That was edited or removed as it had read they were lucky not fantastic timing it was changed and no edit sig so that has to be a forum admin.

true... i'm hoping they do this... if no internet connection then let a CD check or something... much more efficient... but as they say they are monitoring the keys so cd check is probably out of the question(probably)...

That's not how it works. Even if forum admins edit posts on the BioWare forums, it shows that the post has been edited and by whom. The post was not edited.

I admit, I also thought he'd said they were lucky, but I think it's because the way he worded it (fantastic timing), there's no doubt that's exactly what he meant. Unfortunately people like him are slippery and you can't paraphrase them (or misremember their wording) or they'll jump all over it like he did.

Uhoh, I love spore what am i gonna do!   

I hate these moronic piracy debates and the aggressive profit-protection measures that inevitably spawn them. For all you pirates out there (and I do not claim that never in my life have I pirated or stolen anything) piracy is in fact illegal and is at best morally questionable. Yes, piracy can lead to game sales in some cases because a pirated copy provides a much better idea of a what a game is like than the pathetic excuses for demos that I've seen lately. Anyone who claims pirates don't buy the games they pirate has never met any of my friends. At the same time, there are also plenty who pirate and don't buy. Some of them would never have bought to begin with, but I suspect that doesn't cover everyone. Here's where we get to the part that drives me insane. One side argues thus:

1. DRM schemes hurt the legitimate customer by requiring him/her to go through extra steps in order to use the product he/she paid for. In some cases DRM can result in unnecessarily and unusually poor performance or the total inability to play a game that one paid for, whereas pirates do not suffer these ill effects because the DRM is removed or circumvented.
2. DRM is inevitably defeated by pirates, just as any defensive measure (chainmail, the Maginot Line, whatever) is inevitably defeated by someone who dedicates their time and energy to finding a way to do so. DRM cannot, therefore, cause piracy to cease.
3. DRM is therefore a bad idea because it decreases the experienced quality of the product for some paying customers while failing to achieve its main purpose of limiting or preventing the use of the produce by non-paying customers.

The other side comes back with
1. Piracy is theft in that pirates are making use of someone else's invention without providing due credit or payment to the owners thereof.
2. Owners of IP have the right to protect their IP from those who would use it without permission. If you buy the product you agree to the EULA, so you've got no room to complain about the protection measures you agreed to.
3. The problems caused by DRM are experienced by a minority anyway, so that's not a valid reason to remove them.

Now that we've laid out the background, everyone fails to see how these two viewpoints do not contradict each other in any way and are in fact almost entirely compatible with each other. Instead, people accuse each other of piracy, try to give examples of cases in which piracy has not hurt a game (and get accused of piracy) or try to claim that the corporate greed driving DRM justifies piracy. (two wrongs make a right! yay!) Have I missed anything?
Personally, I'd like to see companies (like Stardock) drop less money on DRM and more on ensuring the release of quality products that are worth paying for and then supporting those products with patches and updates. Pirates are a problem, yes, but Stardock had it right on when they (I forget who made the post) pointed out that the product should be designed primarily to function for the customer, and not to ferret out pirates. Unfortunately, I don't think human beings in general trust each other enough for this to become the norm. I have to echoe the complaint of an earlier poster that, 20 years from now when Spore and ME are old games that we want to play because no new games catch our interest, we may not be able to play anymore because of the every-10-day nonsense. I'm sure by then our EULA will have run out and we won't legally be entitled to play anyway, but that's little consolation.

At least EA's not gonna use Starforce.

No, they've chosen something equally as distasteful.

Just read about this in another thread. No Spore for me, then. When I buy a game, *I* want to be in control when and how and under which conditions I play it. A company that is trying to take that control away from won't get my money, period. I won't pay money for a game that depends on anything out of my hands to work - and it's not in my hands how long EA will keep sending the reactivation signal, or even how often they would reactivate my game because I kept tinkering with my hardware.

I'm just sad that this had to happen to Spore, a game that might have actually been good and innovative. But there are lots of other ways to have some fun.

Sadly, this means that I will not be buying Mass Effect and Spore, both games which I have been anticipating for a long time and looked forward to getting. Same thing happened with Bioshock; after reading about a few people having problems with the DRM and the developer/publisher being unwilling to do much to help, I decided to give it a miss. Maybe I'm in a minority here, but all the same I am another example of DRM costing a company sales as opposed to earning them due to DRM.

There's a few reasons I choose not to buy these games, despite wanting them a lot:

1. After buying Galciv II and experiencing first-hand what it felt like to buy a game from a company that didn't instantly suspect me of being a pirate, I decided I would no longer support companies that use intrusive and impractical DRM schemes that only affect paying customers, not pirates. Like those really annoying and unskippable "Piracy is a crime" ads you get on bought DVD movies, the people who actually steal the product neither actually see or even care about the message on the disk, the downloaded movies start up as soon as you load the file. No hassle. The pirate gets a superior product over the paying customer. Same with games with excessive DRM: The pirates get the most user friendly product, and for free. The paying customers get all the hassle and all the technical problems from DRM issues gone bad.

2. While internet is something most people have, it is not a constant. Around April last year I had some financial issues, and as a result I was unable to pay my internet bill. In that month I did not have internet, and I really experienced just how dependent I was on it for my daily routines and how bad it felt not to have it. Forums browsing, reading news, instant chat with various friends I've met online, my house phone (as I have IP phone), all gone. Not just that, but it was also during a period where I was massively addicted to WoW, and the withdrawals were quite bad.

There is sadly no guarantee for me that this can't happen again, or that I for whatever reason (like moving house) won't be without internet for extended periods of time. As such it is really not in my best interest to support a move towards single player games phoning home several times a month in order to run. Can you imagine a few years down the line if this were to become an industry standard? Even if you very rarely are without internet for extended periods of time, when it happens you'll suddenly be unable to play any game you own, even if it has no other online component than the verification. Why on earth would I want to support that? No, I'm afraid I'll keep supporting companies like Stardock (which we need more of) instead of those that may ultimately make my game collection useless.

Yes, you can crack copy protections through various schemes, if you're willing to visit a ton of dodgy sites in order to track down a working crack. However, if you're forced to use "it can be cracked so it's not that bad" as a rebuttal to someone complaining about DRM, you've pretty much lost the entire justification for having DRM there in the first place. Besides, who is to say that cracks will even be easily accessible in the future if they actually manage to arrest more of the cracker groups out there (like Drinkordie or whatever their name was)?

DRM is part of a failed business model. You can't put intrusive/impractical/user unfriendly copy protection on something, sell it at full price and expect to realistically compete with a free, user friendly equivalent. DRM is punishing legitimate buyers for following the law, and the pirates offer the cheaper and better alternative. This needs to get changed. I just want to slap stupid corporate suits who create a game, put an obnoxious DRM on it and afterwards ask themselves why so many people are still pirating it despite the "awesome" DRM they put on it.

Make being a legitimate customer have some perks instead of a punishment. Create a user friendly infrastructure where you offer bonus content etc for paying customers if they verify they are legitimate customers, accessible when the customer so pleases. Stop with the stupid "you will pay for our DRM and you will like it" policy already

Seriously, why is EA so retarded? Oh wait..it's run by dumb fucks. Thats why.

1. I dont like their company
2. I dont like their 10 day activation policy
3. THEY CALLED ME A PARROT! (I guess companies have a hard time believing that there is a good game out in the market so they will make up excuses. I will agree that anti-anti-piracy is a good form of advertisement though.)

even if this is the best game ever made
I refuse to play it, I wont even pirate it, they just dont deserve my time.

PS i have heard lots of people have canceled their reservations after hearing about the new copy protection.

sry bout the double post, didnt know that quote was not by a mod in bioware
still refuse to buy a game with 10 day reactivation crap

He did post it and it was this



It was changed or edited by an admin as this would start a good war IMO.

Anyone remember Earth & Beyond? It was a nice-looking sci-fi MMORPG that EA published several years ago. It had about 22,000 subscribers according to Wikipedia, which is moderately successful as far as western MMOG's go. Anyway, back in 2004, EA decided to pull the plug because the game wasn't making enough money. Not because it wasn't making money, mind you, but because it wasn't making enough money. And this was an MMOG that people were paying for on a continuous basis!

If they shut down that game, do they really expect us to believe that they won't ever "cancel" a game you only pay for once, now that they have the ability? Would it be so surprising if they quietly turned off the authentication servers a few years from now, just in time for you to buy the sequel?

(I also found it telling that EA would shut down a MMORPG with 22k subscribers at the same time I was playing Jumpgate, another MMO that had mere hundreds of subscribers. Jumpgate's publisher went bankrupt, their outsourced in-game support team managed to alienate most of the playerbase, and there was a period of a few months where part of the billing service went down and you couldn't even sign up, but still they scraped by with enough revenue to pay the server bills and keep a programmer supplied with chips and soda. And then here comes EA with their players and their profits, and they just throw it all away...)



DO WANT

So if you went on vacation, and came back to play Spore, it would be disabled?

And idiots are actually DEFENDING this in this topic?