new to this site just purchased a game and it keeps redirecting me wene i go to download.. wtf anyone else have this issue wene first signing up?

Go to your Account, Library, and then find your game there. By default everything is FTP downloads, unless you decide to use Galaxy. If you want to use the GoG downloader then the links are hidden without using a wonderful script that i use all the time to use to download games updates and bonus stuff in bulk.


GogDownloader Sripts fourm

GoG Downloader client (Not Galaxy)

Try downloading your games from this page:
https://www.gog.com/account

U got to be more specific, where does it redirect u to? If u have already bought a game u shd be able to find it in ur Account under the 'Games' tab. From there, click on the game & u'll c the links to the game & any extras that come along with it. U can then download the game to the folder of ur choice by right-clicking on the 1st link under 'Game Downloads'.

I thought it was HTTP downloads, not FTP ones. Or do you use FTP as anything that sends files over the browser instead of the specific protocol?

I want to get nit-picky on it, which I can't really avoid...

FTP is File Transfer Protocol. HTTP is Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (or, a visual formatting standard). This means that a link from a http link is on a server that hosts everything else, but it silently switches to FTP...

Although anymore ftp and http are just parts of the url... I could be wrong and a different set of protocols are incorporated in the HTTP format, but from a programming standpoint that seems silly not to use what's already working and avaliable.

While you're right about the abbreviations, it doesn't mean that you can't transfer a file via HTTP, and that is actually how it is done as far as I know. When you click a download link, your browser sends a HTTP request to the server, and the file data is returned in the synchronous HTTP response.

I haven't read or investigated any of the web technologies, but at a basic level it seems wrong to mix and confuse them. And yet it's pretty apparent they are more intermixed and confusing than ever.

Authentication. HTTP offers more authentication options than FTP, including Session ID authentication. So FTP isn't already working for what GOG requires, which is delivery of files to authenticated users that own the game.

It's just a matter of a technology that was originally made with a specific purpose in mind but which could do much more. Once it's doing much more, you don't go back and rename it, because everyone knows it by its original name.

Imagine going back in time 30 years and saying to someone "I'm just going to record a video on my phone". They'd look at you like you were a lunatic. And yet we still call them phones, because "combined-telephone-camera-and-multi-purpose-computer" is too cumbersome to say in everyday conversation.

The thing about the HTTP protocol is that the MIME header states which kind of data the request or response contains, and the client or server acts accordingly. As such, you shouldn't complain that it is being used for things it wasn't meant for, you should complain that the people who designed it named it stupidly.