods that actually alter the scripting that will cause trouble and to be honest you are better off waiting till the game is 'finished' before installing something like FWE, MMM or FOOK2 anyway.

That is quite nice and all, but I don't think people who want to actually play the MOD and can't because of auto-patching care.
Just look at it from their perspective: You want to play a MOD. If you buy a game from retail, you can patch it to certain version and play it, or you can but it from Steam, patching it to the current version and not be able to play it. It's as simple as that, really, and so, given the choice, some people just want to have patching in their hands - and they don't really care about developer of the MOD being rude :D

Agreed. While I wouldn't buy a game just because it was DRM-free I also wouldn't buy it if it was a good game with DRM I didn't want. Since the games here are DRM-free I will look to buy from here first before going to other retailers like steam, so that definitely helps sales in my mind.
DRM just does not stop piracy, in fact all it does it hurt the legitimate customers. Spore, which employed one of the most draconian DRM systems around, was also the most pirated game of it's year, and the pirates did not have to deal with the DRM, making the paying customers the ones who suffered (I wonder how many of those who pirated Spore did so despite having already bought the game just to avoid the DRM?).
I know how easy it is to pirate a game and could do so whenever I want, I have one friend who has all the dlc for DA:O without the need to log in due to having pirated it herself, but I don't even if it means me not being able to play the game because I refuse to buy it due to the DRM it uses (which are increasing in number every year it unfortunately seems). However, when I see pirates getting to play it however they want, I do wonder why I stick to my principles.
DRM does nothing to stop piracy, the only method I have seen that has any affect at all is when the devs themselves release a copy of their game on the torrents, one that is damaged in such a way that it ends up not functioning (the devs of Batman Arkham Asylum did a clever trick of releasing a version of it that would not let Batman glide over a certain spot, when people went to complain on the forums about it they were told to buy a legitimate copy), causing the pirates to be unsure of whether the copy they are downloading will work or not. This penalises the pirates while not affecting the legitimate players.

When a patch borks features, and doesn't improve anything (with the only real inclusion (mentioned in the patch history at least) being achievements for new DLCs), I don't care what the shit developers want.
In the beginning phase of the modding community for the last couple of Bethsoft games, it was all about balancing and additions, due to their incredibly half-assed work. Good quests usually took a year or so to come, though while nothing really spectacular has come to Fallout 3 as far as I know, many quests and storylines have come and surpassed anything that was in Oblivion, which quite honestly isn't that big of an achievement.
Heck, even when looking at Morrowind, my favorite questline is actually a mod, and I also now have problems playing it without certain balancing options.
Considering that NV will be based upon F3, it will probably suffer from many of the same flaws, though I'm still very pleased with some of the changes they've made.

on the other hand I was thinking about buying Batman Arkham Asylum, unfortunately it seems like wherever you look it's damn difficult to find a crack for the game. (I guess the pub/dev is doing a heck of a job getting the cracks pulled).
Therefore I'm not buying the game but instead buying a different one. Good job Eidos! You could have had a sale.