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EA Denies DRM Problems With Sims 2
Fizzlefist writes "For the past 2 weeks there has been an uproar on the Sims 2 forums concerning the inclusion of Sony's SecuROM DRM software in the latest expansion pack, Bon Voyage. It seems paid customers have been having problems since day one of release, but EA is only now, 5 weeks later, issuing an official statement on the matter. A lot of what's in the statement is outright fiction with proven reports of issues with disabling of disc burning software, optical disc drives, printers, cameras, system slowdown and even system crashes. Fan responses have been cold to say the least. Interestingly enough, the expansion pack was cracked and up on the internet less than 24 hours after its release."
It also sound that there is a lot of bashing here:
"But of those 7,122 messages we can track, 2,976 have been authored by just 32 individuals (41.8 %). Each of these individuals has posted more than 40 times on the subject."
"Since that team was set up 2 weeks ago, we received only 12 calls to EA's North American Support Center from players looking for help with their PC's, suspecting a conflict with SecuROM. Sony DADC received just 29 calls about The Sims 2 Bon Voyage and SecuROM."
I didn't really notice an outright denial in the "offical statement". I read that 'problems happen' and if you want it fixed you need to call support.
Looking at the replies and the response, it 'sounds' like they want to help:
quote:
Guys-
If you really want to make a difference, you need to file a support ticket with Customer Support to explain what is going wrong with your PC and try to get help. Those numbers about the few number of calls to Support are not made up. I looked them up myself. There's just not enough people calling to cause change. We've received 4 times more calls with people with flashing red walls than any of the PC destruction calls about SecuROM. (and, btw, about those walls...don't forget to update your video card driver).
We want you to call. I want you to call. I work on the team that makes the game. The last thing we want to do is to make you unhappy.
To get support, follow the instructions in MaxoidVanquish's post above. The thread is here:
http://bbs.thesims2.ea.com/community/bbs/messages.php?threadID=c7bc28ba7df0b19335a3d8edb3ec9919&directoryID=211&startRow=1&openItemID=item.211,root.1,item.61,item.104,item.41,item.127,item.23
If you create a support ticket and don't get the help you need, I want you to do this: send me a note in my SimPage guestbook. Click on "View My Sim Page" right above my post and you'll find my guestbook. Tell me what happened, and if you can, cite the Incident Number you were given so a supervisor can track what happened on your case (those numbers look something like 123456-789012. Write it down when the support person gives it to you). Also please give me your email or phone number and a good time when you can be reached, so a support supervisor can get back to you.
unquote
And to the thought of "interestingly enough, the expansion pack was cracked and up on the internet less than 24 hours after it's release."
I wonder just how many of the folks that 'cracked' the pack are having the problems and are bitching?
Of course I could be wrong and DRM could just be the cause of global warming.
For the past 2 weeks there has been an uproar on the Sims 2 forums concerning the inclusion of Sony's SecuROM DRM software
I think they just transposed the "e" and the "u" in the name of that software. It should read "Suc e ROM".
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Treat it like a DoS denial of service attack. EA installed malware that denied their customers access to their computers. Could be criminal charges too and a massive class action suit.
I was the biggest fan of all the sim stuff for the longest time. I had multiple versions of simcity, simfarm, the sims. That ended when they introduced the need to have the original CD available to run the game. I was used to having the game on my two computers, and play as I wanted to. I know this probably violated so license restrictions, but I don't care. I bought the game to enjoy, and that is the way I wanted to enjoy it. The fact that I paid for the game, and could not play it without keeping up with the CD, was intolerable. When the Sims came with the limitation, that was the last sims I bought. There are is much competition for my money, and if someone is more worried about the people who don't buy that the people who do, that is someone that I have no desire to deal with.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
How can a call to EA fix a crashed PC? Their help desk does the following:
1) Is your PC plugged in and turned on?
2) What version are you on. Yes, that's the latest one.
3) Run Windows Update.
4) Do you still have problems?
Contact your PC manufacturer. It's not our game. All you guys are proving is that it's better to pirate games than pay money to EA.
I work for a software company that prides itself on its lack of intrusive copy protection. Almost a month after the latest release of our flagship product, I am still unable to find it on any torrent or warez site. It almost seems like, without the technical challenge of cracking the protection, the warez d00ds don't even bother, or at least give it a very low priority. I've never heard of any software with intrusive protection that wasn't cracked within 24 hours of release.
Or maybe your company's product is not in high demand.
More likely your program is not popular enough to be worth pirating.
We're a niche market, to be sure, but there's plenty of demand. All of our previous releases did eventually get posted.
The original Half-Life can no longer authenticate to WON. This makes my $500 investment worth less than 10 coasters, as CDs have a hole in the middle. CD keys, and remote authentication, especially, are irritating. CD key, remote authentication via name and password, along with required E-mail address, PLUS various disk copy protections is just too damned much effort. I will just download the warez versions. 90% of the games out now are like ditzy blonde trophy wives: great to look at, and show off to your friends, but in the end, not much better than masturbating.
and that was with Sid Meier's Railroads. I did the Analysis, sent it in to SecuROM, and the next day they sent me a modified binary that would supposedly ignore the specific authentication failure. However, I didnt encounter the issue once I had rebooted, so did not need the modded binary.
I installed BioShock Demo, which did install SecuROM... uninstalled the demo, and SecuROM was uninstalled with it.
While I dislike DRM, SecuROM is probably one of the more benign forms. Anyone remember Starforce?
Hunt your preferred prey at Aliens vs Predator MUD. Join the war at avpmud.com port 4000
"If someone was on hold for a long time and hung up, please send me a message with the Incident Number and I'll track down what happened. Thanks.
I am forwarding incident numbers directly to our senior level SecuROM support people, so there should not be any issues they cannot handle."
I remember when people were infuriated at first with the idea of Windows XP Product Activation and said that as long as everyone "voted with their wallets" and didn't buy XP Microsoft would be forced to change. We all know what a load of good that did.
The problem with the logic that consumers in these circumstances can make a drastic impact on a supplier by "voting with their wallets" is that it's next to impossible to reach the critical mass needed to make such an impact. People on the whole are apathetic, don't know about the issues and don't research the products they purchase, especially for software like games.
I think it will be far more likely that growing and increasingly vocal consumer frustration will cause a change in these ridiculous copy protection schemes, not people "voting with their wallets". But even with this scenario I'm still skeptical because again it assumes that companies actually care enough about their customers to listen to their cries for sanity and to take their needs into consideration.
Cheers, ~ Ruben
...being in a game. And I am not just talking about Bioshock, either. A bunch of people had issues with SupCom having SecuROM, and when the SupCom community told GPG to get rid of it, they did. With WIC, there was a petition started on the forums that was eventually locked (look http://www.massgate.net/read.php?3,29121,page=1). Bunches of other games have had issues with SecuROM as well.
The summary failed to cover the moderator who declared martial law banning so many people and locking so many threads that for once EA actually stepped in and publicly turfed them. With diplomatic language but for anyone paying attention it was quite obvious. Essentially anyone who dared post information based on fact that contradicted their opinion of the glorious cosmic orgy that was securom was due for a banning.
Some might say "The system works". However this moderator had been displaying this behaviour for longer than most people can remember yet EA looked the other way even with user complaints until she finally went off the deep end and banned too many 12 year olds who could dial the customer service line.
I don't need to test my programs.. I have an error correcting modem.
EA has a horrible reputation for Customer Service. It is nearly IMPOSSIBLE to get a straight answer from anyone, mainly because the process needed to actually get to a human being has been made by EA to be as twisted and complicated as possible.
EA loves to sweep problems out of sight by telling customers to use their "Knowledge Base", which is pretty much useless as it is, or to "contact" them by filling out a Bug Report/Complaint form, where they say they will "get back to you."
It took me forever to get the internet gaming part of Battlefield 1942 to work, and it STILL won't work at all. I spent a day trying to find a Tech Support phone number, which was supposed to be included in the manual (the text actually referred to the number to call in case of continuing problems), but the U.S.A. number wasn't given, only the website ant the Canadian number. I ended up calling 411 and asking for the n umber to their Redwood City office, and called that to get the Tech Support number. After calling that number, I got stuck in a phone tree offering Cheat servies and other junk, and an option for Tech Support. After choosing the tech support option, I got a recording referring me to their "Knowledge Base", to which I had already been to and found useless. After calling the Redwood City office, and asking to be referred to a person, I finally got a number for live Tech Support. I spoke to 2 differnt "Techs", on 2 separate occaisions, and both of them kept telling me to go to the EA website and download patches and updates. I downloaded 2 or three of them and none worked, or did anything for that matter.
EA can rot in hell for all I care. All they do is sell games, and nothing more. No service, no help, no functionality, nothing. They make it as hard as possible to take up any of their "precious" time by asking them to make their products actually work. I know BF1942 has a funtioning internet multiplayer component.
I kept getting an error message "UDATE NEEDED!" How can you call yourself a gaming company if you don't even know what your own error messages mean?
But I digress.....
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
DRM does not stop "pirates"...it doesn't even slow them down. Quite frequently, cracked pirated verisons are available on the torrent sites before the actual products are released. The ONLY thing DRM does is inconvenience paying customers...you know the ones who actually went out and BOUGHT the product rather than just downloading it from a torrent site. Every time this happens, a fraction of those inconvenienced paying customers will get fed up and start downloading rather than buying. You'd think this is what the publishers wanted, from the way they act. Either that or they're just insane...the definition of insanity being repeating the same action time and time again expecting a different result.
The thing is that it's the company who gets to say who's a pirate trying to crack the game and who's not. I got Diablo 2 when it was newish and had no end of trouble trying to use it as I only had a burner and had a ton of debugging software on the PC. It wouldn't run on systems with burners or cd emulation software, or debuggers that it mistook for either of those.
As always when a game is annoying I got a crack and it worked perfectly. But I wrote to Blizzard about it to see what they'd say. Their suggestion was that I reinstall windows entirely, then buy a new CDROM (not a burner) in that order. I emailed back and said I had tried a fresh install (not that rebooting to a stripped down OS just to play their game would have been reasonable anyways but the burner was still an issue), but that buying new hardware was unreasonable as mine met the specs on the box. I asked for a debug build (even with my name in it) without protection, as it was obviously their protection making it unworkable. They said no. I mentioned hearing that there was a crack which fixed this problem for others. They told me it was illegal, even if I owned the game, etc... They wouldn't even offer a refund, as the fact that the game worked on other computers was proof to them that it wasn't broken. (What error shows up 100% of the time?)
Long story short, I owned the game but they put me down as a pirate. The game didn't break anything but the copy protection was obviously the only reason it wouldn't work on my PC.
I'm sure that UbiSoft was technically right... 20% of people were trying to do something like crack the game just to get it to work. Who else emails tech support? People who've tried and given up. Of course many of these people, like myself, are going to try a crack to prove that the game works and that it's the copy protection breaking things. This is just them sweeping that under the rug by labeling all of those people as pirates. If you have Daemon tools installed for any reason you're immediately a pirate in these peoples' eyes.
Lies, Damned Lies, and Corporate Statistics.
Nope, they published it! At that time, DICE was not owned by EA yet (they bought them later, EA style).
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
the expansion pack was cracked and up on the internet less than 24 hours after it's release.
In other words, the only people having problems as a result of this DRM are... the honest customers.
So as usual, DRM designed to make the pirates job impossible while not damaging the user experience have the exact opposite result, and the pirates are the only ones with a hassel-free experience, while the paying customers are left to suffer alone in the cold and dark that is Customer Relations.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Mister Wiggles Magical Adventure in Sugarland II is fucking awesome so shut your mouth.