A petition to Valve regarding Half Life 2 and STEAM

This is a petition to the executives in charge of Valve.

We, the customers, do not agree with your indirect in friction, that we use pirated copy's of Half Life 2, or similar games.
It never seems to take long for the latest PC games to appear on file-sharing networks where they become available to anyone with the time to download them and the desire to steal them.
However, we do not want to be put down on the same level as these people. We paid for your game and we do not accept, that,

- we have to identify online on STEAM anytime we want to play the game
- that the server needs minutes, sometimes more than half an hour to identify us as a gamer with a legal copy
- people with an 56kb modem need 47 hours to download more than 500MB of game files before one can start a game
- there is no apparent information on the game package about the extra download time or the need to have an permanent online connection to play (the information about the need for an available Internet connection is well hidden)
- that users who cannot afford the necessary Internet connection have to use "No CD" cracks, which will allow you to run a game without the Internet connection, and are being pushed into the illegal scene because of that
- many players cannot start STEAM, and therefore not play the game, because their Internet provider does not support the necessary protocols
- that you can make your game permanently unusable for us customers if you desire to do so, because if you disable, dissolve or disconnect STEAM, the game can no longer be played
- the additional Internet traffic we have to pay to play the game. Since there is always a client running in the background, additional costs can be as high as $30,- a month for players with an 56kb modem
- that European customers have to pay twice as much money for the game as other customers around the globe
- the missing support on the valve-homepage for the problems regarding Half Life 2.

It is clear, that your actions are in an effort against game piracy, but it inflict us, the customers, who bought the game.
But even having your concerns in mind does not make your behavior more acceptable for us.

And this behavior is clearly bad for us, the customers, and for the gaming industry, too.

Please reconsider the use of Steam and the need for a online connection to play your games. Please do not allow such a potentially wonderful game to be discarded and it's community dissolved. Please listen to your customers.