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Mass Effect DRM Still Causing Issues
An anonymous reader writes "There was some discussion last month about the proposed DRM for Mass Effect and Spore that required the game to phone home every ten days. They backed down from that, but have left in that a user is only allowed 3 activations per license key. A license key is burned up when the O/S is reinstalled, when certain hardware is upgraded (EA refuses to disclose specifics of what), and possibly when a new user is set up in Windows. Only in its first month, some users are already locked out of their games from trying troubleshooting techniques to get the game running."
Why the heck should I buy that crap? No game is good enough to make me jump hoops like a circus lion. Personally, I'd feel insulted. I get to cry, rant and rave, spend my time and money trying to find a solution to their copy protection problem, while I watch others play the cracked and downloaded copies.
Is that the message I should get out of this? Buy and cry, but copy and enjoy?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The same that I've sadly come to the conclusion about many times. Your best bet is to buy the game, stick the box on the shelf and then use the pirated version. I'm all for creators receiving compensation for their work because they work hard and pour themselves into their work, but at the same time I'm not going to let their (or more correctly their publisher's) paranoia about what might happen to their software deny me the goods/service I paid for. As the a sage bit of advice goes, the people who were going to steal your product were never going to be your customers and generally going to draconian lengths to stop them will make your actual customers steal your product because it's less hassle than the legitimate version. SecuROM in particular has been a grievous offender in this regard.
I'm not sure where they got the idea that treating their legitimate customers to a worse experience than the ones who steal their product was all that smart, but I'm pretty sure it was from the same think tank that told the RIAA that suing their customers would be good for business.
I still have old games I install from time to time, most notably the Baldur's Gate series.. They have survived tens, if not hundreds of OS (re)installations (including getting them running in WINE, virtual machines etc) and various computers I've had over the years. With a limit like this, I certainly wouldn't have bought it again, but probably pirated it.
At least Bioshock and Mass Effect have used it so far. Unless enough people protested by not buying those, I don't see why they'd remove it from Spore.
It's a pity, but a lot of people either are ignorant about the DRM, or don't care. Obviously they never bought music from an online store that since shut down.
Yup -- that's why I'll put up with Steam, but not with SecuROM: Steam is convenient; it reinstalls my games for me if I replace my hardware, prevents me from needing to keep track of physical media and CD keys and whatnot, and (ever since I've had it, at least -- I didn't get on the bandwagon at first release) Just Works; the only thing I worry about is whether I'll be able to fire up my old games and go for a trip down nostalgia lane 20 years from now when the good folks at Valve have gone on to other things.
SecuROM, on the other hand...
Like many such schemes...
The radio in my car requires entering a code every time the battery is disconnected, as the legitimate owner of the car i have forgotten the code and gone to considerable expense to get it recoded...
The guy who recoded it didn't take very long, neither i suspect would a thief. So only the legitimate user gets inconvenienced, anyone who steals the radio will have a lot less problem with the "anti theft" mechanism than i have.
On the other hand, my radio is obsolete (1995), a nonstandard size, and riveted and bolted into the car so it's not likely to get stolen anyway.
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My Comcast (Motorola) DVR threw constant HDCP warnings when turned on, despite the fact that I had nothing but an HDMI cable between the DVR and my TV set.
After the third consecutive week of being screwed out of watching South Park live (and paying over $150/month just for the television services) I returned the damn thing, and I now use Torrent to get ALL my TV content. When I find a decent ISP I'll be canceling the Comcast Internet too.
I was more than happy to pay for the service. But when their copy protection continuously fucked me over (despite other markets getting firmware updates to fix this known problem more than a year prior) I decided to stop rewarding bad behavior.
Thats what they get for buying it instead of pirating it. The cracked version(s) don't have any problems like this.
I think it's worth pointing out that the two methods (purchasing and cracking) aren't mutually exclusive. When a company adopts draconian (or just plain stupid) licensing tactics, you can still purchase the software (for legal, moral, etc reasons) and then proceed to download a crack for your copy or just a cracked one via "the usual places". It's not ideal and not perfect, but at least you can run the software you paid for.
At my last job we had some software that required a hardware dongle attached to a license server. The problem was that the licensing software used some hacked-up bastardized version of NetBIOS which meant that only clients on the same subnet as the server could connect and authorize themselves. After weeks of haggling with the company and them refusing to fix their crappy licensing software ("It works for everyone else!") we just found a license crack online and applied it to all the client workstations.
Were we legal enough to survive an audit? I have no idea, but we we were fully licensed for all the clients connected and I think that's what mattered.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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Likewise I have had no problems with Direct2Drive. Perhaps surprisingly the DRM is from Macrovision, but Macrovision does actually take seriously the notion that DRM can be an enabling technology. No physical CD required? And good customer support (from the Trymedia backend)? Yup. And no activation hassles for multiple/reinstalls. It's surreal that Macrovision is now the "good guy" in the world of DRM.
DRM doesn't have to be evil. But of course it can be.
Is anyone REALLY that surprised?
Note to John Riccitiello and the meatheads at EA: Take a page from Brad Wardell and the folks at Stardock Entertainment - DRM doesn't work - his words were....
"Blaming piracy is easy. But it hides other underlying causes. When Sins (of the Solar Empire) popped up as the #1 best selling game at retail a couple weeks ago, a game that has no copy protect whatsoever, that should tell you that piracy is not the primary issue."
I love SotSE and it's about as hassle-free of a game as it gets. WHY does nobody else other then Wardell and his group get this?
People will accept DRM and actually embrace it if it adds to their convenience. Of course, there's guys like me who won't touch it with a ten foot pole, no matter how convenient, but for the majority it can even be a selling point that you don't need to "prove" anything because all the proof is already there that you're a legitimate customer because it's in their files.
That's how DRM can work. When you use the M in the acronym as "management" and not as the "mangle" it's been used usually.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Steam is convenient; it reinstalls my games for me if I replace my hardware, prevents me from needing to keep track of physical media and CD keys and whatnot, and (ever since I've had it, at least -- I didn't get on the bandwagon at first release) Just Works; the only thing I worry about is whether I'll be able to fire up my old games and go for a trip down nostalgia lane 20 years from now when the good folks at Valve have gone on to other things.
I have a question about steam... how does it work if you have two computers (or more)? I mean if I buy Bejeweled, on my steam account, can my wife play it while I'm playing Civ?
I don't really object to being prevented from playing a given purchased game on two different computers at the same time... but being prevented letting my wife or kids play play ANY OTHER steam game is unacceptable... if that's how it works.
Currently I have 1 steam title (Portal) and I'm happy enough with the service but I'm hesitant to buy any more due to this fact.
Its also apparently impossible to give other people your games when you are finished with them. I've lent purchased games to my brothers on many occasions, and I've got games I've borrowed from them.
I realized this when I wanted to lend Portal to one of my brothers, and realized I couldn't because it was tied to my steam account... which isn't the end of the world, he's my brother and I trust him, and I could give him the userid/password for my steam account (in violation of the steam agreement of course)...
but that means, that while my brother is playing portal, I wouldn't be abe to play any of my steam games? Again I could live with not being able to play it while he was, but I wouldn't be able to play ANYTHING?
And worse... apparently they use some sort of ip tracking so if a steam account is accessed from widely different locations they'll ban the account -- so now if I 'lend' my brother my copy of portal, I'm locked out while he's using it and risk getting banned if we try to access the account at the same time. (as both my brothers live in different cities?)
Is this correct? Or have I misunderstood how steam works?
D2D's DRM isn't enabling jack. A DRM-free game could achieve all the same features you mentioned (same as with DRM-free audio tracks). The only thing the DRM does is mollify the content publishers.
That said, the sort of DRM that Direct2Drive and other similar services use is fairly unobtrusive when compared to SecuROM and its ilk.
Oh, it wouldn't take a thief long at all. Most people keep their car's manual in the glove box, which tends to have the radio's code stamped somewhere therein. If you are snatching a radio, might as well grab the manual while you are at it.
Mind you, I agree on the value. I've not seen too many factory stereos worth snatching. There's always that guy in a crack haze who will be happy to get $5 for it, though.
This is how I have been treating games for a while now. My PC can make prettier graphics than the 360, but I enjoy the experience so much more. Not fiddling with installation and being able to carry the games over to a friend's house without hassle is very nice compared to being stuck, hunched over a computer, looking for cracks, updates, etc.
It's funny, just a few days ago my Mass Effect started acting up, and I was close to the end already, so I went looking for a crack... god, there are tons of fake ones out there, or half-working ones that don't let you save (demo executable?).
I eventually found a home-made (vs warez-released) crack, by some guy name Gniarf on some random forum, that works 100%. I don't know who Gniarf is or how he pulled it off, but if a random dude on a forum is able to crack the DRM in Mass Effect, it seems to me like EA wasted a shitload of money on that DRM for absolutely nothing.
What did EA gain from the DRM ? A bunch of frustrated customers who got clobbered by the 10-day activation, as many had predicted. Would it have sold less copies without DRM ? Doubtful, seeing how quickly the fix was produced. It's not even a race anymore, the cracks come out so fast, I wonder why the game houses even pretend to put up a fight. Dead horse much ?
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Elder Scrolls 3 - Morrowind, safedisc harmed performance so much that the developers removed it in the first patch. The nocd crack was recommended by just about everyone.
Part of the problem is that the developers don't usually install any DRM, it's usually done by the distributors.
So even if the developers thoroughly test a product, but the public always beta tests the DRM.
Oh absolutely. I mean the old "enter serial number" and then you're done... Awesome. Anything beyond that adds more wrinkles, each one of which can screw over the user.
Look at all those poor saps who bought music from Microsoft's service that's shut (or shutting) down. They won't be able to relicense what they've paid for.
The end user is the one who suffers. I spent several weeks unable to play Neverwinter Nights due to the copy protection not liking my CD drive. Wound up having to get a crack just to play what I paid for.
Another great example is Starforce. I have GT Legends here. Came free with GTR2 (which didn't use Starforce). I daren't install it given my last system suffered damage from Starforce. So I've got this great game I really want to play, but daren't risk installing it. Starforce is so woven into the program that it can't be removed.
All this protection does is stop casual copying. Stops me running a copy off for you or whatever. Yet nobody I know who pirates ever did that anyway. They've download whatever they wanted. First it was BBS's. Then FTP's. Now torrents etc... Even when I was pirating stuff years and years ago it was NEVER directly copying the original from a friend.
Finally, there is the ultimate rip off. You buy a game and the copy protection won't play nice for you and you can't load the game, so you take it back to the store... But they won't give you your money back because it's open and you may have copied it...
And they keep making the protection worse and worse... This 3 activation thing... Is that just on the disk based? Or download version as well? Really hope this potentially amazing game isn't going to be ruined by its copy protection.
Well, I bought some Broderbund games for my kid from Half Price Books for $5 each, and she loves them. Turns out ripping disk to ISO's, mounting the ISO's to a virtual CDROM drive via a batch file launched with the icon the game came with works really well. I have The Cat and the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham disks safely tucked away out of reach while the perfectly legal backup copy is on the hard disk for play purposes.
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I actually agree with CD check protection... It is a slight inconvenience for the user, but not so inconvenient that I would really mind. It also offers a reasonable protection against casual (i.e. not-so-computer-literate) piracy, which is really the best any copy protection scheme can ever hope for.
For someone who travels frequently and having been bitten by having the CD case without the CD in it on arrival, A CD check copy protection is the number 2 reason on my list for not buying a program. It's right behind the dongle and right above online phone home checks. No dongle, no CD, or no internet are 3 modes if inexcusable failure. Packing light without all the baggage is required. Anything less devalues the software greatly. My laptop has a failing CD drive. It does somewhat OK with commercial CDs, but CDR playback is quite unreliable. CD read copy protection is unreliable for the laptop.
which is really the best any copy protection scheme can ever hope for
No it isn't. A one time registration providing a key with your registration detail is all that is required. I fill out and send in a registration form either online or snail mail and they send back a key. The key then when used with the software, unlocks it and proudly displays "Registered to Technician" (real contact information). I can re-install it as many times as needed from hardware upgrades, dead hard drives, etc. I'm not posting my key online. Piracy is not an issue. Phone home, CD access problems, etc are eliminated. It is about the only type of DRM I even consider. Anything else breaks the software when the hardware glitches. Broken software is useless. Any broken software priced above useless isn't purchased.
The CD key is why after purchase of the Voyetra "Teach me Piano" tutorial, it was the end of buying any Voyetra software. I use an older tutor called Piano Discovery System even though it was made for Windows 95. It is simply not a hastle to run.
Voyetra was dropped, while PDS got the expansion pack. DRM by CD check cost Voyetra several sales.
Due to the DRM in new versions of Windows with all the Anti-Piracy difficulties, I have since moved onto Linux. Stuff installs, and works the way it is supposed to. Rebuilds, upgrades and re-installs don't break everyting requiring tech support to "Get Genuine".
The truth shall set you free!