If that's a real life avatar photo then I understand why it takes soooooooooo long.

UMM you do know that the captcha does like 3 sets of images before you can click ok right? it's literaly like 45seconds tops unless you keep clicking ok instead of the captcha, after the first time I did it all I get now is the check box that says I passed chapcha check.

I'm not sure how captchas work, but I know for me, for some bizarre reason, if I have to do multiple captchas elsewhere/on other pages or websites, they'll start taking increasingly longer on GOG, giving me more and more to complete even though I did them all right.

I get a lot of annoying captchas as well at the moment. But I guess it's my own fault. Changed my password some days ago and I'm still not used to the new one. So several times my first login attempt failed (because I still used the old password). I think that might have triggered the captchas.

From what I recall, captchas trigger if there are multiple unsuccessful login attempts. Logging out and (successfully) logging in again shouldn't be triggering the captcha, so my guess is that someone has gotten hold of the username you are logging in with. I'd suggest turning on two factor authentication (if you haven't already) and maybe updating your password as well.
Captchas may trigger for other reasons as well, but unsuccessful login attempts should be the most common one. And they are there to prevent brute forcing of passwords.

I don't think that is what triggers CAPTCHA. When I still used Firefox, I also deleted everything (cookies, saved passwords, offline data etc.) whenever I exited Firefox, and I hardly ever saw CAPTCHA.

Then again, I don't even know what exactly triggers CAPTCHA, but it shouldn't be merely clearing your cookies. I know 2FA (the four digit authentication code sent to your email) is apparently triggered if your IP address has changed since your last successful login AND you clear your cookies (both at the same time), but no idea when CAPTCHA kicks in.

At some point I thought it is if you try to log in with a wrong password multiple times, but I don't know if e.g. logging in at the same time from several computers triggers it as well (I recall seeing CAPTCHA sometime when I logged in from two different computers at the same time, but not sure...).

Anyway, I don't understand why it takes you three minutes to get past CAPTCHA? Apparently you keep picking the wrong boxes?

I believe it is in order to stop all kinds of scripts/robots who'd e,g, try to guess your password by repeatedly logging into your account (using different passwords), and stuff like that. But as said, it is unclear to me what are all the triggers for GOG CAPTCHA. All I know I very rarely see it myself, even back when I did clear the cookies.

I don't know if it is something in your internet setup, e.g. IP address constantly changing or something? (At that point you'd see 2FA as well all the time, since you clear your cookies too...)

Do you know how many attempts? Maybe GOG has changed it as sometime in the past I recall getting CAPTCHA from just one wrong password, but when I recently tried giving a wrong password a couple of times (when testing whether giving a wrong password triggers 2FA (it doesn't)), still no CAPTCHA.

No idea. And I'm not certain that this triggers the captcha, just guessing this should be the reason. You don't want it to trigger for a user that made a mistake (caps lock was on or small typo), but you do want to prevent brute force attempts. So I'd hazard a guess at 5 attempts or so, though the number may change on the fly as well.

At the moment the Captchas are very annoying. It's not the usual "click on all pictures with cookies and you are done", but instead it's "click untill you no longer see cars". That can take a while. Yesterday I got 15 pictures of cars in a row (and each one took around three seconds to load). After that I wasn't done, but got a new captcha with "click untill there are no longer streets". I got even more streets than cars. When I was done I got four more rounds of "mark all boxes with street signs".

So yeah, three minutes aren't unlikely at the moment (while in the past it took me 15 - 20 seconds to solve the captchas).

Yes, it was much better in the past. Don't know if there is a general problem with that kind of captcha at the moment. I'm sure the pictures should take some seconds to load (they didn't do that in the past), but I had that proble on two different computers during the last few days. I'm also not sure why it sends new captchas when you answered the previous correctly.

Is this CAPTCHA thing an arms race nowadays, ie. the login robots/scripts are becoming more clever as well, like storing all the used CAPTCHA pictures they ever encounter in a database, and also what are the correct (or incorrect) boxes to tick?

That would also explain why nowadays CAPTCHA will require you to go through several pictures without telling you if the earlier picture was correct or wrong, as then the script, or even that army of Chinese guys ticking the boxes manually for a small fee, won't know for sure if they made a mistake or not?

Makes sense, or is my thinking completely off?

The distorted word ones are by now so quick for a computer to solve that they're pretty much useless, they're catching up on the "identify the picture" ones too.

I quickly read the CAPTCHA Wikipedia article which mentions these machine-learning robots defeating CAPTCHAs, but in case you know more:

Is it like the robots recognize e.g. cars in any pictures (or like one MS-proposed CAPTCHA. telling cats and dogs apart), or is it merely that those robots routinely store all the images they encounter into a database, along with the right (or wrong) answers? Or do they do both?

If it is the latter, then I guess they should come up with CAPTCHA systems which don't use pre-generated pictures or stuff, but generate the pictures on the fly? Possibly there are such already?

EDIT: But then if there is a robot who can generate new pictures and decide on the fly what is the correct answer... then I guess it isn't necessarily hard for another robot to learn the correct answer as well using similar algorithms... damn this is confusing.

Well, this is a bit of a relief for me. Using another site which has these captchas things, I thought it was just bugged as it goes through the whole select all cars or shop fronts, twice, then pictures to select signs, and it is all so slow! Much like drm though it only affects legal users, as I tend to give up in boredom, hackers presumably just bypass it.

Relevant.