Yeah.. Buka was the same group that posted the "Perfect graphical realization with advanced DirectX 9 effects" a week ago.

Blue, Yes it does work. The proper technique is called Port Forwarding and nails a port number (such as 80) to an inside PC. Not all firewalls/routers/cable devices/what-have-you support this, however. It IS possible. I do it. My girlfriend has a friend in a neighboring state that likes to FTP. So I tell the router, hey, if you hear an incoming FTP request, pipe it to my girlfriend's inside PC. Not mine!

Also, we have a web server. Work the same way. I tell Mr. Router (via Port Forwarding config) hey if you hear a request incoming to port 80, pipe it to our web server on the inside.

Same can be done for multiplayer game servers. I have hosted before behind our NAT. You can easily host all different kinds of things this way (port forwarding) while using NAT.

Not all devices have this support. Depends on how much you paid for said device. Good luck!

Hang in there. It'll get worse. Now I get 2 FPS on an unformatted computer.

I don't understand the hate. I do understand the lack of knowing what it is you're downloading for patches, but in every case do you really know other than some changelog.txt that you BELIEVE is in there? Trust me, vendors add much MORE to bugs and patches and fixes than what's in the changelog. They've been doing this for years and you don't have a problem with them.

Tell you what. I share what I did. I don't trust steam either but I have to use it so I set up a PC with a plain OS with nothing on it. Never used it to purchase anthing. I put it on a separate network in my house. So whatever patches they download to it, that's fine. I just run the game and that's fine for that standalone PC.

Works great. I don't understand the hate. By the way, the stolen source code I believe was HL2 not Steam.

I can't think of a single app that doesn't get patched and updated to fix things. A big paranoid are we?

I used to be a Steam hater. I installed a fresh OS and Steam. It's not so bad. I still dislike the control loss, however, have you seen the front end to FFXI mmorpg? OMG. It makes Steam look VERY good in comparison. Specifically, the FFXI front end has way, way too many layers to it. Steam is great. I still don't trust it, but it could have been much worse.

The extra $1 per character is to stop a gaming balancing problem they had in beta. It stems the tide of useless new characters. It has nothing to do with greed. Perhaps a beta person can step in here and explain?

It's a good thing the software gives us a choice to auto download or not. But it's a bad direction to go in.

So far, the questions I have are:

1. What about selling your game to another person? Is this one of those questions that was already thought of but decided they don't want people selling their games to other ppl? If so, state it.

2. I don't want to be forced to patch, get screwed up, and wait for another patch to fix the last one. This is a valid concern. What options does the user have towards that end?

3. What if someone has my new System ID and password? That's pretty weak protection.

Paranoid - id Software is a technology company. This means all you're complaining about is their main talent and focus. So yes, it is a show piece for the engine, in all cases. This is John Carmack's main lead. This is also why John Romero left the company. Read back/past articles, yo.