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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."
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.
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.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
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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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?
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.
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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