The ONLY Half-Life 2 Thread. Do Not Create New Threads

[goddamn]

Wasn't this locked?

Anyway, I foudn this: LINK

Valve announced today in their official forums that they eliminated roughly 20,000 Steam accounts yesterday which were found to be attempting to pirate Half-Life 2 in a variety of ways. Defending this rather aggressive anti-piracy decision, Valve adamantly stated in their post that the method by which they were able to trace and catch would-be pirates was a simple procedure, which should eliminate any ambiguity surrounding this mass culling of Steam users.

Similarly, Valve also commented on rumors alleging "fake key or fake warez or hack instructions to trap people" into pirating the game only to find it was a anti-piracy ploy to prevent and perhaps even sue pirates. According to Valve, the hack came from the "community" as one might expect, and the company stated that Steam the accounts that were closed were not related to this untrue rumor, but instead that reasons for account cancellation "includes Credit Card fraud, theft of accounts you do not own and using cracked versions of Valve games."

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Piracy is illegal, "not a good thing" and people who are willing to commit credit card fraud to get a game are just bizarre, but...

I'm a bit concerned about the last reason for deleting accounts; "using cracked versions of Valve games". Does that include the good ol' No-CD patch?

[JoyBoy]

Originally Posted by goddamn

Wasn't this locked?

The original thread was, for reasons I wont go into here.

Anyways, concerning this stuff about Valve shutting down "20000" accounts (its there own figures, remember), I'm of the opinion that Valve are basically 'scaremongering' at the moment. From what I have read, theres a Serial doing the rounds that people have found in certain areas of the interweb, which they are then using to register on Steam in order to get access to Generic-Shooter 2. Valve has banned those peoples accounts. Its not even a hard ban, although if Valve wanted to, I'm sure they could carry out a hard ban if they choose. I want Gabe Newell to register on here and tell me he wants my babies. Yeah, I know you are reading this. Thank You Please

[goddamn]

Babies... lol!

Okay, so right now only idiots who have tried to use a shared key have been banned? Heh...

And what "other reasons"? Now I'm curious...

[Dimensio]

Originally Posted by goddamn

Wasn't this locked?
I'm a bit concerned about the last reason for deleting accounts; "using cracked versions of Valve games". Does that include the good ol' No-CD patch?

I've not heard about anyone complaining that they were banned simply for using hijack's noCD fix.

I looked through Half-Life 2's EULA, and I could not find any statement that would seem to prohibit circumvention of the SecuROM protection. Moreover, the hijack fix isn't actually a "cracked" version of Half-Life 2. It's more of a wrapper for Steam that drops in a different hl2.exe (but not a cracked one, because it's still authored by Valve, it's just for the Steam download version of the game) when Half-Life 2 is launched, so technically they couldn't claim that we're using a "crack".

I play in Steam Offline mode, but thus far I'm not terribly concerned.

[Stephan S.]

Sadly enough i think i've ran into every single problem listed in this forum pertaining to the use of the no/cd program. My latest is the unknown creativeA thing. Any clues? I would appreciate anything.

[hijack]

As I said before: To solve the CreateProcessA error, I need your kernel32.dll. Please send it to hijack_hl2********fr with a description of your Windows version.

[gjobjo]

When I load the saved game the A.1 disabled show and nothing works

are there a fix for this?????

[craycrone]

Well, iam not a ValveMan so my opinion on this might be wrong, but this NoCD Patch replaces the ORIGINAL (non-cracked) hl2.exe with that one from the Puplisher (that one with securerom, needing the dvd/cd in drive before the original hl2.exe can be executed). So not the actually the Game was cracked, rather the door to that game has been removed.
But there is also a Post by Waldo, Level Designer / Day of Defeat co-developer on Valve who posted:

Just to make things clear...

First, Valve didn't put out any kind of fake key or fake warez to trap people.

Second, the people that had their accounts disabled had attempted to steal an item worth about $50. 20,000 accounts times $50 - that's about a million dollars worth of illegal attempts. That's hard to ignore.

Third, the number of people who actually had bought HL2 and used the CD key cheat was VERY small. VERY small. Most people just tried to rip off the game and not bother buying it.

source: SteamForum

Even he is only speaking about the illegal "CD key" and not any NoCD Patch. I really dont know but it really looks Valve is tolerating this Patch until they release a solution by themself.

[uka]

Wen i start hijack_hl2 i recive unable so start steam.exe and then unable to injeckt hijack_hl2.dll it worket yestorday ..