First the prices, then not having ANY mod support and now they're insulting nearly every gamer there is?

ACTIVISION EXTREME FAIL!

Again, moving to Steam activation was enough combat for piracy, removing dedicated servers causes more problems for normal players.

"Many players don't need it" is so wrong, so so wrong.  Do you know how ridiculous it is for European/Austrailian/Many other countries players to play with people from the US on listen servers? On top of the distance, some countries don't have the infrastructure to support decent internet connections for gamers there.  Say hello 250+ ping as a low standard.  Even a US citizen playin with someone on the other side of America, is still demanding on the average internet connection.  Removing dedicated servers is seriously shafting countries far from the US, now add those people with my previous examples and you have a lot of disadvantaged players.

The max players in these listen servers will be 8-16 at best, and will still have lag problems.  The average persons upload speed just cannot take the stress of hosting such games. If you play TF2 you'll know that even though the standard games are 8v8, the most popular servers for casual players are big 16v16 games on dedicated servers console modded to allow such numbers.  So yes, unless you have any facts on the matter (especially for pirated Steam games online) I think you are exaggarating your claims.

I want a statistic for that statement which you just pulled out of your ass. That or you really are just pulling shit from your ass.

Also your ignorance is appalling, normal players don't need it? Did you know that in TF2 or UT even the most used servers use some mod or another for better functionality, whether it be more customized voting or glowing skins?

Please stpo spreading blatant lies and bullshit and get your facts straight before speaking.

I was tempted not to dignify you with a response, since you decided to call everything I said BS when you clearly have no concept of the topic in question.

http://www.gamepro.com/article/news/165488/hard-times-pc-game-piracy-in-us-estimated-at-75-80/

Numerous studies (hey, feel free to google it yourself - it will help you avoid appallingly ignorant statements) show that the majority of PC gaming done nowadays is pirated. As the article there shows, it's why so many developers favor consoles now. 

And I stand by the fact that most users don't need custom servers. Granted, it's nice, but so is a good matchmaking system put in place by the company. and guess what? The "most used" servers for virtually all PC games are ones which pirated copies of games work on.

Please do some research before calling things blatant lies, and consider sprinkling a little common decency in with the waste you're spewing.

So a random dude says he feels like 75% of the people are pirates because, and I quote:

"I didn't believe [the data] at first. It seemed way too high. Then I saw that Bioshock was selling 5 to 1 on console vs. PC. And Call of Duty 4 was selling 10 to 1. These are hardcore games, shooters, classic PC audience stuff. Given the difference in install base, I can't believe that there's that big of a difference in who played these games, but I guess there can be in who actually payed for them,"

He doesn't have pirated data to compare his sales against. All he has is a ratio of console vs PC sales. CoD4 and Bioshock were nothing phenomenal for your PC gamer since they didn't reallt stand out as much. If it's so easy to google, do it yourself and back up your argument. Als don't cherry pick some examples. For every Demigod I can thrown Sims or Spore at you. Here is the best data I can find you. Spore is the most pirated game of all time aat a little over 1.5 million copies pirated. It has sold many more millions. So yeah, bullshit.

And I stand by point that what you say is more or less all bullshit. I haven't used matchmaking in a lng long time, even in games that DO have it. Please do some research yourself before continuing.

Here's a question. Why couldn't they just do both?

Either way,  it's lame to get rid of dedicated servers to PC versions.  Mods are what keeps FPS fresh after the first few months.

So they can sell their DLC on PC gamers as well. They don't want modders 1upping themfor free you know.... makes them look bad and all. We don't want them to look bad.... right?

It really does go to prove my point though that videogame magazines and websites pretty much rely solely on advertisers for their money, and those advertisers are almost solely videogame companies.

Can't trust em for anything.

A random dude quotes statstics that are generally accepted as being true. (He wasn't the one making them up.) And yes, popular games selling 5 to 1 or 10 to 1 on consoles indicate show pervasive piracy is. A game sells 5 to 10x as much on a system where it can't be pirated. You can call it BS all you want, but the number of small developers who have suffered from piracy(want an example? check some of the other links in that same article, one of which is a small developer talking about the effects of piracy on his company) and have made clear how much damage it's doing, carries a lot more weight than "this is BS. I have spoken.

I especially like your last paragraph. Let me paraphrase is. "What you say is BS. I don't use matchmaking, so you need to do research." Oh wow, someone who hasn't used matchmaking in recent times (thus making you rather unqualified to compare it's current weaknesses to custom servers) decides I should do some research, when I'm the only one who actually linked soem data about piracy - and what's more, you apparently cherry picked a line where the writer expressed his opinion, when the article is has quotes from developers discussing actual piracy rates. Speaking of research, did you even read that before deciding it was invalid?

"Popular games?" Do you rea;ize CoD4 was utter shit MP with its levellig system and BioShock was inferior to System Shock 2. Maybe people jsut didn't want to play the games to begin with. PC gamers have a far higher standard than console gamers. If Halo was multiplatform it'd have had the same ratio, yet Valve and Blizzard come around d they have sales in the millions? Please, it's not pirating it's poor quality. Again, show me the damn statistics. A few hundred years ago it was widely believed that the sun rotated around the Earth too, even the damn Pope said it was true!

Just to clarify here:

http://torrentfreak.com/top-10-most-pirated-games-of-2008-081204/

Look at spore and the sims 2. I realize that it's old data now, but consider the fact that in the same time frame the top 2 games sold far many more millions than they were pirated in that same time frame. Now provide  numbers to contest that or stfu with your bullshit.

MOST people don't use matchmaking. They go to the same server they have selected and they play there. As pointed out above, it gives people a sense of community. In fact MOST PC gamers do that. Why do you think Valve added in a semi-proper server browser to L4D? Because people wanted it and didn't want their matchmaking bullshit.