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EA Recommends Hilarious Work-Around For RA3 CD-Key
sunderbear noted that EAs Command & Conquer 3 shipped missing the last digit of the CD Key. He writes "EA's brightest minds have put their synapses into overdrive in order to whip up a comical work-around. 'There is currently a work-around that may allow you to bypass this issue. Since you have the first 19 characters of the code already, you can basically try guessing the last character,' said a note on EA's customer support site. Yes, they're serious. 'To do this, simply enter your existing code, and then for the last character, try the letters A-Z, and then the numbers 0-9. You should eventually get the right combination, and be able to play the game.'" It appears that the helpful hint has been purged.
I'm not sure why this is such a big deal.
People are laughing at it because it's just another example of copyright "protections" only inconveniencing paying customers. Pirates just run a key gen or download a serial online or run a crack.
So what do you want them to do?
Make it so I can put the disk in, click install, and play.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
the problem only affects SOME, not all, units.
Yes, and we trust EA on that one, right?
Yet another reason not to buy anything published by EA.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I would return the game to wherever I purchased it and ask for a replacement since the product is defective. I would open the package at the store to make sure I had a copy with the correct number of characters in the serial key. If the second copy was also defective I would continue to go through all the copies they had in the store until I either had a valid license key or until they ran out of copies. At that point I would then ask for my money back since all copies in the store are defective and I don't want the product at this point. The store should be able to return to EA for a full refund since they did ship faulty mechandise.
Man, out of all of the epic sequels released recently, it's been a giant litany of failure. Far Cry 2 with it's myriad of crashing issues, not to mention all of the instances where enemies / allies just don't appear as they are supposed to, forcing you to reload an earlier game and pray it's a one time bug. (And also the fact that it doesn't feature deformable terrain like they bragged about in interviews.) Fallout 3, with even more crashing issues, including a huge number of people who crash after the intro movie. In a move deemed "hilarious" the pirates have a patch out already that fixes Fallout 3, but Bethesda still does not. It fixes it by deleting the corrupted sound files so you miss some spoken dialog and have to see it on the closed caption instead, but at least you can play the game now. And now RA3 doesn't come with a valid CD key! At this rate the next PC release will give you cancer. And they'll still blame piracy for people not buying their "99% A+++++++ BUY OR DIE" games (according to the reviewers they own).
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Guessing the remainder of the CD-Key is circumvention.
But because the copyright owner (EA) has authorized this circumvention, it doesn't violate USA anti-circumvention law. From 17 USC 1201(a)(3), with my emphasis: "to 'circumvent a technological measure' means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner".