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

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.