Blizzard Patches No-CD Support Into Warcraft III

Rock, Paper, Shotgun notes that in Blizzard's never-ending quest for perfect balance, they've added a handy feature for still-dedicated Warcraft players. Players will no longer need to have the disc in the drive in order to conquer Azeroth. This kicks off a discussion by blogger Alec Meer about the role of copy protection and anti-piracy in PC gaming: "I don't need the Paint Shop Pro disc in my DVD drive whenever I want to butcher my holiday photos, after all. It was always doubly unnecessary for a game like W3, which also employs serial number checks if you want to play it online. Having the CD check as well seems like leaving a polite post-it note on the windscreen of a driver prone to double-parking. Don't bother. Just wheel-clamp the bastard. While there're still some reasons to be circumspect about online distribution systems, they do spell an end to miserably sorting through quivering towers of plastic discs or popup-heavy crack websites. This brave new world, in which the data already installed upon my hard drive is all that's required to play a game I've paid for, is one I know I want to live in."

Comments

Was I the only one...

[kabocox]

I just went to http://www.megagames.com/ for the no cd patch. Oh this is the official no-cd patch. Well, that's a bit better. Kinda late though.

Re:Was I the only one...

[Jugalator]

Almost! Over here it was GameCopyWorld.

Re:Was I the only one...

[Brian Gordon]

GameBurnWorld?

Re:Was I the only one...

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

> I just went to http://www.megagames.com/ [megagames.com] for the no cd patch.
> Oh this is the official no-cd patch. Well, that's a bit better.

Company removes copy protection from ancient program. People mislead themselves into thinking the company's "seen the light!"

Nothing to see here, folks. Move along...move along.

> Kinda late though.

They waited for years before doing this, when the game's sales are largely over. Kinda late...for what then?

Re:Was I the only one...

[Goldberg's Pants]

The fact they've done it at all is great, even if it about 4 year too late. (When did WC3 come out anyway? The irony is I bought it close to it's release date and don't even remember.)

I shall reinstall WC3 now. Half the reason I don't have it installed for the occasional game is because it needed a CD crack, and I get tired of having to track them down. (Though most of the games I play these days either have no disk (IE. Steam or Elicense), or have no protection (Stardock titles).

It's all very well bitching about "kinda late", but as the saying goes, better late than never. *runs off to find Warcraft III disk.*

Honestly, who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not like requiring the original media has killed any console. Console gaming is larger than PC gaming these days.

No one cares about needing the disk. I'd rather require a disk than have every time I play the game recorded in their database, tracked by a serial number.

Re:Honestly, who cares?

[mmalove]

I disgree entirely. I care about needing the original disk. Moving towards a steam-like system of DRM where you don't need an easily malable sub-gigabyte coaster to unlock usage of your software license is a step long overdue.

MMOs caught on to this secret early on - when the value your game offers is mostly or completely through online play, you don't need a disk, you can do a much much better job checking accounts as they authenticate with your server.

And consoles are being released with built in HDs rivaling those in gaming PCs now. I wouldn't be at all surprised to be less than ten years away from never needing the gaming disk there, either.

Kudos to Blizzard, though as was stated above, a few years too late.

Re:Honestly, who cares?

[eln]

I care. These days, a consumer can reasonably have a terabyte of storage on his PC. With that kind of storage, I should be able to have hundreds of games sitting on my hard drive waiting to be played on demand. However, because of this stupid "CD required" garbage, I have to maintain a stack of CDs that have no purpose other than to verify I actually bought the game (never mind that in most cases, I also have to enter a license key during the install phase anyway).

Requiring a CD may not be a big deal if you only ever play one or two games, but if you're like me and have a varied taste in games, and may play even 5 or 10 different games in a week, having to switch around CDs is a major pain.

Re:Honestly, who cares?

[peragrin]

Gaming on OSX (enjoy the laugh for the moment) has one advantage very few of the CD checkers check the actual hardware only the mount point for required data. I can create a disk image of the cd in question and mount that before playing. It does take up some storage space but generally you only need one disc in particular in a multi disc set.

Re:Honestly, who cares?

[mabhatter654]

consoles don't have serial numbers, or 30 minute installs of hundreds of megs of data either.... They assume possession of the disc is proof of "ownership".

Re:Honestly, who cares?

[profplump]

Often they don't even verify that the disk contains the correct data; only that a disk is mounted with the correct name. Many games will work if you simply rename your hard drive to match the CD volume name. Others only verify a single folder or file on the disk (again, often only by name), and/or that the disk is removable.

If you're worried about disk space is may be worth checking -- just create an empty disk image and name is correctly. If that fails try adding the file/folder structure from the original disk using empty files. It doesn't work with everything, but it works with enough games to be worth checking, at least on space-limited devices.

Re:Honestly, who cares?

[Tridus]

I care quite a lot when the game's check fails due to some weird SecuROM system that determines my drive isn't really a drive due to a bug.

Re:Honestly, who cares?

[PrescriptionWarning]

Consoles also have longer load times on average... not to mention once the console is a couple years old, PC games surpass the graphics capabilities. Besides you can't tell me that if you could put your game CD in your console only once when you bought the game, then never have to swap out again that you wouldn't do it. Same goes for DVDs.

Re:Honestly, who cares?

[SoCalChris]

My son has a Reader Rabbit game that requires the CD to run. Every time he wants to play that game, he's got to have either me or my wife get the CD out, put it in, skip where it tries to reinstall the program because the CD was reinserted, and then start the game. It's a major PITA.

Re:Honestly, who cares?

[amuro98]

That's because until quite recently, consoles had no secondary storage system large enough to store a CD (much less DVD) worth of data. And when they did, hacks appeared immediately that let you copy a game to the hard drive and play it without the disc entirely. (pirates loved this - no discs to burn, AND faster load times)

However, now that hard drives are becoming more and more standard in consoles, games are beginning to use them for caching data (to improve load times) or in some cases, "install" the entire game ala PC. One of the biggest complaints about 'Devil May Cry' for the PS3 is that it literally needs 20 minutes to copy the game to the hard drive - and then you STILL need the disc to play. Just like the drain-bramaged model that PCs have used for years. Meanwhile, 360 owners can simply pop the disc in and start playing the game. Immediately.

Re:Honestly, who cares?

[edwdig]

Consoles also have longer load times on average

Not if you play on a Nintendo console. Wii games usually take a few seconds to load at startup and then rarely have noticeable load times after that.

Re:Honestly, who cares?

[PrescriptionWarning]

Likely because the more casual player base expects low load times, and on a Wii you have typically smaller textures anyway, however that is besides the point. If you could load in all your Wii games in just once (not counting Virtual Console games), then never have to swap CDs again, you would probably come to like that little bit of convenience. And thats all it really is, convenience. Plus there's the added benefit of less chances of scratching or otherwise maiming your game disc, especially helpful since all consoles have gone out of their way to make sure you can't make a legal backup copy.

Re:Honestly, who cares?

[urza208]

It's not even the space fact. People like me ( I am a student in a university). I am always on the move, and one day last week I had the urge to play some dota in between classes, and alas I couldn't becuase I don't carry my WC3 cd around with me. Or Diablo2, etc. I think this should be implemented right away in all programs, seeing as how it would actually have people like me... play more. That simple.

Re:Honestly, who cares?

[Achoi77]

Blizzard cares, they are looking to put forward some goodwill out for the benefit of players, and are sooner realizing that unmitigated piracy is not as rampant as the accountants are claiming(at least in terms of damaging their bottom line). Considering that the major draw for games nowadays is the online play, it's relatively trivial to track down who is a legitimate player and who isn't.

Back in the day when online gaming was the novelty, companies were trying to lock down who can play their game or not. That is now the obsolete mindset, as companies with half a brain are now looking to lockdown who can play their game _online_, which is much much simpler to control with the benefit towards consumer convenience.

I just read on an rss feed that Steam just broke the 15 million users barrier, and I believe Blizzard is looking for a peice of that cake. And if Blizzard is looking to widen their audience with regards to their other products, they are going to need market penetration. This move means they are trying to literally going to 'give' their game away - they want their game to be pirated. Because in the long run, if the consumer wants to get the full experience(the online play as opposed to the single player stuff), he's going to need to buy a copy sooner or later. This also means that Blizzard has faith that the products that they release are that good.

However, the disturbing trend may be that the single player experience may be compromised, since it would be considered a freebie at the cost of developers making the single player stuff. More and more games are either going to have a crappy single player experience or it's just gonna be too damn short (like an hour of solid gaming).

But overall, companies are soon realizing the benefits of offering 'the first hit free.' But l2drugdealing will only work when their product is of real quality, so it better be a damn good first hit.

Re:Honestly, who cares?

[edwdig]

Likely because the more casual player base expects low load times, and on a Wii you have typically smaller textures anyway, however that is besides the point.

It's just better coding & higher standards from Nintendo. Remember, the N64 was cartridge based because Mario 64 off a 2x CD drive would've sucked due to load times. The GameCube generally tended to have almost invisible load times in anything that wasn't a half assed port, yet its graphics were significantly better than the PS2's and almost on par with the Xbox's, both of which tended to be worse with load times.

If you could load in all your Wii games in just once (not counting Virtual Console games), then never have to swap CDs again, you would probably come to like that little bit of convenience.

Sure, if it's not required. I like being able to grab a game off my shelf and bring it to a friend's house to play and having it just work. Of course, it's also assuming that the console has sufficient space that I don't have to worry about managing it. Once I have to start uninstalling & reinstalling games, it's no longer convenient.

Re:Honestly, who cares?

[PrescriptionWarning]

Sure, if it's not required. I like being able to grab a game off my shelf and bring it to a friend's house to play and having it just work.

an excellent point I could not argue with. This is where the ingenuity of the developers would have to come in. Would they allow you to play games either from the disk or take a few minutes to load first, then take the disk out and never do it again? Could you start playing the game while all the data loads in the background while you play? Could you have it so it loads in the background, then have to option to simply overwrite the temporary files when the next game is put in for it to load its temporary files, or to keep it so you can play again without the CD? There's so many possibilities that are simply untapped because of the control that is generally exhibited over consoles. Oh well, whats a few seconds anyway :)

Re:Honestly, who cares?

[tepples]

consoles don't have serial numbers, or 30 minute installs of hundreds of megs of data either They also need a mod if you want to make your own games. For the Xbox 360, such a mod ("XNA Creators Club") costs $495 over the five-year expected life of a console.

Re:Honestly, who cares?

[FishWithAHammer]

Turn off autorun?

Re:Honestly, who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.alcohol-soft.com/
(And I'm sure there are Free solutions out there that do the same thing, I just prefer this setup as it's what I'm used too)

1) install Alcohol 120
2) create a 'fake' "cd-rom"
3) "Rip" Reader Rabbit to an ISO on sons Hard Drive
4) "Mount/Insert" the "ISO/CD" on your new "CD-Rom". Set A120 to Auto-Remount (reloads "CD" on computer reboot)
5) Put Reader Rabbit CD back in its safe case, never to be touched again.
6) repeat process for any other program that 'requires' CD.
7) ...
8) PROFIT!!!

Re:Honestly, who cares?

[Dutch Gun]

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/02/06

Re:Honestly, who cares?

[bendodge]

This is all fine and dandy, but what happens when I reformat?? Just today I had trouble activating some offline software online after a fresh XP install (the software doesn't need the net for anything except activation). If it just checked a CD, I wouldn't have such trouble.

Re:Honestly, who cares?

[Zaphod The 42nd]

Gaming on OSX... oh, so you mean Warcraft3?

Re:Honestly, who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

360 has been out for 2 years, easily flashed, still no ISO loading. PS3 isn't worth talking about since you can't even play backups yet. Wii ISO loading will come soon hopefully with the newfound hacking of it. It doesn't copy all of the game, it only copies the level and character models. Which is why you still need the game, there's still shit loads of data on the disk.

Re:Honestly, who cares?

[Lord Kano]

It's not like requiring the original media has killed any console. Console gaming is larger than PC gaming these days.

Who cares?

Adults.

LK

Re:Honestly, who cares?

[Bert64]

Not requiring the original media was a fairly significant driver for modding the first xbox, you can fit a larger HD and copy all you're games to it. Far more convenient than juggling a stack of physical media... Ofcourse, the high price of games do tend to keep the quantity of games people have down.

Re:Honestly, who cares?

[Bert64]

The license key itself is a pretty stupid way of trying to verify you bought the game...
It only takes one to leak onto the internet, and every pirate can use it. Meanwhile legitimate owners who need to reinstall the game for whatever reason find that they lost the little piece of paper with the code on and thus cannot play the game they legitimately purchased.

I know many people who were bitten by this, and the original vendor was unwilling to help - if they don`t have the code they wont even talk to them, and told them to buy another copy. The solution presented to people in this situation is to obtain a pirated copy or a crack... Even the most die-hard of anti piracy zealots don't usually have an issue with this, since they bought a legit copy in the first place. But it also gives a fair few of these people a taster for warez... It blows away the often spread myth that warez copies are somehow inferior, and shows them that the opposite is true - warez copies are usually better, as they get rid of ridiculous restrictions like license codes and keeping physical media in the drive.

Re:Honestly, who cares?

[Bert64]

Even worse, online activation ensures that the vendor can expire you're software whenever they want. Also if they go bust, you lose the ability to activate.

Re:Honestly, who cares?

[Bert64]

Quake's model was ok, nothing to stop you playing a pirated copy offline, but it didn't work online...
I believe you could play on a LAN, which seems fair.. I remember a game on the amiga which explicitly stated you could run a temporary copy on another system in the same location for lan play purposes. It's certainly not worth buying a game for such a quick casual play anyway.

I also like eve's model, give the program away but charge a subscription for the online play - you're buying a service which costs money to provide, instead of a collection of bytes that costs nothing to copy.

Re:Honestly, who cares?

[v1]

There are two additional angles to this. First angle is that the checker almost always checks for the presense of one specific file at a specific path. UT 2004 checks for the background picture that shows up in the CD's first file window. If that file exists, it assumes the disk is in the drive.

UT takes things one step further though, it only searches mount paths that claim to be DVDs. If you create a disk image for this, you will have to image at least 600mb of data to make it post as a DVD and not a CD. I found a "no cd" disk image that was a hacked compressed image, 48k, that showed up as a big empty DVD with one file on it.

Fortunately, in one of their more current updates, the silly requirement for the disc was removed and now I can play in peace. The problem I had was that when you started to play, the disk spun up and stayed spun up. This was to prevent you from ejecting the disk and inserting it into another machine to launch the game, to prevent passing a disk around at a lan game I suppose. But that's just paranoid. The problem is, this is a laptop (yes I know not the best gaming choice) but laptops don't do so well keeping a disk spun up. The entire deck vibrates because the disk is at high speed, and the machine gets a lot warmer. Those were the reasons I sought the "no cd crack" disk image.

Disk Utility doesn't do a good job at posting media type on disk images. In most cases it posts it as a generic media, which is usually not what the software is looking for. (UT would not go for this) Toast however, is very sly at mounting images and does a very good job of spoofing a CD, DVD, or whatever, when it mounts an image. So for most games nowadays that require CDs, you have to use Toast to mount the image to get the monkey off your back.

So unless you know how to hack a disk image, you're stuck with a 700MB .dmg (assuming you can FIND what file it wants, otherwise you will need 4.7gb for the whole DVD) in addition to the 9gb the game already occupies on your HD. Silly. If you're going to do that crap, RUN it off the CD, don't just require it because you're paranoid about piracy and waste my HD space.

Re:Honestly, who cares?

[TheThiefMaster]

The best is when you double-click on the game's icon (after SUCCESSFULLY installing it) and nothing happens. You fail the drm check for an arbitrary reason, and it doesn't even bother to tell you that. I'm looking squarely at Overlord, being the only game I've bought in the past year that I've NEEDED to crack to play. In my case, the most common problem is "what do you mean I can't load a 32-bit DRM driver on Window 64?", which is still very very rare. For some people it's "traces of cd emulation software detected, so I'm going to block you playing from your REAL DISK", which is just as annoying.

Out of the pc games on my shelf at the moment (about 30), at least 13 are either DRM-free (6, most of them guild wars + expansions) or have had a patch released that removes the drm requirement, and all but 2 or 3 of the rest have a no-cd/dvd crack available. Only one I've needed a crack to play, and it fortunately wasn't one of the ones with no crack available. That's not bad odds, but it could be better.

The scary thing is that I now have more games in steam than boxed on my shelf.

Re:Honestly, who cares?

[electrosoccertux]

I just read on an rss feed that Steam just broke the 15 million users barrier, and I believe Blizzard is looking for a peice of that cake. And if Blizzard is looking to widen their audience with regards to their other products, they are going to need market penetration.

Hm...interesting...they should make an online version of Warcraft... give the game to people for free or very cheap for a month, and just charge them for online play...yeah, Steam is definitely on to something here....

Re:Honestly, who cares?

[milsoRgen]

And consoles are being released with built in HDs rivaling those in gaming PCs now In what way have the console HDs rivaled PC HDs? It certainly isn't in speed or capacity or size? Last I checked the price for the 360 HD was absolutely ridiculous on a price to storage ratio. And since as far as I can tell they simply use commodity hardware there are really no increased performance benefits to speak of.

Re:Honestly, who cares?

[Tsoat]

Countless times I've wanted to replay SC and see if I can still hold my own against a zerg rush but everytime i get that nostalgia im confronted with 2 problems, 1)I don't have the disc and 2)im far to lazy to go track down an actualy copy of the disc, if I do actually go through the trouble of getting a copy playing the game only makes me miss D2 and WC so the problem was very cyclical however now that I don't need those pesky discs I can start destroying people online again. fear the !Tsoat

Please please please be a trend

[mrxak]

I really hope this sort of thing happens more often. I remember some games I used to play only required the CD if you hadn't copied the CD onto your hard drive, and that was because the normal install didn't include all the data needed for the game to run. But now that hard drives are so much larger, it'd be nice for more games to do that, even if they are on DVD.

Re:Please please please be a trend

[DrEldarion]

It will only (maybe) become a pattern in games where you have to pay to play. Why does Blizzard care if you buy the game for $15 if they're getting their $15/mo from you?

Re:Please please please be a trend

[king-manic]

It will only (maybe) become a pattern in games where you have to pay to play. Why does Blizzard care if you buy the game for $15 if they're getting their $15/mo from you? WOW was always no CD. Warcraft 3 isn't WOW. This implemented this on a $40 1 shot game with no reoccurring charges to access bnet.

Re:Please please please be a trend

[Constantine XVI]

Epic has removed the CD check from the first updates for UT and UT2k3/4. Not sure about UTIII though.

Re:Please please please be a trend

[Morkano]

A few other games where you don't need the DVD in the drive:

Stardock's Galactic Civilization II, and their new Sins of a Solar Empire. In fact, there's no copy protection on the disk at all. And once you buy it you can download it from them whenever you want, even if you completely lose your DVD and serial number. As long as you still know your Stardock Account.

World In Conflict also lets you play without the DVD when you play in multiplayer only, which is quite nice.

Re:Please please please be a trend

[thyrf]

The CD check is still very much in place with UT3 (as well as CoD4).

Re:Please please please be a trend

[nexex]

UT III has never required it.

Re:Please please please be a trend

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, with Blizzard it appears to already be a pattern. I just patched StarCraft and BroodWar. The latest patch includes no-CD upgrades.

Re:Please please please be a trend

[morari]

Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament 2004 both removes there disc checks in a patch, shortly after release even.

Re:Please please please be a trend

[mike2R]

Couldn't agree more. Steam is getting all my business at the moment simply because I find online activation infinitely less annoying than playing hunt the CD.

Re:Please please please be a trend

[Pendersempai]

We're talking about Warcraft III here, not World of Warcraft. Warcraft III is not a subscription game.

Re:Please please please be a trend

[Briareos]

The CD check is still very much in place with UT3 (as well as CoD4). So you "found" a leaked beta of the second patch for UT3, now with added copy protection?

The game as it is installed off the DVD it came on only wants to know it's serial number, once...

np: Blamstrain - Climate Control (Exosphere)

Re:Please please please be a trend

[michaelar]

This is becoming more common -- thank God -- but just-released titles will likely retain copy protection for a while after their street date. More and more often, later game patches remove the CD protection, but only after that critical first few weeks or months after release when buzz is strong and sales are high, and therefore pirate activity is highest. Game companies, if you're reading this, please consider scheduled expiration of CD protection as an acceptable anti-piracy compromise!

Re:Please please please be a trend

[Sancho]

Hope they never shut down the business. Or stop supporting a specific game that you want to play.

Re:Please please please be a trend

[mike2R]

Me too. I've thought about that but am prepared to take the risk. I really really hate CD checks.

Re:Please please please be a trend

[TheThiefMaster]

UT3 with the v1.1 patch doesn't require the dvd either. I don't know about pre-patch, but some people say it doesn't need the dvd straight after install.

Re:Please please please be a trend

[montyzooooma]

X3 removed the disk check with one of the last patches a year or more ago and I'm pretty sure that Gothic 3 removed the disk check with the last 1.52 community patch.

Re:Please please please be a trend

[zoney_ie]

You can get Warcraft III for €7 or so.

Re:Please please please be a trend

[Bert64]

Well once one of the cracking groups has made their own nocd crack (and it happens fairly quickly these days) the "protection" becomes worthless anyway.

Re:Please please please be a trend

[daninspokane]

I wouldn't worry about it to be honest. Valve is making bank off Steam. They've come up with an innovative system, and they know it... their customer base knows it. Most of my gaming is done through Steam now as well because it's just.. so damn easy.

Re:Please please please be a trend

[mike2R]

I think you're right. It's a interesting market since obviously customers, if they're are going to use an online service for games, want to do it all in one place. This makes the potential for Steam (which seems to be significantly ahead of it's competitors as far as I can see) huge - I can easily imagine Valve's profits from Steam dwarfing what they make from their own games in ten years or so.

StarCraft

[owlman17]

Not just WarCraft, also SC1 (Original and BW) patch version 1.15.2

- patch 1.15.2
    Feature Changes

- StarCraft and StarCraft: BroodWar no longer require the CD while playing the game. To play without the CD, please follow the following instructions:

Windows Users:
- Make sure you have "Hide extensions for known types" unchecked under Explorer Folder Options.
- If you own only StarCraft, copy "INSTALL.EXE" from the StarCraft CD to your StarCraft folder and rename it to "StarCraft.mpq".
- If you own StarCraft: Brood War, copy "INSTALL.EXE" from the StarCraft:Brood War CD to your StarCraft folder and rename it to "BroodWar.mpq".

Re:StarCraft

[kailoran]

I think I still prefer the 0.5MB "special" install.exe file (that I uhh... got from a friend), to the several hunderd MB original. Granted, this doesn't let you play the campaign, but this isn't what Starcraft is about anyway.

Re:StarCraft

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhh, the install.exe file isn't several "hunderd" MB. All of the actual installation files are either kept loose in a directory or in a separate archive file. The install.exe file just contains the code that says "copy these files" or "extract these files" (along with fancy things like splash-screens, EULAs, serial checks, install options, etc).

Re:StarCraft

[kailoran]

-1, Wrong. In the general case, you'd be right. However, in many Blizzard games, including Starcraft and Broodwar, install.exe is also a large archive of all the game files, taking up nearly the entire CD. There is no separate data file.

Re:StarCraft

[Rude Turnip]

I wonder if they've done this for the Mac version. I got around it before by creating a disk image of my Starcraft CD and mounting it to my desktop :P

Re:StarCraft

[poetmatt]

yep, oldstyle copy protection attempt right there is what it amounts to...of course anyone with even a little programming knowledge of pascal or even basic can copy everything the exe reads as it executes to crack the game in about 10minutes.

Re:StarCraft

[Some_Llama]

hmm, i have a directory for Starcraft that has followed across multiple installs and different boxes in my house, it has all the files needed to play multiplayer AND the campaign (original and BW), the only thing special i have to do is run a registry crack, otherwise the no-cd executable works just fine without ANY info from a CD.

IIRC, the install.exe is in the dir and the reg hack just takes the current path for starcraft and adds it as the CD path in the registry. then you use a loader to play.

and yes i still play it now and again.. can't wait for SC2 woot.

Re:StarCraft

[Anonymous Coward]

StarCraft and StarCraft: BroodWar no longer require the CD while playing the game.

Ah, crap. And here I just bought another SC disc at Goodwill so I could play multiplayer with my kid. Blizzard damn well better refund my $2.

Patch notes

[Kenoli]

The 1.21b patch notes can be read as:
- The game no longer requires the CD to play.

Or as:
- The game no longer requires a no-CD crack to play.

Re:Patch notes

[Kenoli]

PS I don't think they'll be updating the no-CD cracks for this patch version.

Re:Patch notes

[KDR_11k]

Don't underestimate what some people are willing to upload.

Never really understood the CD check

[a whoabot]

I never really understood the CD check. I mean, why can't the "signature" of a CD being present just be emulated? And that's indeed what all the pirated game downloads come with. I don't think I've seen a game where you actually have to have to actual game CD in order to play it: an image of the disc could be mounted using some program and the game played thinking that it is the actual CD.

Re:Never really understood the CD check

[everphilski]

I don't play many games, but straight-up emulation of the Diablo II and Starcraft discs were damn near impossible back when I played them. I tried, I had friends that tried. Blizzard and plenty of other companies do stuff to the disc that makes emulation difficult for the average gamer.

Re:Never really understood the CD check

[whtmarker]

Instead of emulating the CD description, just copy the entire CD into a folder and either map a network drive to it, use daemon tools, or virtual drive creator. One of the tricks I use is to name the volume/drive the same as the CD's name and i've never had any problems.

Re:Never really understood the CD check

[gEvil (beta)]

And yet simply making a disc image of the install discs with Disk Copy or Disk Utility always worked with no problems under OS9 and OSX.

Re:Never really understood the CD check

[everphilski]

Never had luck under Windows or linux (Slackware) ... never tried a Mac, I refuse to pay Steve Job's "vanity tax".

Re:Never really understood the CD check

[gnick]

I mean, why can't the "signature" of a CD being present just be emulated? Some games do check for stuff like that - And it's sometimes a real PITA. I bought the latest C&C game a while back. It not only checks for the original media, it scans to see if you have any disc emulation running on your computer. I run DaemonTools all the time and find it enormously useful. So, when I tried to run the game, it would detect DaemonTools and refuse to run - Even with the original media in the drive. Even exiting wasn't enough - it would detect the driver. It took hours of time and about a week of waiting before the EA Games had a fix for me. And, by that time, I had acquired a functional copy via TPB.

When it was all over, I thanked them for their help, but let them know how much easier the TPB solution was and let them know that I'd be using TPB until they got the bugs out of their protection scheme.

Re:Never really understood the CD check

[king-manic]

I've been playing both with Daemon tools. No CD ever required and haven't for a long time.

Re:Never really understood the CD check

[Anonymous Coward]

original starcraft never had copy-protection. just create an image, and your done.

Re:Never really understood the CD check

[TheThiefMaster]

You obviously haven't played any recent games this way.

One form of copy protection which is difficult to avoid involves modifying the disk to have two sectors with the same sector number. When seeking to that sector number from one direction, the drive will read one sector, when seeking from the other it will read the other (or something along those lines). This kind of disk can't be copied just by copying the files, because only one of the duplicate sectors will be copied. It can't even be got around by copying the entire disk to another, because CD-R and DVD-R (+/- and RW variants) all have the sector numbers pre-written.

However there hasn't yet been a form of copy protection that couldn't be circumvented by removing the copy-protection code from the executable.

Re:Never really understood the CD check

[everphilski]

How'd your rip D2 or brood wars? I was using Daemon Tools as well for the imaging. I'd always get crap when I ripped.

Not that it matters anymore ... I gave my CD's away a long time ago.

Re:Never really understood the CD check

[king-manic]

Use an older version of clone CD. Alcohol or blind write do an amazing job too.

Re:Never really understood the CD check

[TheSpoom]

Note that Daemon Tools (warning: I'm not sure but I think they might have added ad-ware, though I think it's optional) has emulation of a bunch of different copy protection mechanisms built in that you can enable.

Re:Never really understood the CD check

[The One and Only]

In the olden days of 2 GB hard drives, often the data had to be read from the CD while the game was running. I still have an old Mac version of Civ II that had varying levels of installation. If you did the full installation, the installer quipped that if you had that much room available on your hard drive, you should call them and buy more games.

Re:Never really understood the CD check

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using daemon tools for all my no-cd patching needs for roughly 3 years now.

Including WC3, SC&BW, Halo, etc. Just have to make the images right, no big deal.

This is nice though, it'll free up a few gigs.

(And since I play online, I figured it wasn't a big deal since I'm using valid keys anyways.)

CD checks for online games

[LehiNephi]

I agree with the summary--CD checks for exclusively-online games are pointless. Epic did it with UT2003/4, but after just a few months removed the CD check in a patch. For single-player games, I can understand it better. For me, a CD-check is far more preferable to some of the other (almost always ineffective) copy-preventing schemes out there. For example, I find Steam overly heavy-handed. Not only must you have a internet connection just to play the single-player game, but you can't sell the game to somebody without also giving them your Steam account. And the TOS specifically disallow that. For someone like me who would only use Steam because he has to, this is unacceptable, and squashed most of my interest in purchasing the Orange Box.

Re:CD checks for online games

[nuzak]

> Not only must you have a internet connection just to play the single-player game

You need the connection to activate it. Once that's done, you can play offline as much as you damn well please.

Killing the resale market isn't so great though. But I'm still sick of having to keep track of a stack of lexan dongles.

Re:CD checks for online games

[KDR_11k]

Steam allows you to unregister a key and sell it to someone else but you have to pay Valve to do that.

Re:CD checks for online games

[tepples]

You need the connection [to Steam's servers through the Internet] to activate [a single player game]. Can a residential dial-up Internet connection be leased for a week in most areas? Or does a new subscriber have to commit to one or more months at a time?

Re:CD checks for online games

[Sangui]

If you have a dial up modem, you can use http://account.netzero.net/s/landing?action=viewProduct&productId=free and get free dial up internet for 10 hours a month. But in reality you can have unlimited hours a month. Make a new account, more hours. That used to work, I dunno if it still does.

Re:CD checks for online games

[fyrewulff]

It doesn't, they lock your hours to the phone number you dial from now.

Great with WINE

[ArcherB]

The benefit to No-CD patches is that it makes it so much easier to play games under WINE on Linux. While I never had an issue with War3, other newer games give me grief such as Supreme Commander and C&C3. Both of these require a No-CD hack to run as neither will recognize the DVD sitting in the drive. (Yes, I do have the CD mapped to WINE D: drive) Removing the CD-In-The-Drive requirement would really take many of the barriers to playing these games under WINE and would open up that 1% of the market that are Linux users!

Re:Great with WINE

[Fweeky]

other newer games give me grief such as Supreme Commander and C&C3. Both of these require a No-CD hack to run as neither will recognize the DVD sitting in the drive Dunno about C&C3, but SupCom's CD check was removed in a patch 11 months ago, only a couple of weeks after it was released.

Re:Great with WINE

[BlueCollarCamel]

Not sure why your copy still requires the disc. SecuROM crap was removed in 3220.

Here is a retail to 3260 patch: http://thq.vo.llnwd.net/o10/SC/live/supcom_patch_1.0.3189_to_1.1.3260.exe, which I got from here: http://forums.gaspowered.com/viewtopic.php?t=13046

The original Unreal Tournament did the same thing. They required the disc up until the first patch, which is not unreasonable in my opinion.

Re:Great with WINE

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the official patches for Supreme Commander removed the disc-check a while ago. You shouldn't be having a disc reading problem now unless it has to do with the initial install.

Re:Great with WINE

[Das Modell]

I cracked my legal copy of Spellforce 2 because it has Starforce. I also cracked my legal copy of System Shock 2 because it stopped working after XP SP2.

Copy protections sure are useful.

Re:Great with WINE

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, use cdrdao to create a .bin and a .toc of the disks and mount them before playing? I wouldnt apply dubious no-cd-patches...

Good

[MBCook]

They annoy me to no end. It was one thing to keep the disc in the drive back when the data had to be pulled off (I wouldn't want to install Wing Commander 4 and it's 6+ CDs on my hard drive back then). Recently, this has been driving me nuts though. Valve has done such a good job with Steam, that it makes the problem even more obvious.

I bought Sam & Max Season One in the retail box, and it uses copy protection. I use a Mac and the game isn't available for my platform, so I have to play the episodes in Windows. I can't use Parallels because the copy protection thinks I'm using a copied disc. I can't use a disc image for the same reason. I can't play it under OS X. I have to boot into Windows. That takes a long time to shutdown OS X, start Windows, start the game, check the CD, then get into it. It's an amazing pain.

Sam & Max is not an intensive game at all. Even with the lowered performance of 3D stuff in Parallels, it should work fine. I understand Half-Life 2 not running well (it likes a beefy system), but there is no good reason I shouldn't be able to play Sam & Max that way.

But I paid for the physical media, because I prefer that. And because of that, I get copy protection. I'm seriously considering not playing Season Two at this point.

Re:Good

[SynapseLapse]

It's on steam. No CD fuss, no muss.

Re:Good

[thyrf]

Steam is an excellent way to buy and play games. However when buying any 'non-steam' games (infinity ward, epic, etc) the price rockets up in comparison to that of physical media. Example: I went to my local GAME three weeks ago and bought UT3 for £20 and Cod4 Collectors Edition for £25. Absolute bargain. Go to steam and CoD4 is $70 atm which for me works out to be about £35. Add VAT and the other stupid charges and it comes to about £47 - I know this because I bought it this way for my brother over Christmas.

You're really paying for the convenience when you go with steam (in some cases - orange box is a steal).

Re:Good

[zsouthboy]

If you actually buy the games right from Telltale, they're simply downloads, and they simply check with their servers to play. IIRC you should be able to WINE them then.

Plus, more money goes to them than the retail packaging.

Win/win.

Re:Good

[necro2607]

Dude, I agree that the cd-check is bullshit, but... just go grab a no-cd crack from somewhere like game copy world or mega games. ;) JFGI, btw.

Re:Good

[thyrf]

With Steam made games yes - but not from other publishers. You can't register CoD4 to your steam account if you bought it in a shop (and I should know because I tried).

Uh

[Anonymous Coward]

This took how many years for them to figure out and patch?

if only

[dtml-try MyNick]

If only other developers would spend about 10% of Blizzards amount of support to their games I'd be spending a shitload more money on purchasing new games.

WCIII is almost 6 years old now, and still Blizzard looks for ways to improve the experience.

This dedication to strive for perfection is the sole reason I have every single game they released sitting on my shelf.
Alternatively, this is also the reason I have only one EA game sitting on that same shelf. I got fooled once, won't happen twice.

You could argue that this patch is long overdue, but the fact that they even spend some resources on it is something to be hailed.

Re:if only

[SailorSpork]

You could also argue that if WoW hadn't taken off, they'd be a much poorer brand without the resources to continue to tweak its niche game years after it was released. The question is, does success lead to dedication, or does dedication lead to success?

Re:if only

[Anonymous Coward]

You, sir, deserve mod points.

I, too, have every Blizzard game on my shelf and I play, if even for ten minutes a day, at least one of their titles. Here lately it's been a mix between Diablo and StarCraft (which are both about a decade old).

It's rare I say this (no, really), but they deserve every single penny I've given them, down to the last drop. Well earned, Blizzard. Congratulations.

Re:if only

[king-manic]

You could also argue that if WoW hadn't taken off, they'd be a much poorer brand without the resources to continue to tweak its niche game years after it was released. The question is, does success lead to dedication, or does dedication lead to success? They had this dedication before WOW. Diablo ii, Starcraft, War 3, War 2 all had patches long after other companies would have abandoned them; and those patches were as often to fix play issues as to squash bugs introduced by the last patch. To put in perspective, each have had around 10 patches except war 2 while most games top out at 3 and for most games those 3 patches were to fix critical issues. I know it's bought my loyalty. If i spend $60 on a blizzard game I know I'll be playing it 5 years down the line (like I do with war 3). The cost per hour is ridiculously small so it's an entertainment value.

Re:if only

[adonoman]

Blizzard was a success long before WoW came out, but I agree that if they hadn't found continued success with WoW, they'd be spending less resources on maintaining older games. But consider that they are still releasing patches for Starcraft - a game that came out in 1998! Could you imagine Windows releasing new patches for windows 98, or Apple patching Mac OS 8.5?

Re:if only

[blahplusplus]

"This dedication to strive for perfection is the sole reason I have every single game they released sitting on my shelf. "

Blizzard in the early years released some real turdy games, it wasn't really until warcraft and diablo they became a force.

emulation

[Anonymous Coward]

Well for every other company who doesn't do this, that's what Alcohol 120% is for. Having to have the CD in the drive for an online game got old a long time ago.

BFD...

[geminidomino]

Give me a no-CD patch for Diablo II that doesn't lock into some weird windows API so that I can finally run it on wine without a headache.

What brave new world

[Kynmore]

The article says this is a "brave new world" to not need the CD... How old is this guy? Does he not remember the days before they required the CD to play? This isn't a brave new world, it's a return to the way things used to be. Funny, wasn't it Blizzard that started the "Disc Required" movement? I may be wrong, but I think it was Warcraft 2 or Starcraft.

Re:What brave new world

[IdeaMan]

I remember that. Wait were you talking about when they had laser cut holes in the floppy disk? Or maybe you're talking about when they printed a bunch of little images/words on different pages in the manual that you had to answer questions about?

Hang on, gotta chase those pesky kids off my lawn again...

Re:What brave new world

[Don853]

I remember that... from Lemmings on a Mac LC. The words were light yellow too so you couldn't photocopy the manual. I don't think I ever beat that game.

Re:What brave new world

[Kynmore]

Don't forget the cardboard wheel that came with Lucas Arts' Indiana Jones and The Fate of Atlantis... I really do miss some of the old verifications from the floppy days; some were games themselves.

Re:What brave new world

[toriver]

Yeah, I am having a whale of a time trying to play LSL 2 form the recent collection where they have scans of the manuals shipped as PDFs. In black and white. Where I am supposed to find the telephone number of a girl rendered in color in-game...

Bah on Sierra and their silly "ensure the user has the manual" protection schemes.

BF2's CD check made me quit the game

[QuantumRiff]

Last year, I moved to Ubuntu as my primary OS. I would still boot into Windows XP to play BF2 online. I bought a legit copy, and had registerd the serial, all that goodness. I bought and downloaded several expansion packs online. My DVD Drive died in my desktop. I couldn't play anymore. Didn't replace the drive, because I use USB pen drives for everything now. So now, EA won't get anymore money from me, because I can't play that game. (and I haven't booted into Windows XP More than 3 times since September.) Now, If more companies would allow you to download ISO's or whatever, and then install, I would be very happy. Been playing the ET:QW demo for Linux. I really like it, but don't want to have to go buy a Drive, plus the game. Since the game is pretty much online only, why don't they just check the keys when you come online like Steam does?

Re:BF2's CD check made me quit the game

[cmdr_klarg]

A DVD-ROM drive will cost you all of $20 from newegg.com. Surely you could get that much use from it?

Re:BF2's CD check made me quit the game

[WNight]

Nearly the same price as a 5.25" floppy drive. And about as useful. They're so fragile that I wouldn't put anything I wanted on one...

So he could pay $20 (+s&h) to get a dongle-adapter. Or, he could go to gamecopyworld.com and get a dongle-remover for free. And no delivery delay.

Re:BF2's CD check made me quit the game

[Anonymous Coward]

ET:QW does not require the CD to play. Just for the install. However, it does require an isp that does not filter p2p traffic. Been having no end of trouble with that.

Re:BF2's CD check made me quit the game

[Anonymous Coward]

Ya kno, just because they do not *officially* say it's okay doesn't mean it aint. Download the iso from your favorite torrent site, install. Then go buy the game and put in the key that comes with all that pretty packaging. No dvd/cd needed at all, what-so-ever. The thing I LOVE about commercial gaming in linux (native games ofcourse) is that requiring a cd is just non-existant.

what really annoys me....

[oliverthered]

what really annoys me is that you have to leave the DVD in the drive, but the game insists on installing everything to the hard drive and doesn't actually pull any content of the DVD for no reason what so ever.

I don't care if it take 15% of the load time I don't want my disk space wasted and have been able to setup games under Linux+wine with links so that the games pull the data of the CD instead and they work perfectly fine.

Steam/Battle.net

[SB5]

I remember the old days when the games asked you to find the 23rd word in the 7th paragraph on page 18 in the game manual.

That really sucked when you didn't actually buy the game. Because it didn't come with a manual, you just copied a floppy.

Re:Steam/Battle.net

[contraba55]

Or (back in the day) in Dr. Brain, it would give you coordinates to a map in the manual and you'd have to use the info there to play, each time. Made replay pretty hard once you'd lost the manual

Re:Steam/Battle.net

[erebus24]

I've still got my mix'n'mojo wheel here, one the more fun copy protections. I remember when my friend and I brought Monkey Island 2, the guy in the shop showed us how easy it was to take the wheel apart and photocopy it. Well I never said it was a good copy protection, just fun.

Re:Steam/Battle.net

[zegota]

Does anyone remember this in Metal Gear Solid? There was a frequency on the back of the CD case you had to call to progress with the game (true, you could look it up online, but it was more to be clever than copyright protection). I remember being so frustrated when the commander told me to "check the back of the CD case." I searched my inventory for hours.

Not another car analogy...

[melikamp]

Having the CD check as well seems like leaving a polite post-it note on the windscreen of a driver prone to double-parking. Don't bother. Just wheel-clamp the bastard.

This car analogy is about as effective as show chains strapped onto a steering wheel. A CD check (even with stored images & Daemon Tools) is a major PITA because it happens all the time during a normal operation, unlike the boot which happens only once in a while and only after a major screw up on your part.

Another reason

[Kelz]

All maphacking programs are currently fataling the game after the patch. This most likely has to do with the version number and not the programs itself, but it does kill off a few of the older MH programs that are no longer updated. I've used my lovely 32kb no-cd image for WC3 for a while, and it will be a chance to not have to have daemon tools running in the background all the time! (I have several legit CDs, I just don't like popping them in and out).

This is great news

[Prien715]

I still play fairly often -- it's one of the few multidimensional RTS playable in under 15 minutes on average. I've tried newer games (the new C&C/AoE. Supreme Commander, World in Conflict, Warhammer, Total War), but none of them seem to have the balance of playing both a quick and varied game -- with the exception of WiC.

Maybe I'm just old school, but I keep coming back to it (and Starcraft to a lesser extent) even though I played since the beta program.

This certainly is going to do nothing but encourage me;)

Anyone else still play often?

Re:This is great news

[king-manic]

I've tried newer games (the new C&C/AoE. Supreme Commander, World in Conflict, Warhammer, Total War) I agree, most of the RTS are 1-2h slog fests with little resembling play balance. Either all sides are the same, the sides are different but 1 is clearly superior, or only 3 units are useful and it's a rush to get these. Sup Com is probably the closest to War 3 or Sc level of balance but it's still a 1h-2h slog involving a lot of massing.

Re:This is great news

[Kelz]

Most people employ rush tactics in WC3, but then say that it takes 1-2h to do a good game of supcom. Early harassment while you consolidate control of the map in SC can very much win you a game in the first 20 minutes.

Re:This is great news

[Hatta]

I do, though Company of Heroes is taking more and more of my time.

Re:This is great news

[BeeRockxs]

Try Company of Heroes.

Re:This is great news

[king-manic]

Online on US west I noticed only lower level people employ rushes. Hero Harassing is a common alternative to creeping. But "rush" is not as frequent at higher levels because the chance of winning is mitigated by lower hero levels and delay of teching. It's somewhat map and player number specific, on 3v3 a rush is rare, 1v1 it's a quarter of the games. Hero harass is almost a given in 1v1 and many new players mistaken this for a "rush".

Re:This is great news

[Anonymous Cowpat]

so a strategy game rather than a tactical game then? You are aware that such a game was Chris Taylor's stated intention with supcomm, right?

Re:This is great news

[KDR_11k]

Try some Spring, the mods do have occassional balance issues but since they're still being maintained any such issue won't last for long and there shouldn't be anything major remaining.

Re:This is great news

[king-manic]

so a strategy game rather than a tactical game then? You are aware that such a game was Chris Taylor's stated intention with supcomm, right? I am, and i bought it. But it gets less play then war 3 (by a huge margin). TA had the similar thing. Neat but not my style. In the community i play those two with it degenerates into massing. Just trying to hold the map and pumping out the same unit mix. Slight variation of air vs ground vs sea. But always 1-2h slogs which are fun for the first 30 min then not so much for us.

Its about time

[shlepp]

Epic games has already done this with UT3, previous UT games had the cd detection removed. Doom 3 and Quake 4 also got protection removed with patches from ID.
Whats good is lots of games are available through Steam, which means no protection at all, if its one thing i do hate is having to get a new no-cd crack for an updated version of a game. Adding no-cd features to a games v1.1 update or initial release should be mandatory imho.

It's almost as if

[sakdoctor]

there had been a suddenoutbreakofcommonsense, but you have to ask yourself, whatcouldpossiblygowrong?

Stardock

[Hemogoblin]

All of the Stardock games have had this for awhile. Galatic Civilizations II was awesome, and apparently the new Sins of a Solar Empire is awesome too. It's nice to not be treated like a criminal.

Re:Stardock

[Spikeles]

Yeah there is a really good post here by the developers of Sins explaining their take on Copy Protection.

Hey EA, are you paying attention?

[alanshot]

Here's hoping other companies follow this lead. I am getting tired of swapping CDs.

What? I have NEVER had to have the CD

[halivar]

I've been playing WoW for almost 3 years, and play almost every day. The CD's are in the box, in a drawer, and have not left since I first installed. Is the CD check new, or something?

Re:What? I have NEVER had to have the CD

[syrinx]

I've been playing WoW for almost 3 years, and play almost every day. The CD's are in the box, in a drawer, and have not left since I first installed. Is the CD check new, or something?

Not only did you not RTFA, and not only did you not RTFSummary, but you didn't even RTFTitle!

We're talking about Warcraft III, not World of Warcraft.

Re:What? I have NEVER had to have the CD

[laffer1]

Warcraft III != World of Warcraft

I wish all companies did this with their old games. For the brief stint on x64 vista, I had trouble playing some games because the copy protection was not patched for vista (64bit). For instance, you can't play age of empires II conquerers (expansion) in vista x64, but supposedly macrovision released an update for 32bit vista. It's very annoying that I have all these games and can't play them. I ended up going back to XP for this and other reasons.

I could get the game to install, just not run without crashing.

Re:What? I have NEVER had to have the CD

[corychristison]

Warcraft... not WoW.

Damn I feel old.

Re:What? I have NEVER had to have the CD

[halivar]

Oh, c'mon. My UID's bigger than 500K. What do you expect from me?

wordy....

[Himring]

What a wordy way to say, "cool"....

If wishes were fishes

[NealokNYU]

"While there're still some reasons to be circumspect about online distribution systems, they do spell an end to miserably sorting through quivering towers of plastic discs or popup-heavy crack websites."

Hopefully this heralds a change in Blizzard's stance on distributing Warcraft III/Frozen Throne online. Currently, the only way to acquire them is to pay for hard copies. I have been reluctant to purchase ANOTHER Battle Chest after losing my first copies of TFT and WC3-- yes, I've purchased both games TWICE. A digital copy would help space cases like me endlessly.

I'm an idiot

[halivar]

WC3, NOT WoW. I can't even RTFS. Please mod me down. I must be purged.

Why I download pirated SW

[Anonymous Coward]

I was visiting my brother a couple of months ago and he told me to play this game he got for our nieces, said it was addictive (Viva Pinata, I should have known...). I'm not a gamer at all, but I do enjoy silly games from time to time.

He was at work on day while I was working from his place on my laptop and thought I would give it a try. First it complained about the CD. So I put it in, and then it complained about the network being down (my laptop was plugged to the modem, no router).

At that point I said "fuck it".

Once I got home I booted from linux to Vista, downloaded it from TPB, played some, and it wasn't even worth my trouble.

Moral of the story: copy protection generates piracy. I would have totally bought it had I loved the game and if there weer no hassles.

Re:Disks on OSX

[Psykechan]

MacBook Air and other no-optical systems will require this.

Disk Utility -> Create Disk Image -> mount image -> play game.

I am looking at a 631MB .dmg for the original game and a 480 MB .dmg for the expansion right now. This way I can play the game anytime I like and not have to worry about carrying my original CDs with me. I'm happy for this news because it will allow me to delete these as well as the Starcraft .dmg files. A few GB on a laptop is a big deal.

It's taken far too long for the gaming companies to figure this out. Ten years ago games would have no-cd patches out the same day that new copy protection came out. The really invasive ones took maybe a month or two but the crackers could play them. The only people who suffered were the legitimate buyers. Blizzard really should have learned this lesson back in 2000 when Diablo II was causing issues with legitimate disks but pirated copies worked fine.

Just copy protection

[Sycraft-fu]

In some cases it is simple, just checks for the CD and yes, you can copy the CD in any software and the copy will work. Not a lot of people that will weed out. Usually, it is a much more intense check. These days it is often a program like Safedisc 4 or Securerom 7. These check a lot of things to try and ensure it is the original disc. For example they'll ask the drive what kind of media it is (burners will report if something is pressed, burnable, or rewritable) and only run if it is pressed media. They also check various characteristics of the disc that are difficult or impossible to copy. They'll check areas of the CD that aren't normally copied (like sub channels) or things that are properties of the physical disc (like the ATIP). If they don't match, it won't run.

Regardless of the levels of checks, that's the purpose behind them. They are just trying to prevent you from making copies of the disc. It isn't because there is any useful data needed off of the disc.

Re:Just copy protection

[jandrese]

Of course all of those checks are rendered useless on the same day the game is released by crack groups that put out the no-cd patch. Personally, I hate hunting down the disc when I want to play a game, especially on my laptop where I often want to play a game on the road (who wants to lug their CD library with them wherever they go?). The only people those checks do anything to are honest people with cheap burners that get messed up by SecurROM and its rootkit like properties.

I'd argue that piracy is a big problem for the PC gaming industry, but these CD check things do nothing to prevent it. If anything, they drive people towards piracy because the pirated version is much less hassle. At least they don't make you look up words in the manual or spin the crazy decoder wheel or anything like that anymore.

Nice

[shoptroll]

Well they were hinting at this in the forums last week after they did the same for Starcraft. Sadly, there's no mention of doing this for Diablo II. They're also planning another balance patch for release at some point, which might add some features to Battle.net for the game as well.

This isn't exactly uncommon though. Epic Games usually disables the cd-check very early on in their patch cycle. I believe the DRM is mandated by publishers, while the developers seem to be more sympathetic to gamer's wants.

Online Distribution Will Save Us?

[morari]

Nah.

Try using a "no cd crack" instead. They've existed for nearly a decade and I've used them on every single one of my games that try to force you to put (and keep!) the disc in even though it's not accessing anything off of it. Copy protection via a present disc is not only a complete hassle, it's also dangerous. The more you move a disc around (from case to tray and back again), the more likely it is to acquire scratches and become unplayable in the future.

Online distribution (such as Steam) is just as annoying. Why should I have to run an external program that bogs down my CPU and bandwidth just to play a game? I shouldn't. Simple CD Key checks are good enough for online play, and no such protection at all is best for singleplayer. I'm not told to turn off any virtual drives I may have when trying to watch a movie on DVD in my computer. Game developers need to get over themselves.

Great!

[Tarlus]

I can finally unmount the virtual CD drive and free up the 600 megs that the ISO was occupying on my hard drive. :D

these work?

[phorm]

Any howto's on how you got these to work? They're pretty much the only games that I still reboot to windows for...

Re:these work?

[ArcherB]

Any howto's on how you got these to work? They're pretty much the only games that I still reboot to windows for... War3 just worked with the -opengl switch (wine war3.exe -opengl). I ran the installer and off it went...

C&C3 took a little finagling. First, I needed the NoCD hack. That allowed the game to run, but the cursor would never change. You would mouse over an enemy for example, but the cursor would stay an arrow rather than changing to the "attack" cursor. I found a wine patch that fixed that issue, but it required to me to recompile it into a folder in my home directory and then run it from there:

env WINEPREFIX="/home/archerb/.wine" $HOME/wine-cnc3/bin/wine "C:\Program Files\Electronic Arts\Command & Conquer 3\CNC3.exe" That runs like a champ, although it is not the latest WINE. The cursor thing is a known issue that will eventually make its way into the GA release of WINE.

I don't own "Supreme Commander". Instead, I bought the stand-alone expansion "Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance". It installed with no problems, but it is still asking for the DVD to be in the drive, even though it is in the drive. I finally found a NoCD hack today, but it's for the 1.0 version and I haven't had a chance to test it out yet.

WineHQ is an excellent resource with some great tips on getting things running. It's where I got most of my information and was lost before finding it.

So long overdue, it's painful

[garylian]

I can't tell you the number of games I've lost over the years due to damaged CDs. Yeah, you try to protect them, but when you end up switching CDs every few days because you wish to play a different game for a bit, sometimes the CD sits on your desk for a few minutes.

My copy of Temple of Elemental Evil worked fine for the orignal release, and the first patch. The second patch to come out wasn't compatable with DirectX 9.0c, so it was pointless. Applying the third patch to fix the second patch made my CD fail its check. So, the game worked out of the box, and through the first patch, but the 2nd/3rd patch broke my CD? You've got to be kidding me! And SecureROM analyzed my data, and said that it was because I had Daemon Tools installed. So, I uninstalled that, re-ran their program, and they said I must have a copy of an orignal CD. Since it's an Atari game that isn't being supported any longer, I can't get a new CD from the company.

Heck, my current copy of Hellgate: London acts up in single player mode (which requires the DVD to be in the drive. Multiplayer does not, as it should be.) Half the time I have to reboot my system, because SafeDisc doesn't recognize the DVD being in the drive. It spins, then stops and hangs. It's even told me that my OS isn't high enough, and I need to upgrade to Windows 98SE or 2000. I have XP installed. Some of that was the multi-language support, which can be clicked off, but the bottom line is, the copy protection makes the game sometimes unplayable without a reboot.

With the way today's games are, with the zero-day release always having a fatal bug (I believe intentionally) that requires a patch to be downloaded, there is no real need for this. Very few if any gamer systems aren't internet connected, so just make a simple verification check go out on the serial number, and let them play. No connection or a failure of that check, and no game.

It's one of the reasons I play MMOs so much, even though it is often solo. No copy protection to annoy me, no CD/DVD to keep track of, and less clutter in/on my desk.

Re:So long overdue, it's painful

[Hyperhaplo]

Very few if any gamer systems aren't internet connected

Oh, great, lovely idea. I'm about to lose my home net connection for at least 3 months. If this was the norm then I would not be able to play during this time.

Let's add this to the Ravenshield 'check the connection every 10 seconds, whether it freezes the game or not' and you start wondering why you bother at all.

That said, I still play UT. One of the few games I am happy I bought, sad that I lost the disk, happy that I don't need one to play it.

SupCom CD check was removed shortly after release

[vecctor]

Just an fyi since you mentioned the game: they released a patch to remove the CD check for Supreme Commander just a couple weeks after release.

Simple Solution

[ThePlague]

Burn an ISO of the CD or DVD using DDump (or your favorite ISO burner), and mount it using Daemon (or your favorite virtual drive). I haven't used the physical Disk to verify usage in years. I buy the game, touch it exactly once to burn the ISO, then install from that ISO and keep it mounted to play. Easy.

Re:Disks on OSX

[UnknownSoldier]

Regarding Diablo II ...

- On PC Daemon Tools or Alcohol 120% works great.
- Does this Disk Utility trick work on an old Mac running OS X 10.3 ?

Frequently patched out

[6350']

CD-check is just a really basic, broad-spectrum, anti-casual-pirating deal in most cases. It's become increasingly common to patch it out at some point in a game's lifecycle. You want to have it present during the bulk of your sales (ie, early on) but particularly with a game that has a significant online component (that is, vocal users), you also want to get rid of it sooner than later (of course, Blizzard is a special case, and mmo's are a different story).

Last game I worked on, we had the CD-check already removed for the 1.1 patch (which itself was completed before the game even hit the shelves), and we released it in less than two weeks from the date the game appeared on the shelves.

The easy to circumvent things like this really are just there to discourage casual copying amongst average Joe's. While of course this and pretty much anything else can be gotten around, the people who do, know how to do, or would make the effort to do, these kinds of things are a subset of the larger market. So, studios/publishers will add in some of the basic old school protections as a kind of first order protection.

These kinds of things are kind of annoying, but the idea is to not have a Tribes 1 experience (zero, and I mean *zero*, copy protection of any kind: you could literally drag-and-drop the install folder into ICQ, so to speak, and send the whole thing to your buddy). It was sad to see the sales-vs-players numbers for Tribes 1: seventy thousand copies sold with 350,000 players online has got to bring a tear to the eye.

Re:Frequently patched out

[Anonymous Coward]

Problem is, companies don't exist forever, and support doesn't last nearly that long. Some of my favorite games (such as Dungeon Keeper) have no "official" patch source. And fan sites that archive the patches are even more likely to disappear overnight. What happens to these purposefully-bugged-to-need-a-patch games in the future, when there's no longer the ability to get the fix (or get the nocd)?

Re:Frequently patched out

[NotBorg]

> It's become increasingly common to patch it out at some point in a game's lifecycle.

Or in this case some point way past its lifecycle. So far out that chances are that you'd have to buy or pirate the software again because the original medium cannot be found or was damaged (sometimes the result of a momentary laps of extra-paranoid-and-careful-care in the process of swapping disks). It's more "common" for the game to never be patched or patched too late--too damned late--to matter.

Re:Frequently patched out

[hidannik]

That's hardly a fair comparison, unless those numbers were collected before Tribes was offered by the publisher for free (as advertising for Tribes:Vengeance, IIRC). Were they?

Hans

Re:Frequently patched out

[Lord Kano]

I think that Tribes was meant to be pirated. It was multiplayer only, no copy protection and didn't have any registry dependencies from the installer.

I felt so bad about ripping that game off that I bought Tribes 2. It sucked.

LK

Re:SupCom CD check was removed shortly after relea

[ArcherB]

Just an fyi since you mentioned the game: they released a patch to remove the CD check for Supreme Commander just a couple weeks after release. I should have been more specific. I have Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance. The error I get when I try to launch the game is "A required security module can not be activated. This program can not be executed." According to WineHQ, a NoCD crack fixes it.

Do you know if there is an official NoDVD patch for Forged Alliance?

Motivation for No-CD

[AlpineR]

I posed this question when the Starcraft No-CD patch came out: What is Blizzard's motivation?

My hypothesis was that it was going to be part of a promotion for Starcraft II. Make original Starcraft a download for cheap or free to bring back old players and introduce new ones. As a map maker, the influx of players would be exciting.

But the more likely explanation is that the Mac Book Air was just released and has no CD drive. Blizzard is good at supporting Macs and keeping old games playable, so this is probably just a continuation of that policy.

About goddamn time

[AbRASiON]

We've had to use daemon tools for years, why they didn't do this sooner is beyond me because we need a GENUINE CD KEY.
Ugh.

Massively multiplayer online cash cows

[tepples]

MMOs caught on to this secret early on - when the value your game offers is mostly or completely through online play, you don't need a disk, you can do a much much better job checking accounts as they authenticate with your server. You forgot a few words there: "you don't need a disk, you can do a much much better job emptying your customers' checking accounts as they authenticate with your server." ;-)

Re:SupCom CD check was removed shortly after relea

[Fweeky]

Yes, Forged Alliance's DVD check was removed in 1.5.3598, which is about 2 months old. Run GPGNet and it should grab the latest for you.

They are worse than a hassle

[Sycraft-fu]

There are many, many cases where the copy protection schemes will cause legit copies of games to refuse to function. They are incompatible with a given drive, or a utility installed on the system and so on. Securerom in particular has a lot of problems with various hardware and software (including a number of version have Vista compatibility issues). So they are a hassle when they work, but when they don't they stop legitimate customers from using their software. This is more true these days since they are more aggressive, and they rely on some rather tricky things (like trying to accurately read ATIP) to validate discs.

Tribes 1

[Craig Ringer]

A 70,000 sold to 350,000 online ratio is pretty extreme, and probably does indicate many lost potential sales. However, it certainly does not mean 280,000 lost potential sales ; many people will be online solely because they could get it for free. I wouldn't be at all surprised if some people bought it because of the greater impact it made and improved word of mouth spread. I know I did. (Then I bought Tribes 2, and wasn't that like a stab to the eye).

I'm sufficiently annoyed about recent "advances" in copy protection - incredibly invasive crap that can make it dangerous to install a game on a machine you also need to get real work done on, the ongoing irritation of finding the damn CD, the head-popping fury involved if the CD/DVD is damaged and your perfectly good install is unusable, the fact that you can't fix it with a no-cd anymore because of the (useful and necessary) cheat protection software like Punkbuster, AND THE KNOWLEDGE THAT PEOPLE WHO PIRATED IT ARE GETTING A BETTER GAMING "EXPERIENCE" THAN YOU ARE, just makes me less likely to buy games.

The online check for serial uniqueness in multiplayer games is a vastly more effective blocker of casual copying and is infinitely less aggravating for the user. So, for multiplayer games like the Battlefield series, why on earth do I need the DVD in the drive? It's just another thing to go wrong, to get lost or damaged, and it's simply annoying. When I'm playing with a friend, if one of us forgot to bring our disc we just launch it, eject the disc, and pass it along. We still both have the required unique serial numbers. How does requiring the disc make any difference, except as something that can be lost/damaged and thus make it harder for me to play the game I bought (another point of failure)?

I have a lot of older games on my laptop. Some I just bought ages ago or have picked up from a bargain bin. Some are from magazine CDs etc, often released as promos when a new version on the same concept is released. Some are from "abandonware" sites. In all cases I can play them without the CD, and it's such a massive improvement in convenience (especially as I exclusively use a laptop; I often don't even have the CDs with me) that I find it harder and harder to care about the new stuff.

Personally, I'm also VASTLY more likely to buy a game I can play with a a couple of my friends who enjoy online gaming. I find solo online play a rather boring experience that's mainly about being repeatedly let down by packs of idiots, and I don't have the time to waste, nor do I play enough, to be interested in the whole clan scene. Being able to play a team or side oriented game with a few friends in close co-operation (in the same room or by voip) makes everything vastly more fun. However, since it now costs us more than $300 (plus expansions, usually) to get set up, we buy and play a LOT fewer games than we would if we could share a copy, or buy extra player licenses at a lower price. For example, if I'd been gaming with the other two when Tribes came out, I guarantee there'd have been at least one sale from me.

I also pirate games to see if they suck before I buy them. I'd feel it less necessary if games and their demos weren't all so buggy at release that some are simply no fun to play, and patch release notes so lacking in detail that it's hard to guess if it might now be in an acceptable state I'm prepared to pay for. One upon a time this would've meant that by the time I bought it there'd been a price drop (as far as I'm concerned that's the price of publishing buggy crap with annoying copy protection) but these days they stay at AU$100 for a year or more anyway. Despite that, I'M STILL MUCH MORE LIKELY TO BUY A GAME IF I CAN BORROW IT, OR PIRATE IT, FIRST

. I've been burned too often by buying games that turn out to be utter crap, or simply buggy enough to be more like work than fun, and am no longer prepared to reward a company for releasing such crap, so I feel it's necessary to try the game before paying for i

Re:Tribes 1

[6350']

Geez, caps AND bold AND bolded caps - so I take it I can assume that we've discovered your hot-button topic?

Re:Tribes 1

[Craig Ringer]

Pretty much ... it's just so stupid, and in such a pettily annoying way. Making entertainment products too annoying to use really gets to me; I'm driven to similar foaming fury by DVD CSS region coding (read: regional price protection with bonus unreliability) with control locks, often misused or incorrectly applied to do things like prevent returning to the menu from the main page.

At least with a DVD you can just rip it or use a player that's been fixed (or written in the first place) to ignore the stupid parts of the standard.

It all comes down to locking me out of products I've bought and making them harder to use. Things like hardware dongles on software are bad enough (can you say single point of failure?) but the very notion of adding highly user-hostile features to entertainment products is nigh incomprehensible.

he FBI has been notified.

[KidKadaver]

zero, and I mean *zero*, copy protection of any kind
I'd argue that it was more like .01, but their copy protection was memorable if you encountered it.

One of the most widely used illegal distributions was dubbed DaJackal. New players with this release (who had neglected to properly configure the game before going online) could be easily identified by the altered default player name "DaJackal". A few mods (notably Shifter and sub-variants) even included code which would automatically kick any player with this name attempting to connect to a server running the mod. Similar code was included in one of the later official game patches, which would kick the player and then send the following message: "The FBI has been notified. You better buy a legit copy before they get to your house." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starsiege:_Tribes#Piracy

Re:Disks on OSX

[Anonymous Coward]

Parent here but posting as AC.

Yes, the Disk Utility method works fine for Diablo II and I have personally tested it all the way back to 10.3.3 (G4/G5 PPC) and even installed with the Carbon Installer. It works on 10.4 and 10.5 with both PPC and Intel.

I wish that Blizzard would release a patch for D2 to not only grant the no-cd check but also to give it a Universal Binary so it can do GL mode on the Intel Macs.

Hurray!

[Mishotaki]

Hurray! or not, from now on, i got a free DVD drive that isn't doing anything in my computer...
All because i had to buy a second drive because of my Warcraft 3 CD taking a drive permanently over the years, and i didn't want to bother switching the CDs around so many times to always put back the same CD...

Anyone want to buy a cheap DVD reader? only spinned a couple thousand times to check if my Warcraft 3 CD was inside when i start the game...

trade-off

[Lord Byron II]

The trade-off of course is having to submit to a serial number inspection upon every loading of the game.

It can, and I HAVE TO for C&C3!

[Cybrex]

Daemon Tools is an excellent utility for doing just that in Windows. I highly recommend it.

I discovered Daemon Tools when my legal, purchased (pre-ordered, even!) copy of Command & Conquer 3 suddenly stopped recognizing the disc. The disc is pristine and had worked for about a month with no issues, and there had been no changes to the system at all (I only use the PC for C&C and Half-Life) I tried using 2 different drives, applying the official updates, etc., etc., etc., to no avail. I easily wasted three full nights trying to get the game to recognize my disc and had no success whatsoever.

In desperation I looked for no-CD cracks, and stumbled upon Daemon Tools. In less than 10 minutes I was up and running. In a bit of irony, after all the time spent wrestling with the game to get it to run I'd lost my "inertia" with it and mentally moved on to other things. I played a couple of maps that evening and haven't launched the game since.

Re:Disks on OSX

[UnknownSoldier]

Sweet! Gonna have to try that out -- I'm running OS X on an old PowerBook G3 (Bronze Keyboard) :-)

Thx for the info!

Re:SupCom CD check was removed shortly after relea

[vecctor]

Yeah, from GPGnet news section:

2007-11-09 05:52:52

Forged Alliance Patch

We have released a patch for Forged Alliance. This patch only removes Secure-Rom. It will not invalidate existing replays.

cdkeys

[rpgSE]

You can still get cdkeys at http://www.mmoexchange.com/ so you no longer need to even go to the store. Everything is digital! Rob http://www.gamertex.com/

Quake Wars

[__aabgfe356]

My friend recently convinced me to try his copy of Quake Wars and i was a little nervous thinking i might get his CD locked out or something, but when i finally got around to trying it, it turns out you dont even enter the CD key in until you decide you actually want to play online. Considering this is really an online only game (some would argue this of WC3 too) as single player is the same game but with bots, it makes a lot of sense to do it this way. So basically, you can lend the game to someone have them install it, you dont have to give them the CD key, they dont need the CD to play and they can try the game, if they like it, go out and buy the disc or get it off Steam. Its almost like having a demo but it dosent restrict any part of the actual game, only the ability to play against real people! Kudos to id and Splash Damage for setting up Quake Wars that way.

If they would only do it for Diablo II

[jonwil]

A no-cd crack for Diablo II would finally eliminate some of the hacks required to get the game working in WINE.

Plus, if the no-cd applies to the Mac version too, people can play Diablo II on their new MacBook Air without the need to lug an external optical drive around everywhere :)

Re:If they would only do it for Diablo II

[oneplus999]

Plus, if the no-cd applies to the Mac version too, people can play Diablo II on their new MacBook Air without the need to lug an external optical drive around everywhere :)
For WC3 it does apply, which is great for me. I never wanted to install risky bootleg hacks on my mac, since it's also my work computer.

I don't like using cds or nocd patches

[Rycochet]

As I've got several hundred games (originals), as well as several tb of space in my computer, I just install games when I feel like it and play them without using nocd patches or having to get the disks out again...

How do I do that you ask? Oh - a nice little program I bought several years ago called GameJackal. It builds up a "cache" of the cd the first time you run the game, then you just pop out the cd and play happily without it in future.

It's not perfect, but as it does almost every game over 6 months old without any problems, and only a few problems with newer ones (till it's updated etc) I'm quite happy... Even means I can run game updates without having to uninstall nocd patches and find new ones...

I beg to differ

[Vacardo]

"popup-heavy crack websites" www.megagames.com isn't too heavy on the pop-ups, and is a breeze to use if you're using Firefox with script-blockers

Keep in mind..

[snuf23]

Starcraft isn't just a game - it's the South Korean national sport.

Re:Keep in mind..

[adonoman]

Good point.

Re:Disks on OSX

[peragrin]

yep after it is installed create a DMG of the expansion disc. I can mount that and load the game on my laptop. what I haven't tried is to install it on an intel mac but it works great under 10.3 10.4 on PPC.

Re:You can download WoW for free (legally)

[Anonymous Coward]

Believe it or not, you can download WoW for free directly from blizzard. Of course, you still need a WoW account which requires purchasing the game to get but as long as you have a valid WoW login/password, you can download the game from them anywhere.

You can always get around this...

[DrVomact]

Back when I played a bunch of games that had the "CD in the drive" requirement, I got a product called Virtual CD. It allows you to create a set of virtual CD drives on your system, and mount images of the CDs you need on those drives. (You have to create the images by copying the CDs or DVDs first, of course, and store them on your hard drive.) This meant I could take my laptop anywhere without lugging around a bunch of discs and fiddling with them every time I wanted to run one of these programs that insisted on seeing its installation CD before it started. It was a bit of a hassle to configure Virtual CD so that it would automatically mount the appropriate CD when you double clicked on an application, but once I set it up, it worked flawlessly.

These days, I don't run much software that has this requirement, so I haven't used Virtual CD (http://www.virtualcd-online.com/) for a couple of years. But I'd highly recommend it if you do have this need.

Same for SC

[ZaSz-RH]

They did the same patch to StarCraft!