Channelx99, a poster on the overclock.net forums, says that the Razer Naga gaming mouse comes with special drivers that require your computer to be connected to the Internet at all times in order to play — and this means that the mouse was useless when it was first plugged in, because Razer's servers were down.

Parsing the Razer license agreement, Channelx99 finds that Razer reserves the right to spy on all your activity and to sell or data-mine that data. Multiple emails to Razer from Channelx99 have not created any clarity on this, as the company only sends back generic customer-service messages that don't explain whether the purpose of the drivers is really to spy on and monetize users.

Other commenters on the forum note that Razer's always-on drivers cause all sorts of performance issues with the mouse, making it slow and unresponsive during gaming sessions, and they say that earlier Razer products have had built-in memory that was used to store user preferences for the programmable buttons and functions.

Apparently, the Razer Naga will still work as a normal mouse — without any of its crucial, scriptable extra buttons and functions — if you don't install the driver, but of course, that's not how gamers expect to use their fancy programmable mice. And according to the forums, all Razer products will require always-on Internet connections and round-the-clock user surveillance in order to work.

Razer forces you to create an account with them before you can use the software with the mouse. You cant configure the mouse in any way until you make an account with them and activate your computer and account through their server. If they decide to take down their activation server for any reason, you will never be able to use the software. If you live somewhere without access to internet, you will not be able to activate and use the software. If you work somewhere that has a network behind firewalls, chances are even though you can download the Synapse software, the firewall may also block you from activating and using the software as well. If your connection drops out for any reason, the Synapse software will make a habbit of locking up on you while it transitions to offline mode. During that time your settings may revert or possibly not be saved. Yes, you can use the mouse as plug and play with basic functionality if you choose not to make an account and activate your computer, but who pays $80 for a basic plug and play mouse? The reason people buy the Naga 2012 is the configurable buttons and to change the DPI, polling rate, set up macros and profiles along with everything else. Razer has no right to lock this away from customers who paid for these features. For the Naga 2012 mouse, there is no other offline drivers to revert to. Synapse 2.0 is your only option. Razers Synapse 2.0 software is always online. If you have an internet connection active, Razer will be constantly using it constantly downloading updates and interrupting your full screen applications. Not only that, as I suspected, the Synapse 2.0 software is spying on you

Razer Synapse 2.0 software/mouse unusable if you dont have an internet connection or their…

(Thanks, JimDiGritz!)