Right? I've always been so perplexed by "the gaming community" tendency towards trying make everything a popularity contest... especially when the games aren't even the same genre.

Both games look like a lot of fun, and we no longer live in the age of only being able to obtain 1-2 new games every year due to availability issues.

Seriously, early on this company literally deployed a mass MITM attack against their entire userbase.

Any company that pulls some shit like that is just going to do it again whenever they think they can get away with it.

Putting that entirely on the reader is unfair. The author of a comment or post has some level of responsibility to manage their side of the communication as well.

There's a reason that, as a species, one of the first things we invented after digital communications was emoticons and eventually shorthand terms to convey emotions (lol, lmao, wtf).

Body language, audible tone, syllable emphasis, or the rest of the damn near endless list of minor things we use to communicate, we needed to make sure we could avoid being accidentally combative by default.

And you should have the option to do so.

But that doesn't mean other people shouldn't have the option to play offline if they so choose.

Steam, as well as numerous other marketplaces, have already proven the piracy boogeyman was nonsense.

The overwhelming majority of customers are happy to pay for games as long as it's not a giant pain in the ass to do so. The people that pirate games either:

1. Lack the money to buy the game in the first place in their budget
2. Were motivated by the act of piracy itself

Neither were actually going to pay for the game in the first place. And with the significant increase in both risk and awareness regarding information security, people that were "on the fence" for one of the above reasons have a high probability of deciding not to pirate just to play it safe.