WELL....I guess I give up.

After countless years of playing this game, you have somehow made it impossible for me to open the client due to password/proof of ownership of the game issues. This is absolutely disgusting. I love the game and have played thousands of hours, but now I need to verify my ownership of a game nobody owns. I have the game linked to Steam under some other login, so It thinks I need to link to steam and still tells me I'm already linked to a different login. Well I guess I'll just use the maps and mods I have until they quit working and then forget the game altogether...

THIS SUCKS, AND WHOEVER MADE IT THIS WAY SUCKS. FTW

You know u can ask for help instead of bashing the people spending their free time to make FAF.

Since you already have a steam account linked you can use that to recover your faf username and reset the password to the linked account. Have a look at the FAQ here: https://forum.faforever.com/topic/278/i-lost-access-to-my-account-what-should-i-do

@mandofan58 said in WELL....I guess I give up.:

but now I need to verify my ownership of a game nobody owns

You couldn't be any more wrong.

I can understand emotions sometimes runs high and internet has some anonymity, but come on. I think you can do better.

@mandofan58 "My name is Karen and I demand to speak to the manager!"

user is clearly fustrated due to FAF choices and decides to vent it in hopes something changes

faf users attempt to claim moral highground by putting him down for bashing people
and then procede to bash him back anyway

stay classy... at least askaholic has some social skills (as he always has)

Why do we still have steamlink now that visionik is no longer in charge of FAF?

Legal compliance - partly because FAF is distributing an edited version of the EXE.

Steamlink doesn’t make you legally compliant.

I think the intent is to demonstrate that the user owns a legal copy - and that intent is to clear their obligations - not the legal obligations of someone seeking to get around that. Of course it can be circumvented. So, technically - that's correct - it doesn't make YOU legally compliant, but it unbinds FAF from you in the legal sense by discharging their responsibility.

The intent is that visi got spooked by his lawyers and gave FAF a deadline to meet and change their patch distribution method. Obviously nobody was going to do it and so Steamlink was implemented as the option B once the failed deadline inevitably hit.

Nobody at the time as a contributor was worried in any capacity about FAF being hit by any sort of legal notice and Steamlink does absolutely 0 to stop some sort of C&D. What Steamlink does is vaguely make it seem like FAF helps drive sales for Square Enix and we put the bare minimum effort to stop distributing files for free. In the end if Square Enix wanted to shut us down they are entirely within their rights to do so and Steamlink is irrelevant, just as any mod made for any game can get shut down.

If you want steamlink gone you can lobby the board to undertake the associated responsibility.

It's not something I'm going to support without another mechanism of verifying ownership of the game. I'll resign from the association if we start supporting/encouraging piracy.

It should be (probably is) against forum rules to describe ways to circumvent proof of ownership. Please don't ever share that info on FAF systems like the Forums @ThomasHiatt . You can edit your comment to remove that.

Do people not know what CYOA means? It’s like getting offended when an emulator site tells you to rip your own Roms from the cartridge. Read between the lines.

@zeldafanboy said in WELL....I guess I give up.:

Do people not know what CYOA means? It’s like getting offended when an emulator site tells you to rip your own Roms from the cartridge. Read between the lines.

FAF is not a dodgy emulator site and there should be no "wink wink" here.

There's more than one way to cover an ass. For FAF at least, cover it by staying within the law, as well as anyone can tell what the law even is. FAF is special compared to other fanmade mods because GPG told the public, more or less: "GPGnet is ending but you will still be able to do matchmaking on FAF, which is going to replace GPGnet in a lot of ways"

A lot of people relied on that promise when they made the decision to buy a copy of FA. I'm not giving legal advice here but a promise + justifiable reliance is powerful stuff, at least in the American legal system.

If people want clarity about what EXACTLY is legal for FAF to do, the best way for that to happen is to get sued by SquareEnix, hire lawyers (maybe rally the open source community for funding/free lawyers), fight it out in the courts, and get a judgment.

Clarity is overrated. The best thing for FAF is just go keep going forward under a little bit of uncertainty, and try to behave like responsible adults, for example taking reasonable steps to stop piracy so FAF can do what GPGnet used to do, namely provide a matchmaking service for people who own a legal copy of the game.

It's pretty clear that distributing all the game files like FAF does for patching is against the law. And it's pretty clear that nobody cares. You were all happy to support FAF for a decade before steamlink was implemented, but now you consider its absence would be unethical and to be supporting piracy? Very convenient.

GPG is not Square Enix and you're going to have a very fun time trying to prove that a significant minority of FA bought their copy of FA based on that GPG statement. Proving people bought FA because of FAF after that statement doesn't mean anything, we could drive 90% of FA sales but it still doesn't give any rights over the IP. Square Enix can and would just hit FAF with a boiler template C&D that every mod community gets and there is nothing that makes FAF special from the countless other communities that got smothered over it.

It isn't the right of Square Enix to make profitable decisions for their IP, it's their right to make decisions for their IP. The ruling would tell FAF it can exist as a community chat hub to organize games to play using Steam matchmaking.

And I'd broadly disagree. Steamlinking is probably the most damaging institution FAF has in terms of community health. It is practically the reason we lose half our players in our onboarding process. Making it easier and more intuitive is extremely difficult and nearly impossible as far as I'm aware simply because of the way the steam API functions which causes most of the new player issues.

The marginal security it brings is nowhere near the harm it causes.

Also for the record jts THQ nordic not Square whom have ro take issue.