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

[Allison Geode]

when I buy a game, there are a couple things i do while installing it: 1. look for and download a patch. 2. look for and download a crack. to me, being able to play a game on the pc without needing the cd is important, and i consider cracks just another patch I have to install to make my games function the way I want. i have a large colletion of games, which means a large collection of discs, and its easy to temporarily misplace one disc (its on my shelf or in my binder somewhere, but it can take longer to find the disc than it does to play the game in some cases!) that said, I do not pirate games for myself, ever. i consider paying for games (to have the official disc and the manual) to be important, and I have to give big props to developers that either don't include copy protection in their games, or 'crack' the game themselves upon release of a patch (games like quake3 and unreal tournament 2k4 make me happy.)

Old hashed topic, no solution

[fwitness]

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.

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.

Psygnosis - latin for "Won't Boot"

[wowbagger]

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.