You think having to waste 3 minutes of your precious time - or not so precious, if you spend more than 10 minutes a day on these forums - on having to fill out an endless series of craptchas in order to access your legally purchased games, you should try accessing your Humble library from within the People‘s Republic Of China.

You see, not too long ago, gog would also require you to fill out a craptcha in order to redeem keys. Luckily, the Chinese higher ups have realised that google is the devil‘s spawn, so they block the shit out of it. Which is cool if you want to set a sign against Silicon Valley imperialism, but unfortunately, it also prevented you from redeeming your keys, since the craptcha wouldn‘t even show up. It was a massive pain in the ass, as you‘d either have to use a VPN or send detailed instructions on how to redeem a key on gog to your mom back in a non-Great Firewall‘d country. But for the most part things worked fine, at the very least you could access your library without hassle. And ever since gog opened a Chinese storefront, they - THANKFULLY! - got rid of craptcha altogether. Instead we get this really cool minigame where you have to fit a missing puzzle piece into the right spot. Fun!

Unfortunately, Humble has gone in the opposite direction...

As soon as you try to log in - that is: EVERY TIME you log in! - you‘re greeted with a craptcha. Unless you‘re in China, of course. You log in, you get the spinning wheel of death and you wait, wait, wait for a craptcha that will never ever show. You‘re literally locked out of your account. You literally can not access your legally purchased games. Thanks, IGN! Thanks, google! Or should I say: screwgle!

The funny thing is: Humble now offers regional prices in Chinese Yuan. You‘d expect the small matter of a potential userbase of 1.5 billion people being unable to use their platform due to their choice of challenge-response authentication provider would be of some concern to them, so I took the liberty to take this up with Humble support. The response came swiftly... Well, gee, I want to thank you guys, you could've given me help, but you've given me so much more. I wish there was more of a punchline to this rant, other than a bunch of PR-rhetoric, but yeah, this is where you‘re at as a Chinese Humble customer: "Can‘t access your games? Whoops. We appreciate your feedback!“

But since you made it this far: I‘m giving away a gog copy of "Return To Castle Wolfenstein" for no particular reason whatsoever. No rules per se, just let me know whether you‘re in or not. Winner will be drawn on christmas eve (so make sure you enter by the end of the 23rd) via random.org. If I don‘t like the person random.org draws, I will continue drawing people on random.org until I come across someone I like. Please note that "Return To Castle Wolfenstein" is prohibited in Germany, so German users are explicitly verboten from participating. Protip: I can‘t stop you from switching your location to some other place in order to circumvent this arbitrary restriction, so don‘t do that, mmmmkay? I wash my hands in innocence.

And then China really thinks they should be recognized with the "free market status" in WTO, something that EU and USA are opposing? Well, first China should start unblocking international services and companies. :D

Maybe the rest of the world should block Alibaba, Huawer etc., any Chinese company with international business?

As for CAPTCHA in western countries, I recall some people complaining that GOG CAPTCHA nowadays takes them like five minutes to solve, with countless new picture puzzles. Just yesterday and the day before I got CAPTCHA in GOG for redeeming the keys (Hard West and Master of Orion), and GOG CAPTCHA gave me only two pictures to solve, done in 5 seconds or so.

So either GOG has changed something just recently, or I have no idea why some have to spend five minutes to solve CAPTCHAs in GOG. I hadn't seen CAPTCHA in GOG for a very long time, but it indeed appears you get it when redeeming keys (I hardly ever do that, I guess).

I also yesterday went to Humble Bundle to redeem the free Company of Heroes 2, and I think I got only 1 CAPTCHA page to solve.


EDIT: Not in. I have this principle that free games are worth nothing.

Sorry but if I lived in China, loggin in to Gog would be my very last problem.. O_o'

I do have one question actually. If google is banned, what do they use in China? I assume it's not duckduckgo. :)

Also, why are you not using a VNP?

I guess most Chinese use Baidu. For every service that is blocked in China you usually have a homegrown service to fill the gap.

Because, frankly, I don't miss most of the blocked content. Blocking Twatter and farcebook is IMHO doing a service to humanity. And google can kiss my ass ever since they hijacked my old youtube account and said "Haha, if you want to access your account again, you'll have to get a google+ account!" Yahoo works here and while it's not quite as accurate as google, it gets the job done. Youtube is also blocked, which kinda sucks, but I'm already used to 90% of youtube content getting blocked in oh-so-progressive Germany.

I see. 3rd search engine in the world, apparently. Well, thank you for yet another piece of generic knowledge I'll probably never find an use for. I'll add it to my collection. :)

Hope Humble realizes they're missing out. It's weird they're not doing anything about it in a time when western pubs and platforms are starting to realize how huge the Chinese market is. Even Gog has a Chinese forum now.
In the meantime, if you don't want to resort to VPN, it looks like letting someone else in your HB account is really the only thing you can do. :\

I was going to. I really intended to copypaste your text, but laziness and the creeping feeling that I'm not going to get anywhere kept me from doing it.

But then, something beautiful happened. Something marvellous. Something completely unexpected.

They fixed it!

Yeah, I could hardly believe it myself. They actually fixed it. If you're trying to log into Humble from China, it now uses one of those cool, game-y verifaction systems: They show you a picture of a ball with an animal on it and you have to flip the ball until the animal stands on the ground. Infinitely preferable to the unresponsive "select all pictures with cars/street signs/storefronts on it" that google tortures potential humans with. Very cool stuff! And I can access my library again! Yaaay!