I hate CD keys and Cd protection

Why? I have legal copies of several games sitting around that I cannot play because they keep me, a valid paying consumer from playing them with CD keys that do not work, and CD protection that doesn't recognize itself as a legal copy.

It drives me crazy! After buying Black & White, I had do download a pirated copy and crack it just to get it to work. With X-2, The Threat. I had to disable IDE settings just to get it to accept the CD, then it wouldn't accept the key on the back of its packaging.

I can't help but boycott these publishers. I loved Black & White but wouldn't bother buying the sequel, thinking "Do I really want to go through three hours of paranoid developer induced pain just to start playing their game?"

Does anyone else have this problem?

 

i think you just kind of get the crappy end of the deal more than most people.

as easy as it is to pirate games, it still stops a good amount of people in their tracks.

the guys who made savage had a server-side protection that basically rendered them impossible to steal from. that's awesome and i don't think that's bad at all.

 

It's great people can't steal games. As bad as having your work stolen is, it's equally as bad when I as a consumer have to have enough knowledge to pirate a copy of a game I just legally bought to play it!

Am I attracted to publishers with crappy protection tech?

I thought being attracted to men who were bad for me might be a problem. I think this is worse though.

 

Having to put the disc in the drive when I've done a full install pisses me off. It's so easy to find cracks these days that it's pointless to continue this. Of course since it's so easy to find them that means I perhaps shouldn't be so pissed off I still feel dirty though, and there's always the risk of trojans and other dodgy stuff. This is one of the reasons I'm so taking with Steam-style services.

We should all learn from Stardock's approach on Galactic Civilizations II... well, our publishers should anyway.

 

The thing I hate is that I buy a game to play multiplayer on my three computers at home and it won't let me because I'd need three CD keys. I really can't understand that. It seems like they can check the IP addresses of the computers and use them to allow LAN gaming.

 

i just think you're retarded, no offence.

:wink:

 

One day will come the day where there is foolproof protection?

Hack-proof.....that's a challenge.

 

nm

 

Foolproof protection? You're kidding - how many people would be out of jobs if we had that? It's not about the legalities of copyright, it's about MONEY. Someone, somewhere is benefiting from the dumbarse protection that we all have to put up with. If we had foolproof protection, how would the hackers manage to feed their families? What would the internet police be doing (besides trying to hunt down pedophiles in chatrooms and investigate credit card fraud)? Surely somewhere along the lines, bitTorrent would be affected, and we don't want that! Surely!

What I hate more is (and this is irrelevant to this thread) is having to back up the music you buy through iTunes because if your HDD decides to play up, they can't recognise that you've already purchased it. If this doesn't encourage piracy - nothing will.

 

You know how some people in America think that people should be allowed guns to protect them from abuse by the government.

I think that piracy has a role to play in preventing us from abusive DRM schemes.

 

All it takes is one person to be able to hack the protection for the game to spread across P2P. Unless the protection is 'hack-proof', it begs the question 'why bother'? People who normally pay for their games will do anyway, the people who pirate their games won't. If it isn't hack-proof, then there will always be an illegal copy to download.

 

There is something to be said for raising the barrier of entry into the pirate club.

You simply cannot allow people to pirate games openly, some intellectual property rights lapse if you do not take steps to enforce them. A specific example I'm sure of is trademarks.

Regardless cd protection sucks but the alternative is to require a net connection for authetication via something like Steam or go back to those paper code look up tables you used to get with Amiga games (which I invariably misplaced).

 

The alternative is not having any protection Online verification is just another form of protection.

There is a vast difference between not using protection, and 'allowing people to pirate your stuff.' Assuming you were a pirate, you would not be able to convince a court of law you were free to copy stuff on the basis they were not protecting their work through using cd protection. You would be laughed out of court and slapped with a huge fine. The Trademark example has no bearing on this.

 

Of course you are correct that there is a difference between not using a copy protection and allowing pirates to copy. That wasn't meant to be my point. My point is that as the numbers of pirates increase it becomes harder to prosecute them [1]. China would be an extreme example. Therefore ways of reducing the number of pirates by making it harder to become one are probably worth it.

Basically it's in our interests to make game piracy as underground as possible. CD copy protection generally acts against that interest when people have legitimate reasons for having to get around copy protection. A good protection system should be completely invisible to the consumer, not in the sense that it has hidden in your system files.

H


[1] It's more likely to be some sort of bell curve, really hard to prosecute when there are a very small number pirates, peaking where there are good number of them but they haven't gone mainstream.

 

I would say thats completely untrue. Its not difficult to prosecute pirates at all. In fact its very easy due to the nature of the professional software/cd/video pirates goods that they can be prosecuted. In the UK at least if you report a shop/stall selling pirated crap, they get the inspectors down pretty fast. Likewise if you see one in a shopping centre and take it to the centre management, they will take action. (I, and a few other people on here as I recall, have done such).

You are talking about home piracy which for the most part consists of people downloading warez, music etc. Which just isnt going to stop anytime soon while the current technocrati think its okay to download stuff for free. (There are very few people on this board for example, who have a completely legal MP3 collection I am sure)

Copy protection only hurts and frustrates the legitimate buyer. The casual pirate doesnt care because they download their stuff protection free, the professional cracking groups dont particulary care because they can break anything you can put on there (that doesnt make it unusable/unstable). The pirate selling goods on the street doesnt care because they buy/copy their stuff in bulk from masters nicked from the manufacturing plant.

 

Play console games.

 

It's a difficult topic and you can debate the pro's and con's forever. The reality is that some copy protection methods do more harm then good, having to switch out disks is extermly annoying...but I also appreciate the need to protect the investment.

Steam was extermly annoying the first time I used it. After installing hl2, I had to wait nearly 3 hours to download the updates (I had no choice, I couldn't play the game until they were installed) over my 56k modem...

I did like the fact that once I reinstalled it sometime later, it was much easier to register again.

I also understand the annoyance of wanting to pay for a game, but not wanting to shell out over $100au for something that turns out to be crap.

There is no easy answer. Maybe we could use a episodic game model to allow players to download/purchase chunks of the game, so if you like episode 1, you'd buy episode 2 and so on, but if you don't, then i guess you haven't wasted to much time or money...alright, I just described demos, but i played the demo of fear, which I really liked, the bought the game, which, as a gamer, i thought sucked...

And I guess that's the heart of the issue, money. Some don't want to waste it, most want to make it...

Even console based gaming is getting hit hard with piracy and I'm sure there is a lot going on behind microsoft's and sony's doors to rectify it...and don't even get me started on region coding...

In the mean time, will have to put up with all the codes, online registry, cd swapping madness...(while not perfect, Black & White had a half decent idea, it only checked that the disk when installing...if I remember correctly...long time no play)

 

bit like what is it, Sam and Max with the episodes of play?

and demo's aren't all that great, often there hack jobs without as much thought as should be used, our last game, the demo would have really put you off getting the game as it was a munter, nothing like the game in the end *l*

 

Unfortunately, copy protection seems to be a necessity to prevent pirating of a game especially before release and about a month after. IMHO, the best solution is to use copy protection on release, then later (say 1 year after) supply a patch which removes the copy protection. This not only pleases customers as they know the game will not break on future hardware due to copy protection problems, but also reduces support for non-working copy protection due to specific configuration.

 

Agreeing with Quant, you cannot really do much without it. Sure, there is a ton of ways to get around it and such, but in the end it is a necessary nusience. I especially loath CD-Keys... For those who played Starcraft, or Warcraft vividly, you will probably remember having to re-install the game a couple of times... My issue was that i would never actually have my CD case anymore... (It got broke or something so i threw it out, ignoring the big CD-Key on it).