You're not hearing me, I understand where his frustration is coming from. You should understand that if you're frustrated with something, it doesn't give you a free pass to shit on it for completely unrelated issues.

Good example of whining about whining. And with this I go one level further: whining about whining about whining. :)

People in countries like Japan or China, can't you guys use a VPN? I know it's annoying that you have to but at least it's an option. I'm not sure any free ones would work as they are usually slow as hell and probably block many ports that is usually hogged by bandwidth intensive tasks such as P2P or perhaps HD streaming.

You could try Hotspot Shield, it's one of the fastest with a US IP (and they have another service with a UK IP).

I don't think you're hearing anyone. You're the one who bought all this into this thread in the first place. My comment here had nothing to do with Steam as a service. It was entirely about a certain type of user it attracts.

Now you're just going to have to deal with the fact that my opinions differ to those of yourself and then get over it.

You can, but you'd be violating the ToS and as such you'd be risking losing your entire collection of Steam games.

I don't buy from Steam any more and I don't have a huge catalog there. I think I have at least 5 or 6 games here for every one game I have on Steam.

But yeah, if you're using a VPN like that you're risking having your entire account taken away if they find out.

I used to live in China too, and there's the additional issue of the authorities blocking VPN services at their leisure, so you don't know if your potentially paid for service is going to be available to you any more than Steam lets you play/purchase the games.

That was definitely a problem as well. I was there last year during the handover of power and security was pretty tight due to the history of violence during that shift. And following the meeting of the People's Congress, they decided to crack down on VPNs. Not sure that makes a lot of sense as it greatly inconveniences foreign businesses that want to do business in China, but there you go.

I was never interested in getting illegal stuff, I just wanted it for things like Netflix so that I could stay reasonably current with things in the US.