StarForce Copy Protection Causing User Ire

Ant writes "According to a thread on the Rage3D boards, and another on The Adventure Company's site, the copy protection system StarForce, as used in PC videogames including Toca Race Driver 2, Traitor's Gate 2 and Broken Sword 3, is installed on a user's PC without proper explanation, and doesn't get removed on many uninstalls - some users report difficulty in keeping their systems stable due to conflicts, and think they've tracked it down to the StarForce protection."

Comments

Re:Copy protection sucks

[jkeyes]

uh when everyone knows www.gamecopyworld.com it does take 0.5 seconds to find a crack.

waiting waiting waiting

Re:Suggestion for avoiding such copy protection

[0x0d0a]

This:

In some cases, dev houses have copy protection forced on them by the developer.

Should read

In some cases, dev houses have copy protection forced on them by the publisher.

Doesn't make much sense otherwise.

Another Form of Copy Protection

[thirty2bit]

TMPGEnc 3.0 XPress by Pegasys needs the usual reg key, but the product page on their site also states:

LICENSE VALIDATION is required for TMPGEnc Plug-in AC-3 and TMPGEnc 3.0 XPress. Therefore an Internet connection will be needed to validate your license from time to time.
To be able to use the Software, the license validation procedure have to be executed via Internet. The purpose of the license validation is to verify that you actually own the license. The information you have input the first time, will be sent to the license validation server, and you will be able then to use the Software.

This is a new annoying form of copy protection. For some reason, 'guilty until proven innocent' comes to mind.

I almost purchased the software for our department's video needs, for manipulating safety and training videos, but our corporate firewalls and proxy prevent it from hitting the internet. No cha-ching, this is a lost sale. Ironically it's inexpensive software. Like $60 US.

I don't like any software that needs to 'phone home', since you'll never be told what's being phoned. Real Networks RealannoyingPlayer comes to mind with the user-tracking feature that got their butts in hot water. TiVo monitors your watching habits. Windows XP phones back to the mothership on occasion.

argh

[chrish]

Copy protection might prevent "casual" copying between the computer illeterate and that's the intent. But when it screws up your computer (by introducing instability), affects game play (I've heard of schemes that check mid-game causing major lag points for online players), or even makes it impossible for you to play the game you just bought (many of these schemes don't actually work with all disc drives), then it's just a load of crap.

That "protection makes it impossible to start the game" thing is a real killer for some people with crappy drives because you can't take software back most places. There should be a big WARNING: Disc is copy protected! sticker on the front of the box to warn people.

I was using cracks on some of my games because:

• The CD check at the start of the game took an unreasonable amount of time.
• I was sick of having to dig the original CDs out of the pile of papers/CDs/cats on my desk.
• I don't want to risk damaging the original CDs; I'd rather leave them snug in their jewel cases.

The problem with using a no-CD crack is that you're suddenly locked out of future patches unless you backed up the original executable/DLLs. That's a pain in the butt.

Using DaemonTools to mount CD images and BlindWrite5 to make images, even of "protected" CDs has been awesome. No worries about patching, or damaging the original CDs, and the copy protection checks happen fast because you don't have to wait for the CD drive to detect a disc, spin up, etc.

Bypassing online cd key requirements

[Sparky9292]

Ever heard of key generators? The idea of a cd key is nice, but if tools exists to generate them, want's th point in using them. Just look at the quake 3 misery where a lot of buyers could not play online. Evertime they tried it, they got a 'cd key already in use' message. Very annoying if you buy a game and cannot play it. That should never happen if the keysystem is implemented correctly, that is, the number of potential keys should be up there in the trillions. Also, limiting how fast somebody can try to contact the key server should lock down any attempt at brute force searching. But this doesn't address what I think is the real cause of those people getting "key in use on their new games" - that is, people going around in stores, ripping packages open and typing down the often quite visible key.

To get around online cd key checking, pirates have been launching cracked servers where the keys don't get checked. Browse on Battlefield 1942 servers and you'll find a bunch with cracked in the title.

Follow-up & Removal Tool

[antdude]

See here.