Fanboi part II

So my post on Fanboism was more than a little fanboish itself, which is ok, because I think Valve totally deserved it. Being a great company, however, does not excuse you from making mistakes or being a douchebag. To illustrate this, I present to you WHY VALVE SUCKS 1) Steam offline mode is worthless. Complete and total fail. It doesn't work half the time and locks you out of your purchased games. Seriously, it sucks and needs to be fixed. 2) Valve anti-cheat banhammer - In case you didn't know, if you are suspected of cheating Valve can label you a cheater, meaning you can't play on any VAC servers (that means pretty much all of them) and you're stuck playing on shitty servers out in Hong Kong with a 9992485928349982934 ping. What really sucks is there is no appeals process, no chance to protest or prove your innocence, and it applies to all of your games. Harsh stuff. I've never been on the receiving end, but I'm still freaked out by it. 3) Valve can disable your account. Valve reserves the right to cancel your account and prevent you from playing your games. This sucks, and bothers me quite a bit. In fact, if I can buy a game through a service other than steam, I will, for this exact reason. I think Steam is a solid app and a great platform, but I'm really wary of anyone else having that kind of power over things I've paid money for. 4) Half Life 2 source code theft - this was seriously sad, folks. A German hacker apparently got a keylogger onto Gabe Newell's computer, then stole the HL2 alpha after the game was officially announced in 2003. Not only was this an epic fail of security measures at Valve, it also revealed that HL2 was nowhere near finished. Shortly after this, the game's launch date was pushed back a year. They did kind of make up for this though, by offering the hacker a job at valve, even going so far as to arrange a flight for him to the United States - with FBI waiting at the gate. Unfortunately, this lulzy bit of revenge was thwarted by the German equivalent, who caught the guy before he could leave. 5) Half-Life: Source. This game is still awesome (it's Half-Life!) but it should have been a freebie, though $10 ain't terrible if you don't already have Valve's first masterpiece. Really, though, it was rather pointless. 6) Half-Life 2 ending. 'Nuff said. 7) Glacial development times. Although this is justified as it results in pure awesome, the fact remains that it's a long, long wait in between Valve games. It's so unusual, that when they release more than one game in two years, people go apeshit and start frothing at the mouth because their minds cannot comprehend it. So there you go. Most of Valve's suckage is concentrated in Steam, otherwise it's pretty damn hard to really hate them. They're not perfect, but they're still awesome. Of course, I would love for everyone to chime in and add their thoughts on the suckage of Valve. It's always important that everyone screws up and does stupid things sometimes, even your favorite people.