Also for those who dont remember Space Rangers 2 had StarForce on it the game was great but the CP made it unplayable. I own it and it is in great condition as I was unable to play long without major problems while gameing and it took 9 hours just to get it to work with my PC. Oh and Starforce leaves unwanted gifts that run long after you uninstall the game and Starforce. Well it said it uninstalled but it never did. I had to hunt the files down maunely to get rid of it as it was causing problems by using my cpu more then it should have. That was a 3 day hunt to get rid of that grabage.

So yes Space Rangers 2 is and was a good game but the CP destroyed it.

I have to wonder that too. You'd think these people never spent even a second doing market research or learning how to market to a target audience instead of projecting a fancy, hip, cool image like EA tries to do so desperately. Unfortunately, the marketing presentations and statistics companies like Securom promote to management of game companies normally convinces them or principle stakeholders to add the protection. It's like buying a timeshare--it's one big scam with icing and a cherry on top so it looks more appetizing.

I've run into a couple of games over the years which run better pirated because of the copy protection screwing things up. I've also lost an older CD drive to copy protection because the game kept checking the disk so often. Because I game on a laptop and am commonly mobile somewhere, I also install no-cd patches for all my legally purchased software so I don't have to lug around my couple hundred disc carrier. Yeah, I purchased every game that I have but that doesn't mean I'm going to tolerate the copy protection scheme especially when I'm playing by the rules. One of the top reasons people make the switch from PC's to consoles is because of the complexity and hassles of installing and maintaining a working gaming PC and the games themselves. Copy protection just makes things much harder than they need to be. It's like watching a movie where the first 5 minutes are a couple of anti-piracy segments you can't skip.

Well, still buying this game

Edit: While I do wish game company's would follow SD/IC example, however, didn't someone already mention that not everyone has an internet connection? Which mean's not everyone would be able to download a game, and if there is no disk available, well they are screwed then.

Oh just got this from the Bioware forum

-Derek French Technical Producer BioWare

Here is a link to the new thread that has not been locked I know of 3 so far.

If this link is not allowed on the forum Admins just delete it and let me know not to do that anymore.

BioWare Copy Protection Thread

Make your opinion known guys let them know about it.

Piracy is stealing, and stealing is a crime. What kind of insane reverse-thinking does it take to actually think that piracy is ok? You say you pirate a lot of stuff, you mean you steal a lot of stuff. Congratulations on being a criminal. You should be proud.



Yes? This is in the news all the time, and the biggest reason given against music piracy, or should I say theft, is that it hurts the artists. Do you live in a morally-bereft cave? How the hell did you miss the biggest single consumer debate of the last 5 years? Never heard of Napster?

And you know the worst thing is, none of your points have anything whatsoever to do with this thread.

Was buying - not buying anymore.

Got sucked in once by Bioshock and vowed never again.

yes and with this game, with no internet connection you can't even play the single player game. That's the entire point of this thread?

The more I think about this (and read the forum posts), the more I wonder what crack Bioware was smoking when they agreed to this EA nonsense. First of all, you only get 3 activations. Didn't they learn from the Bioshock fiasco that this isn't enough? Because of all the activation problems on release week, people used that up in a hurry. So they upped it to 5.

And additionally, they have some sort of revoke tool you need to download and use w/Bioshock to free up the licenses. This is just blatantly horrible because if you uninstall Bioshock, it does NOT free up a license. You have to run the revoke tool after uninstall. And the revoke tool has to be run from the PC that you installed the game on. So if you reformatted the drive and got rid of the PC, whoops, too bad, can't revoke a license.

Do you know how many PCs I've installed games on and never bothered to uninstall it? Never mind if I had to do the additional task of removing a license...

I don't know what Bioware is going to do with regards to freeing up licenses, but you can bet that just like with the release of Bioshock, all of the information is not available yet for us to make any sort of reasonable decision as to whether it's worth buying Mass Effect PC and Spore.

-HM

StarDock customers: Buy your game legally and have tons free patches and great support and laugh about pirates that have to deal with all kinds of issues to get their versions to work.

EA customers: Buy your game legally and deal with all kinds of issues to get your version to work while being laughed at by pirates since their crack disables all the retarded DRM and lets them play just fine in all situations.

Or in other words (I think Brad said that): If pirates provide a better product to your customers then yourself then your concept is broken.

So TRue, so True.....

But stealing (larceny) is not the SAME crime as software piracy (copyright infringement).

What I most dislike about the current trends in DRM is that most of the schemes are hardware sensitive. Last time I upgraded (fairly major overhaul, keeping only case, drives and peripherals), I spent two days running around trying to get all my software reactivated on my "new" computer. Even now, months later, I have the occasional issue. I'm not even going to bother setting up a "games" hardware profile with all the miscellaneous junk turned off like I used to since I know it'll stop everything working again.

If I've paid for a product, I expect to be able to use it whenever and wherever I wish without having to jump through hoops. Can someone please hurry up and come up with a genius copy protection scheme that lets me do that!

GC2 activation, maybe ?

One of the things I find most annoying with our society is that people who live "normal" lives are completely incapable of understanding when others have situations arise in their lives that make it impossible to carry on in a "normal" fashion.

I have Generalized Anxiety Disorder- it's the single worst not-fatal disease one can have and will shut down your life faster than you can blink. Because of having it, I have been unable to find work for the last 5 1/2 years that I can perform. I filed for disability, but of course we don't fund it properly, so its been over 3 years waiting for a court date to determine once and for all if I can get it. Otherwise, I have no income, no assets, and no means to get income.

However, my life cannot remain on hold simply because others in society are not supportive or understanding. Therefore, I have every right to continue gaming- one of the few things in life that lets me escape from my horrible reality and live "normally" for a while, and reduce my anxiety to only about 3 times the normal level. (Most of you reading this, if you had my disease, would spend your days curled in a fetal position whimpering. It's a constant struggle for me every day to fight off what you would only feel if you were stuck in the ocean with 7 sharks swimming at you ready for a snack.)

I worked 7 days a week for 8 years straight, 12, 14, 24 hours a day as an award winning virtual reality developer. Due to circumstances outside of my control (a hereditary, incurable disease and the way our business society is flawed in how it works), I can't do what I used to do- and at the same time can't just "do anything" like other people can. (When's the last time your cashier at McDonald's collapsed onto the floor unable to do anything but whimper for "help" when you were giving an order? Never? I thought so.) In that time, I bought over 1500 games. I'd reckon about two dozen were worth the 40-60 bucks. The rest never got played once after the first 1-3 day experience, because they were full of totally flawed design concepts and had skipped the QA process- even apparent to those NOT familiar with the industry.

My point is, there are circumstances that are VALID circumstances for people out there who simply cannot buy games, but yet have every right to continue gaming- and making sure that when they DO buy a game, it is a working, quality title and not a "quick buck" type of product that will never see the light of day after one use. Demos simply don't cut it. A one hour trial is pointless, and locking down half the gameplay doesn't let one understand how the game TRULY plays. Only a full experience over a week of gameplay will let one know what the truth is about the game experience.

I think of the 5 or 6 games I've borrowed- and I DO mean borrowed, because that's exactly what it is (stealing is PERMANENT), I bought 4 and knew the other 2 were not worth any money. All got deleted once I knew my answer with a few days to a week, and no negative financial impact was caused on any of the companies- in fact, 4 of them had someone without income BUY 4 games because I knew they were worth my extremely limited resources!

There are so many other issues far more deserving of attention in gaming than "piracy"... it's simply a waste "slowing down" the pirates who will always, always break the system in place, not to mention the loss of customers who will not buy a game with intrusive root kit style copy protection or simply WRONG approaches like having a single player game REQUIRE internet connectivity. How should anyone be willing to buy a game, which they now have full rights to use, and yet be denied because they can't afford to have an internet connection that month with the high cost of gas and food? It's preposterous.

All that said, I can't wait for Spore- I need no trials, samples or anything for that one. It's simply going to be the best game ever made, period. =D

First, erring on the side of caution requires a one dimensional problem. If you err on the side of caution by driving slower in heavy traffic, you likely to cause a wreck when you piss off everyone behind you that needs to be somewhere in a timely fashion.

Second, I know because I don't live under a rock. I'll probably buy demigod, I have zero interest in it. I bought galciv2, it's too slow, I rarely play it. I knew before I bought it that I wasn't going to play it much at all. Sins I like, but don't. I'm a multi-player kind of person when it comes to rts games, I hate playing ai. I'm on satellite internet. Why did I pre-order a game I'd play solely online when I'm basically not going to play it online for the foreseeable future? I might hop on at some point after the balance is reasonable, it does run late at night, if with 1500 ping, odds are my forewarned companion will drop thirty seconds in like the last one did though. I'm not the only one either. I know quite a few habitual pirates with terabytes of games, movies and music who, on hearing about sins, went to the online store instead of the pirate bay. One in particular bought it simply because it was faster to download it off their server than it was off a torrent. Weird huh? Patience is a virtue, if pirates don't have any virtues...



Brilliant logic, if only they had any relation between each other. An intelligent person, when designing a protection scheme for spore, might have considered such an obvious, sensible tact. Alas, EA has no such marginally intelligent people making decisions. They could even use such a system to mass market a pseudo demo through the pirates. Skip copy protection entirely, and just require authentication to connect to the master server. The pirates would get to see the game, get addicted, and then have to buy it to get the full benefit that is a universe populated by the creations of the entire player base.



Copy protection isn't wrong, it's stupid. They have seen no magic increase in sales by increasing the protection. There have even been games that weren't immediately cracked. Rainbow Six:Lockdown holds the record if I remember right. What did Starforce do for Lockdown? Nada. Lockdown isn't one of the higher selling Rainbow Six games. Rogue Spear beat the pants off it. Rogue Spear was cracked on day one. The pc game industry goes and looks at the stats and thinks wow! 20 million people have downloaded this game and we only sold five! They aren't considering that half the people pirating it are probably just seeing if they're even vaguely interested in buying it. The rise of the internet and the so called doom of the pc gaming industry has been a steady, unfaltering expansion from one year to the next. The drop has never been shown.