Well first off I would like to extend a heartfelt thank you to both Stardock, and Ironclad Games for not including DRM in their games. In part, this is why I bought your game. I loved how you treated your customers like human beings, not drones easily manipulated by hype. *cough*Halo3*coughcough*

I used to be very.. meh, regarding PC games. I will admit, I pirated games like Doom 2 back when it used floppy disks, and Duke Nukem 3D... but then as I grew up, and got to know people who worked in the industry, it dawned on me that there are human beings that are affected. Fast forward to now, where now I am... an informed consumer, and quite frankly I am proud to have been part of the SoaSE launch, I was glad I got to talk to the people who helped develop the game, from the producers, and even to the lady who gave me my verification code.

It saddens me that Spore has now resorted to using DRM, Will Wright is amazing in his ability to defy conventional thinking, and push the limits in terms of our human potential. If there were a way for me to control where my $60 goes to when I buy the game, I would make sure EA saw not one dime. I will be taking a stand against the intrusions of SecuRom, in fact, EA's tactics have left me quite cynical in regards to the gaming industry. Were it not for people I talked to on Stardock, were it not for their helpfulness, I'd be torrenting games right now.

I'd rather put up with internet authentication every 10 days than have to have a DVD in the drive. It's also much better than SUCUROM virus-type "protection" that messes up your DVD player too (or at least it does for me, I have to reboot just to watch a DVD (that I own, thank you) after playing a SUCUROM protected game (that I own too, thank you)).

I also prefer it to something like Steam or webtangent that runs in the backround at all times when playing a steamed/wt game. Way lame.

So, ultimately, I see this as no big deal.

I feel sorry for the 10 or so PC gamers out there who aren't permanently connected and who wanted to play these games.

I wouldn't. At least with the DVD in the drive I choose when the game decides it's going to validate - and if necessary or desired, I can find something to bypass it.



You do realize that this protection scheme is a SecuROM product as well, don't you? And you also are aware that your number of allowable activations is restricted to three?

You'll forgive me if I'm not willing to embrace SecuROM's good will when they tell me they're not monitoring/installing anything on my system other than the game.



I can guarantee you there are a lot more than '10 or so PC gamers' who aren't permanently connected to the internet.

Especially when the paranoid among us disconnect in single player games so we can turn off our security programs for better performance.

Bingo. I know a number of gamers that don't even have their gaming rigs connected to the internet at all.

Or those of us with gaming laptops who do most of our PC gaming on the road and don't always have ready access to the internet.

Yep, and those deployed in the military. And those in rural areas. And those in some less developed countries. The list goes on...

Maybe Wright can give you a P.O. box to send him a check. Then you can pay him directly and steal it.

Paranoia aside(I run without a firewall in the DMZ and don't use an anti-virus) there are plenty of reasons to not be connected to the internet. Where I'm at, it's a hundred bucks a month for a seriously shitty satellite connection.

When the stars are aligned, I've killed the right people and it's three in the morning, my connection is 1200/180. With a minimum possible latency of 667 milliseconds. When they aren't, I get speeds like these.

May 8th, 10:04PM - 469/137 kbps
April 24th, 11:27PM - 83/47 kbps
April 13th, 09:33PM - 118/126 kbps
January 26th, 12:27AM - 597/173 kbps

Bits, not bytes. My usual ping response times for things are 1k+. My ping response times from the mid afternoon till late in the evening are riddled with time outs. Depending on how it's designed, I could come in to play it in the evenings, and fail the authentication every frigging day and get surprised on day 10 with a deactivated game. Maybe, just maybe, my ISP enables the NOC controlled firewall on my modem for me again and blocks secure transmissions? The last time they did that, it took over a week to be able to do things like check my email. You'd be amazed how much you can't do when encrypted data is blocked.

Everyone not dumb enough to shell out that kind of money gets to use dial-up. That means that they have to tie up a phone line to play a single player game. Just paying for a dial-up connection in this area is like pissing away money. You're paying for a crap connection on crap lines, that's completely worthless for anything real, and lets you very very slowly check your email, and do other trivial tasks.

It's true that it's not a particularly onerous requirement and most people that are playing it will have internet. It's just a stupid one. It removes people from their market, people without connections, people without reliable connections, people that are paranoid, people that want EA to drop dead for calling them pirates, and people that don't do phone home software. It adds nada, they already know the copy protection scheme doesn't work, Bioshock had much the same and was cracked almost immediately.

+1

lol... it's true... i'm not going to play my single player game with internet connection on... unless i'm going to play multiplayer games or MMORPG type of games(probably)... lol

I already own the game, played though it 4 times and bought the DLC. Is it so wrong to try it out on PC?

Not sure I understand your question.

I certainly won't be bending over and taking it like a man for corporate America. Not that I would have bought those particular crappy, overhyped console games anyway.

The sad, pathetic, moralising gimpboys in this thread have been brutalised by the media for so long that they seem to feel an emotional need to defend their abusers. If only their virtual gimp masks and ball gags muffled their typing we wouldn't be subjected to their inane drivel.

I don't give a flying f*** about some simpering loser's self-righteous moralising. I decide for myself what's right or wrong, and I'm not even vaguely interested in any criticisms of my behaviour. Mindless herd animals can kiss my arse. If I consider DRM to be unacceptable and refuse to buy games that use it, then that's my right.

Are there other copy protection schemes besides SecurROm, starforce, or the one SD advocates. I just checked the Mass Effect forums, that thread has now 97 pages of posting on it, and majority of the posters are complaining to no end and are telling EA they will either not buy the game, or wait for the game to come out and get download a crack for the exe even though if they did purchased the game. And, of course, many of them are of the opinion that EA's effort will fail to deter piracy, because the hackers will find a way to get around it.

i think every game has one but mostly securom... but sometimes it's not intrusive or it doesn't bother your gaming at all and it doesn't require you to be dependent on a server just to play the game(except multiplayer of course)...

the main issue that i can think of that is unacceptable is after 10 frakkin' days without internet connection will render your game useless... also shelf life of the game is diminished once the server is dead(it' not MMORPG anyway...)... also the issue that your gameplay will be so dependent on the server... people will just say this out of sarcasm that get an internet connection but the main issue with this is there is no other option just in case this scenario happens...


90+ pages man.. i also got tired of reading that... but still i can't find the issue of how many times you can install and uninstall the game... will it be the same issue as BS(bioshock)... i do whine about this issue because of the experience from BS(bioshock) and also if you can see user feedback(customers are always right but not anymore)lol...


at least they should implement a cd-check if you have no internet connection... (i think i posted this already... cd-check... COH does this at least you can play your game continously...) lol

Here's what I gathered from Derek French (Bioshock official) in the Mass Effect forum:

You can install / uninstall it as often as you like as long as you don't change your hardware. Apparently, the game sends information about your hardware to the EA server when it authenticates, and the server remembers that. If at some time the server notices different hardware associated with the same serial number, then it blocks you out, and you have to reactivate your account. You have three free activations (including the first installation). After that, you're at the mercy of EA support to reactivate your license if you want to play the game you paid for.

The "hardware change detection" will, according to French, not be strict, i.e. plugging another RAM chip in is not supposed to necessitate a new activation of the game. Details about this are sketchy though.