The only people who can play Steam games without Valve's restrictions each time Steam goes down like that are those using hacked copies. That speaks volumes about what Valve really thinks of its paying customers
Actually, it doesn't say anything whatsoever regarding what Valve thinks of its paying customers... absolutely fucking squat. All it says is that people pirate/hack games - big revelation there! Feel free to continue your pointless tirade but stick to the facts. Steam is subject to outages that affect paying customers, much in the same way that Guild Wars or WoW are - that has absolutely NOTHING to do with what Valve thinks of its paying customers. It could also be argued that Valve does not have adequate contingency plans but apart from this freak weather event and the launch of HL2, the first full-scale implementation of Steam encryption, there has been virtually zero downtime and even those few occasions have been pretty insignificant... in fact I'd go as far as to say that Valve have done very well with maintaining Steam so far.
Obviously without using a centralised-server it would be possible to avoid the outages, which is a legitimate point, but that's not the case or the reality of the situation and as long as Valve continue to develop/distribute quality/popular games then Steam will continue to thrive. If piracy didn't exist then there wouldn't be a need for such systems anyway.
I won't even bother continuing because you have demonstrated on numerous occasions that you are an unreasonable anti-Valve asshat with especially small genitalia and a predisposition to intercourse with your terminally ill mother (ill from AIDS that you gave her, which you contracted from ass-fucking monkeys). I hope you get leprosy for Christmas, though we can't all get our Christmas wishes.
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Founder of the
"I Hate Smiley Fitz" society
Remember: Riley has autism. He has trouble communicating, and in an overstimulating
environment, he can get frightened and run away, leaving his parents frantic. - Auburn
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance."