Its not games being too expensive; its the payment not going through, as GamezRanker said. Apparently my debit card isn't cleared for international transactions although other Indian users use the site without issue. I checked with my bank and they said I need to do some more fun paperwork and my card can be ''unlocked'', which I haven't done yet.

Indian debit cards (or any online payment) can only be used with a 2-step authentication process (usually a one-time-password sent to your phone) and most sites don't have that kind of checkout process, so the bank probably needs to change something associated with my account for payments to GOG to go through.

hmm i think that 2 step auth is for the bank transaction , the store only ask the bank server for confirmation of transfer and the store has no job in the auth process at all

isnt there any 3rd party which is accepted by gog and you could pay in with your cards? I bet there should be

Sites either have to have it built in (very rare for international sites, I think steam has it?) or redirect to a page setup by the bank for the 2-step process (which is more common). Either way, there's a place where you have to type it in. I currently buy via trading, haven't checked google pay though.

Thanks for confirming my hunch - appreciated.

Awesome, thank you for your detailed thoughts. This is a very valid idea. Hard to answer "how active is multiplayer?" threads if staff can't access server stats of third parties or without Galaxy tracking game activity like Steam Charts. However, some communities are either inactive or aren't that welcoming. I still have a couple of unresolved questions myself posted a few months ago and recently.

For the latter, the English general discussion forums house quite a few GOG-jaded users and sometimes their resentment carries over to other threads as AOE damage (e.g., news, 2020 stats, delistings, etc.). They probably have the best intentions for GOG, but the result are snarky, sometimes hostile, responses that leave a poor impression of the community. It's hard to believe GOG has faith in the same community pool to answer newcomer questions adequately and timely enough to leave a good impression.

If:

- GOG is fine with its current moderation efforts (including game subforums)
- Jaded users' root concerns aren't addressed sufficiently
- User reviews don't preemptively address FAQs
- Anticipated community integration and/or forum upgrades don't result in community responses solving newcomer questions timely

then a two-tiered forum proposal should be considered as a short-term fix to better help newcomers and encourage them to buy into the platform with curated responses from staff. I'd just give these resolved-by-staff forum topics as much weight as support tickets for KPI purposes too.

Fake account (mox883) posting fake message with words that ressemble the thread title in The Witcher 2 subforum: https://www.gog.com/forum/the_witcher_2/full_list_of_mods/post449

You don't see how this could managed to end up with more work than addressing the jaded users or improving reponse times to newcommers? Someone actually has to go and select whom gets in what tiers. And you also can't imagine how this would backfire and itnentionalyl get people to find ways to override the system?

In the long term, fixing the concerns of jaded users are important, especially if many of them are whales and influencers. I don't work at GOG, so I don't know what the best solution is for them and/or what's happening behind the scenes. Some of the boycott concerns are very consequential and complex issues without hurting current or future revenue streams. Their actions need to be delicate if they want to weather the storm intact.

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The current state of the forums is because of either some gross negligence on their current team or this is some esoteric non-opensource software they contracted a third-party that they don't have access to anymore for some strange reason. I suspect it's the latter, but I don't have all the details.

Anyway, wouldn't it be fairly easy to do with GOG's technical staff? All these bots own zero games (needs to be verified by going through these deleted posts and accounts). And presumably this will all be on an eventual new forum software.

1. All customers who have purchased a game are verified buyers.
2. All new accounts are unverified.
3. The first time you buy any game(s), you're automatically put into a verified buyers group and are granted access to the rest of the forums.
4. If the user refunds their game, they can still have access to the forums so long as their net spent is nonzero.
5. Users can be banned from forums if they're an obvious bot, but their accounts are still active.

I think GOG put themselves into a hole in this regard. It would seem GOG is trying to make some compromises between the DRM-free crowd and certain developers as a middle-man, and behind closed doors. And the thing is, i think the reason is is because GOG wants the money but it knows that neither side would really ever agree to the compromises being made. It's been going on and even working for quite a few years, and other "drm-free storefronts" have been doing the same thing, but GOG has been the most capable at both having the AAA titles while also somewhat keeping DRM-free, and it is one of those things that can only go on for so long before the whole thing bursts. I'm going to go with a third option: they are a corporation, so the money is tightly watched and allocated. This also means that the coder(s) responsible for the site are likely working on other projects, one of which is probably constantly fixing the "automated installer setup." My guess is, it's not automated, but they have to lie to investors. It seems to be constantly breaking, and to be honest with us would out the predicament in the office. CDPR and GOG have both been caught lying about things before, so this is not out of the realm of possibility by a long shot. Think of the story, "There Is No Such Thing as Dragons." Not even remotely easy, actually. The most effective method would be to somehow tie the minum purchase requirement in place for gift codes and apply that to the forums, but i think the issue is that GOG doesn't have a testing environment. I think when they make changes, it's all on the live end. This is a big no-no in the industry, but alot of companies do it, anyway. This means making changes is very scary for GOG, because testing things means all goes live. There's actually a system currently in place (which i mentioned above) that requires a minimum of 10USD spent in order to buy gift codes. This caused a problem for me and my girlfriend when she wanted to buy a GOG game for me. This is more challenging than you realize. Demonstrated by the fact that this is already the policy. I've been informed by people who made bots on the forums that indeed their bots have been banned. The thing is, false positives and negatives are a thing. They tried cutting down on this with captchas, but, well... And, once again, gotta make some changes. It'd be really, really easy to fix the downvote spam that is causing all the rep manipulations, but it's a really, really risky thing to do if you're only going live and can't thoroughly test it. They need to get rid of the rep system altogether or temporarily freeze it while they test some ideas on how to handle that, but i think it comes back to employee and resource allocation in their tight corporation.

Pinging, here's another one with zero games: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/residential_cleaning_services_ashford

These are great ideas, thanks for the sobre second thoughts. Hope the GOG team can give some feedback on these ideas.

Interestingly enough, that user has -1 rep, and this is before their post has many negative votes. This suggests to me that this account will be spotted elsewhere in this thread.

A sloppy advertisement that has managed to survive in one of the game-specific subforums since 2019: https://www.gog.com/forum/a_new_beginning/cheap_voip_for_call_center