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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."
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.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
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".
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.
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!
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
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.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
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.
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.
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.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
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.