They'd just ask about it on the forums, and get an answer the same day from myself or a user. As with any problem, if a cursory search doesn't turn anything up, just ask. I don't mind repeat questions, and it's less frustrating for everyone that way.

Not just that, but the support time for a game from major publishers is getting shorter and shorter it seems. This drives me crazy. A publisher creates a game, supports it for a few months, and then completely stops everything, including bug fixes.

I'm sorry, but I'm sick and tired of games that last less than a year before the publisher goes away. That is simply way too short.



Historically, this is how PC games have worked as well. As long as you have the original disk, you can go to a new PC and play it.

This is also how SDC and Steam work: As long as you're logging into the same account, you can play you games on any PC. In addition, Valve has finally got their act together, and the offline mode finally works, so you can play all of your games without connecting to the internet.



How about getting rid of that disk, which is prone to getting lost and scratched? In my opinion SDC (Stardock Central), Impulse, and Steam are the future of PC gaming. No disks to worry about at all. Just click and play.

I really think EA is holding onto a model that didn't work, is way too draconian, and frankly is going to be outdated. The future will have a much greater emphasis on providing benefits to those who are legitimate.

It's no wonder that EA is doing so poorly on PCs - it's not that the PC is not a good gaming environment anymore, it's that they're making the same mistakes over and over again.

Stardock gets it. Valve is slowly but surely getting it. EA, on the other hand, is not getting it at all. They're being too stubborn. They're not thinking outside the box. There's a better way, and they're refusing to give up their old way of doing things.

I agree that this is the best possible solution, but still . . . so few companies are getting the drift.

The more that follow suit, the better.

First, the point is pretty mute now because my friend refuses to ever touch that game again. But, when he got his new computer (including new hard drive), "everything" including windows xp and GCII was reinstalled. Using the exact same passwords to get on the forums and to write to stardock got us error messages saying "you have no accounts here". BUT, when we tried to make new accounts, we got never ending messages saying "That name is already in use", "That passowrd is already in use", or worst of all "another player is already using that email address". And every time, my friend is going "How in the heck do they know what's inside my computer, and that it's new!?!?!". He is really freaked now that people my age and youger take companies "peeking" into our computers so casually. . . . . .

Purple, sounds like you screwed up name / password -- did you try recovering them?

Gormoth, I don't believe anyone has said it's illegal for EA to shoot themselves in the foot with this idiotic system. It's just stupid.

It's an unmitigated fact that drm hasn't done a damn thing to stop piracy. It never has, and it never will. You cannot write something that can't be neutralized. Just making it hard is costing the industry a fortune, and has only suceeded in killing entire companies. They made it hard in Titan's Quest by disguising security checks as bugs. It worked, no one caught it. The security made it through the cracking process, and interested customers looking before they bought, decided not to. The best success story I've seen was Richochet. The guy was tracking the stats while making changes, looking to see what he was actually accomplishing. He saw some really nice sales increases when he disabled pirated keys. No effect on the consumer. He also discovered that despite the number of pirated versions being played, about one in a thousand actually gave a shit enough to buy the game instead of just not playing it. It's not an enigma, they know it doesn't work, they know how few of the pirates will actually buy the game. They know that even if they could create a completely hack proof game, they'd still lose more customers to annoyance than they gained by it.

There was another system that almost worked. One of the higher end versions of Starforce installed exceedingly dangerous drivers where no program should be installing anything. It degraded the performance of machines by as much as 30%, and not just when the protected item was running. It also disabled other software, purchased, legal software with legitimate uses. That by the way is a crime in the US. The intentional vandalism of ones property, by disabling hardware and software on someones computer without their permission, is that the right of the corporation? The longest running secure game, unless the record has been beaten, and I haven't heard of anything close, is Rainbow Six: Lockdown. It went months. It sold like shit. It used the previously mentioned illegal malware. Following the Starforce fiasco, Ubisoft lost customers in droves, forum riots broke out over multiple games, this little spat with EA over Mass Effect is nothing. Even if you don't mind the contempt they have for you as a paying customer, the violation of your rights to be informed of what you're being forced to use, or the destruction it will cause to your system, the most secure anti-piracy system to date didn't do a damn thing to help them sell pc games.

Mandatory online activations with a 3 pc limit wont help EA sell pc games either. They have the right to do any damn thing they please as long as they are up front about it, what they don't have are brains.

No, the name/password worked just fine "until" he got the new compter, then, somehow, the game knew it was not the "same" computer as before, and I guess thought we were pirates or some such #$&@. I have no idea; cause I prety much just gave up too.

And yes, some nice Devs on this board have told me if I send them all the new info, they'd fix it alllll up. I'm not interested; the entire process was such a huge pita for both of us, that no amount of "fun" I may get could make up for all the month+ of hassle. That's sad too, cause I'm sure my friend would have bought the newest GCII expansion had they just let him play his SOLO game on his new computer. . . . . .

Well Purple, I can understand your frustration, but I'd bite the bullet and see if you can get it going again. You've got nothing to lose.

Purple, it sounds more like something got screwed up and they'd like the info to figure out what got screwed up. Additionally, I can tell you that I've used four computers with SDC, (well, three with SDC; two with Impulse, one computer overlapping with both) and never had a hickup.

Well, I'll mention it to my friend; who knows, maybe he has another operation comming up

The activation is keyed to the windows install it is made on (no, we don't keep even that info; it's stored in the sig.bin file). But if he redownloaded, there couldn't be any issue with that since there would be no pre-existing sig.bin, unless he failed to download it then tried copying it over by hand and got that.

I don't know what could have happened with the forums account aside from having had the password saved in the browser before, and not remembering it correctly. Passwords can be recovered via support.stardock.com, and even if you don't have a forum login, there's always [email protected] as well.

We don't like seeing people suffer with problems any more than the people having them do. So we encourage anyone having problems to just *ask*, and we'll do our best to get it sorted as quickly as possible.

Well, I just came back from spending a weekend with him, and showed him this forum thread too. I won't say everything he said, and I'll condence all I can, but basically, he said it did not matter to him where you guys store what, or how you "store" info or why. The bottom line is it's copy protection, just like any other copy protection, and the game stoped working when he got his new computer (BECAUSE of your copy protection, regaurdless of what you call it). He told me is I got him the new GCII (Twilight is it?), and if I installed/registered it for him at his place, THEN he would try the game again, otherwise, he said he had not intention of trying to convice people he was not a pirate (hey, he's almost 60, people in his generation never had to deal with stuff like this).

Anyway, if I get him GCII Twilight, by chance, in the future, I'll do my best he gets all re-registered (God help you if he has to reload windows again though.............)

Nobody can help you if you refuse to let them help you.

My problem is they're keeping the 3 installation limit. At first I thought it'd be a real annoyance but not major, and then I thought 'well what if I have a bug+need to reinstall?', or 'what if you can do modding on the game, I do something wrong, and need to reinstall?'. That'd be my 3 installations gone straight away. Since some of my older games have been installed far more than 3 times (and I'm the only one using them) I think it's outrageous I should be restricted in the number of times I can reinstall it. It's absurd that EA is looking to punish it's legal+loyal customers by giving them an inferior product than the one they can pirate, and they're effectively saying 'well we don't care about you, go and pirate our game instead'.

It's nothing short of crazy on EA's part, and I'm really disappointed the system is going to affect Mass Effect and Spore, two games I've been really looking forward to on the PC (even more so with mass effect since it's a bioware game, and in the past they've been great). The only consolation is I can at least consider getting them now, since the 10 day activation has been removed. That one really was absurd - if the game had shipped with it, I wouldn't have been surprised if it ended up selling maybe as little as half of what it should have without all the DRM. That's what so hard to understand about all this DRM - these companies are paying to have something on their product that encourages people to turn to piracy!

I can only agree with maudlin27.

The Irony is, if people do not buy some game because of the copy protection and it gets poor sales, the publishers will blame piracy for it and make the protection even more intrusive. Maybe they will learn someday.

Publishers like that will either learn or go bankrupt, either outcome will satisfy me. :-p

I am probably older than most of you.

I still have a few of the first books I read when I was six. And I still have the first audio singles that I bought (vinyl of course). And I still have the first computer games I played (on a Commodore C64).

All of them suck within todays standards now. Tastes and technology have changed or proceeded. But occasionally I read passages of these books, listen to those audio singles and play those computer games. I can't put in words - not only because English is not my first language - what fond memories and feelings I get by this. About family, friends, situations, and other things that were important at those past times.

Can you imagine how much fun it is to play a 20 year old computer game with the same person you played it with 20 years ago?

All you young people who buy their first (copy protected and drm'ed) music or computer games legally (in the future even books?) are definitely not able to access these media in perhaps 20 years from now.

And believe me at some time you will want to listen to those past music and play that games occasionally.

The reasons that you can't do this are copy protection and DRM. At some time support ends, publishers vanish, and technology changes. Your CDs and DVDs get worthless. You will never experience the feelings when you play the same music you listened together with your first girl-/boyfriend many years ago. If you get lucky you can buy ten different mixes of cover versions of this month's superstar (feat. today's flash in the pan).

This is what bothers me the most about crippling media with protections of all sorts. They make them artificially short-lived and therewith remove all the plenty of future value from them.

Oh yeah, for all the uproar about Bioware/EA's effort in copying protection, my friend who is a member at Demonoid.com is telling me people there are hard at work in working a crack to the Mass Effect copy protection challenge. Apparently the first crack had issues, and now they are all putting their brains together to figure out how to beat it. Well...so much for EA's draconian effort, serves them right. Should have use Stardock's model.

Yep, done it quite a few times recently... (lets make it 15 though ) I can honestly say it is one of the funniest (as in gut-busting) things you can do. Thirty-odd year olds busting their fingers on hyper sports circa 1984 is a staple at our LANs these days. Not to mention the dead-legs that result from someone pinching "someone else's" yellow lollie on bubble bobble. Classic.

Great post Blue

PS Install limits? I've reinstalled windows about 10 times already! What the hell should that have to do with any games I purchase?! What a pack of helmets.

I consider myself lucky, since i've only had minor trouble with copy protection, problem being that my DVD-drive has hard time reading them. For example, i had to install Command & Conquer 3 from my laptop through lan. . A firmware update fixed that up later.

I just upgraded my computers video card, so it should be able to play Bioshock, problem is, i've heard many horror stories about the it's copy protection, and i'm not sure if it's worth the risk..

By "them", i meant "discs". Didn't this forum used to have an "edit" button?

I guess EA have started taking their "EA games - challenge everything" motto a bit too far :p

MegaVolt

I had a retard in my class that just like you said that if he buy a game he can do whatever he wants with it, including making copies to sell....

I really wonder, are you people really sincere in what you're saying? Do you really mean to say that you won't buy games with heavy protection? If you really are "good" like you want us to believe, then buy the original, stuff it away on the shelf and play pirate release.

You really become no different then the people in my private DC++ rar hub and torrentsite.


I believe that to completely stop piracy we need things like TCPA with Windows Vistas activation and elimination so publishers can be sure that one serial is only used on one machine at any time.

If anybody has another 100% sure way then tell us.

@SanChonino: Yeah, I remember back in the day when I take my cool new PC game over to a friend's house so we could play it together (we always met at his house, he had a larger TV). About half the games I bought he wound up buying as a result. Of course, installing it on a computer I didn't even own was the worst kind of moral turpitude, and proper social interaction only takes place through company owned servers with a monthly usage fee anyway, so that kind of deviancy was wisely stamped out by video game developers.

Nice. Make a point by insulting people.



I can't speak for everyone, but for myself, yes. I went through the BioShock 'copy protection' funhouse and I'm not willing to pay for that type of experience again.



Stupid suggestion. Really. If you buy the game, you're showing support of this type of DRM. If you don't support this type of DRM, why would you hand money to the company that uses it? That's why I won't buy. Nor will I pirate it. Games with this type of DRM are on my personal 'no buy, no play' list.