It doesn't take long for me to log-in into GFWL. While i like Steamworks more, i have no issues with GFWL, so i can't complain. But there is a lot of hate on it. The only reason i can come up with for so much hate is that Live came from the Xbox 360, and PC elitists don't like anything that smells like a console thing.

Even way back when making offline profiles never caused me a problem (e.g. Gears of War PC). I get that some people have had gamebreaking bugs and other issues, what isn't clear to me is if it's any more common than people who have issues with Steam or any other system (dunno why, but if someone accuses MS, everyone pretty much believes it, if someone accuses Steam, this forum aside, the internet becomes skeptical).

Yes, this is true. Maybe all the Microsoft-hate is the reason why GFWL has such a bad reputation.

The only real issue i could ever find about GFWL is the way it handled multiplayer games on territories where Live was not available. If you made a Live account and put the adress of a country where Live was not supported you would be completely locked out from online multiplayer, which is just a fucking dumb decision. Of course, this could be circumvented by making a fake address from a country in which Live was supported. Still, this made a lot of people really mad.

GFWL in itself (as in it's mechanical functions) is kinda transparent, during single player you will occasionally get an achievement pop up that kinda breaks immersion and the "you are signed in to GFWL" notification when the game loads, but that is it ...

on the multiplayer side (like matchmaking and what not) the only thing more transparent is when a game has it's own matchmaking software programed into it; I have heard that some people seem to have problems with it being flaky with finding games with friends in it, but I'm not really into the "social" shit with my shooters so I don't really care who I play with.

that is not to say there are no problems with it, THE PROBLEMS ALL ARISE WHEN IT COMES TO THE PART WHERE YOU HAVE TO DEAL WITH MS ....

patching takes for -fucking- ever .... but that is Micorsoft's fault because they have relegated GFWL to some slow ass servers / low bandwidth servers to be cheap. patching on a Xbox Live game is nearly instantaneous; but the same patch through GFWL and your looking at at least 5-10 minutes regardless of your own connection.

this is a case of MS being shit-tards, not that GFWL is a shoddy program.

another issue that people have is that MS has adopted a policy towards international gamers of "fuck you, non-american scum!" they region lock accounts, charge more for games being bought with non-USD currencies (I'm talking worse than "1 USD = 1 EURO" shit, like charging 20 euros for something listed as $15 USD) and have banned accounts for trying to buy a game version that was mismatched to the accounts region setting.

once again, this is not a case of the GFWL program itself being shoddy, just that Microsoft is a bag of shit in how it operates.


taking forever to sign in to your GFWL account is highly abnormal, typically I get the "you are signed in" notice popup before the god damned Nvidia video finishes playing.

I don't own any GFWL games, but can't you get GFWLiveless from somewhere on the internets? Supposedly you can operate a game without GFWL at all. If such a thing works/exists, it is what I'd use.

Offline profiles work on most games. I've heard tell there may be some exceptions to that, but I've never run into one.

Its annoying is what it is. I played SF every day when I was a teen and the great thing about it was I could flip the SNES switch and be playing in a few heart beats, play a few rounds and move on to something else. Now I have less time, and it takes longer to get up and running which is kinda detouring my use of it. Which is OK in that I've just finally gotten around to playing Batman A.A. and that is what I plan on playing for a good while.

I'm suspecting not being able to log in at all may be being caused by my wife being logged at the same time using conflicting firewall settings. Going to have to look into that.

That did used to be the case, but that was dumped years ago when they realised PC players weren't going to pay for it. I think Gears Of War is the only game I have which came with information concerning paying for GFWL Gold.

As for sign in time, it generally takes 5 to 10 seconds for me. The difference could simply be down to the time of day you log in and MS not throwing as many resources to GFWL as they do to Xbox Live to handle higher load.

and this is the soul wrenching pain of my adult life: all those fucking load videos, all those fucking layers of menus when I just want to play the game, all those stupid fucking "tips" on the loading splash screens ...

I can generally only game for a few snips at a time before my wife is back again pining for me to drop every fooking thing I am doing to listen to her about something she has said already / get something that is closer to he than it is to me. god what I wouldn't give for a return to the days of having to wait no more than the length of time it took Sonic to jizz some sparkles out his finger tip before I had a game up and running.

and the pause button, god how I long for a simple pause button!