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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."
The pirates will always crack it. They only wind up hurting paying end users. It seems nowadays the more you pay for a game the more worthless it is, due to the increased amounts of so called copy protection, which actually does little at all to halt piracy. CD's get scratched. Their attitude is "if it gets scratched beyond repair, that's just one more reason to buy a new game to take it's place" and preventing piracy is just the excuse. I've never pirated a game in my life. I know a couple people who have, but copy protection never stopped them.
I read through much of the threads on the forums mentioned in the abstract, and what is terrible about this thing is that even after installing the game, the "driver" remains. Remove it manually and it returns later like spyware! And what is most disturbing is that one user received an uninstaller after he complained to the company--only the uninstaller didn't uninstall the thing either!
"The television is the retina of the mind's eye" - Videodrome
1) Don't buy the game. Pirate it once a warez group comes up with a cracked copy with all the annoying copy protection removed.
2) Send a personal check to the development company for what the game would have cost you. In some cases, dev houses have copy protection forced on them by the developer. Most dev houses will have contact information listed on their website. Include, with your check, a letter saying that you are sending them this check because you are unwilling to buy the game with copy protection included. This is very important, to ensure that they get the message -- this is an unhappy customer who is honest enough to pay for their game -- the copy protection not only was unnecessary for you, but made you unhappy.
You shouldn't have any ethical problems, as you're paying the developers for their time and effort. As for legality -- technically, what you're doing is illegal, but prosecutions for pirating software for personal use are nonexistent, and the possiblity of such lawsuits is openly ignored en masse.
May we never see th
We've gone over this countless times. You are 100% correct, pirates will pirate, regardless of protection. I remember my pirated copy of 3DStudio MAX, which was cracked despite requiring a bunch of serials and an actual hardware dongle.
The end 'legitimate' user will always pay the price of hacked-up protection schemes. I still install my warezed copy of starcraft instead of the copy I bought. Searching for the CD for a game that completely installs on my drive is just annoying.
Companies don't understand this, and for some reason it seems they never will. Or perhaps they just don't care. Either way, we should just let the subject die, or come up with a better way for users to benefit from protection.
-- I have fans? Wow.
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 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.
- chrish
Back in the days when games booted directly, my friends and I had a joke - "Psygnosis - Latin for Won't Boot"
Psygnosis copyprotected their games with every trick in the book, to prevent the game from loading if it was pirated.
It worked.
It also prevented the games from booting if they WEREN'T pirated, but your drive was a little off. Or you had an accelerator card. Or it was a day with a vowel in it. Or if there were baryons in your computer.
Simple solution - don't buy copy protected software. Don't copy it. Don't use it. If you buy it and find it is copy protected, take it back, say it won't work, and demand your money back.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Does anyone else find it funny that the Starforce home page features a picture (top right) of a dude at a keyboard throwing up his hands (blurred) in apparent disgust while the two "overlords" standing behind him are laughing and smiling?
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
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.