I'm sure with a bit of custom CSS theming, you can have all the ponies you like? In fact it wouldn't surprise me if somebody had already cooked something up to do exactly that.
Honestly, I'm quite surprised that the suggestion is as long as 3 years. Personally I don't see what the fuss about the iPhone is at all. The hardware is really nothing special. I'm sure the App Store is nice and all, but as the article says, Android's more open nature gives it an advantage there. I really don't see what's so appealing about the iPhone. As far as I can see it's all marketing and no substance. I've not once been even remotely tempted to get an iPhone.
Not to mention the fact that The Register has really gone downhill over the years, to the point where pretty much every article they publish now is either absurd sensationalist nonsense, or else pandering to the whims of their readership. It really is just unreadable tripe.
The turning point for me was several years ago, when they published an "article" that was literally just an incoherent, ranting, non-journalistic diatribe accusing someone's blog post of not being journalism. I mean, besides the obvious "no shit, sherlock" factor, and the fact that the blog in question never even claimed to be journalism... I was literally boggling at how not only had someone actually bothered to write such an unreadable rant, but his buddies had actually let him publish it on what they like to call a news website. I mean, they even disabled comments on that story, so they obviously knew it was unpublishable crap.
Yes, that's right. Dammit, I HATE them Micro$oft soooo much, how dare they. Why if I hated them any more I would've... wait, I've got Windows installed. You're claiming that Windows users hate Microsoft. If that isn't proof that you're a retard, what is it? Could it be... TROLLING?
Heh, I don't think WoW's gameplay is quite as precarious as your post might imply. It's pretty much not possible* for a guild to totally shut down an entire zone and farm it to death. As the mobs respawn randomly, eventually one of them is going to spawn near to a competing player, at which point they can easily tag the mob first, which means they're the only one that gains experience from it, and only they have looting rights. It's not significantly different to how any newly released zone will be immediately overwhelmed by players flocking to see it. It can be pretty hard to find enough mobs to complete your quests or whatever, but you're guaranteed to finish eventually, because it simply isn't possible to deny you your kills (except in cross-faction PvP where one side has a large advantage in numbers, which wouldn't ordinarily happen on most servers, and even then there are PvE servers for those that prefer to quest in safety).
*Ok, so maybe it might be possible if you had an extremely large guild and you actually managed to effectively coordinate them somehow, but by that stage you'll find that the bigger problem is the cripplingly low frame rate from having to draw several hundred characters at once, if you have a low-end system.
Was that really a screw up though? I think it's more a trade off between having stable servers that you later have to migrate away from, or having massively overpopulated servers for the first month and an empty ghost town thereafter, thereby necessitating migrations and server merges. As far as first impressions of a game go, I think I'd prefer server stability, tbh.
Eh, I think he meant more that they could hypothetically decide to charge for it, if they were dumb. Oh, sorry, I meant "monetize" it. That's what they call it these days when a company gouges their customers, right? That Sony stuff strikes me as more than a little silly though. I'd heard about that before, and it just baffles me why anybody would pay to get ripped off in that way. Certainly I wouldn't pay for an expansion the size of this WAR content patch, unless it really was dirt cheap.
No, based on his other posts in this thread, it seems he's well aware of the developments in WoW post-release. He knows damned well that Blizzard has released a great many free expansions. I can only assume that he was trolling, hoping to get up-modded by people with less knowledge of WoW. Thankfully he's picked up a few overrateds as well.
Actually, the only the only reason he can get away with preying on that confusion is because Blizzard doesn't try to trumpet it up as giving away for free some amazing expansion, a word which you'd naturally associate with having to pay for. They, quite sensibly, call them patches, just like they are.
Wow, talk about a false sense of entitlement. No, they did not put in place something that should have been there before, they very definitely added new content. The content that was added in that patch, was not content that was accessible at release, nor was it intended to be. Just because you know something is going to be there, doesn't mean you have the right to access it before it's created.
Moreover, if you consider fun playing around 1500 (or under) rating, good luck getting any gear which would enable you to get better rating.
Given that all the gear available that requires no rating at all is easily sufficient to get you to well above 1500 rating... (And no, I'm not talking about raid gear, or any other "hardcore" content. Not that raids are actually hardcore, nor have they been for years.)
And that is my point, even though there are some additions for casuals, those are only superficial, and for every casual addition there are at least two hardcore ones.
Any truth to this comment is largely invalidated by the fact that the game (and both of its expansions) at release contained vastly more casual content than "hardcore". And that's even going by your definition of hardcore, which I strongly disagree with.
But was it really though? Oh sure, this specific example of censorship was reversed. But can you really truly call it 'beaten' if the attitude that created the situation is entirely unchanged? Seriously, read their little press release thingy where they announced that they were removing that image from the blacklist. The whole thing can basically be summarised as "we're sorry we got caught". They never once acknowledged that it was inappropriate for them to censor an image that is entirely legal. They never once apologised for treading on our civil liberties. They outright said that they believe their only mistake was getting caught. Make no mistake, the morality brigade is not beaten yet. They fully intend to continue to censor inoffensive and legal images. They fully intend to continue to force their views of morality onto everybody else. And this time, they fully intend not to get caught.
Indeed. And in fact the summary at the end of that deletion request points out that the image can indeed be used under "fair use". But when a perfectly reasonable question such as "is this image in the public domain" can result in responses such as "if you delete this image then you're a nazi", it really does make you question whether the absurd copyright laws that would restrict this image are any worse than the masses that would argue against them. And while not all the answers were that bad, the overwhelming majority of them chose to deliberate ignore the question that had been put forward, to answer a completely different (and completely irrelevant) one. One can't help but conclude that common sense simply isn't all that common these days.
Misplaced blame, methinks. Blame the website designer, not the browser. If the website is designed in some dumbass way so that all the boxes are absolutely positioned, fixed width/height, because the designer is naively assuming that "surely all the text on my precious creation must be in this fabulous font that I've chosen at this specific size" then funnily enough things will break if the font is not just so, or if the size is not just so, or if the window is not the right size. It's not the browser's fault that the website is shit, it's the website's fault.
It's exactly the same as back in the days of olde, when shitty web designers used shitty IE-specific tags, and encouraged users to blame the browser if things didn't look the way they were supposed to. Only now those same designers have cottoned on to such concepts as "standards compliance" and turned it into a buzzword without trying to understand what it means. So they create all their web pages, run it through a validator and then pretend they're good to go, when in actual fact their web page might contain dozens of braindead design flaws like absolute positioning on every single element, or fixed width/height on boxes that will need to expand if the font size is changed.
I guess I can't disagree with you on the image zoom point, although I zoom images infrequently enough that it doesn't bother me.:P
Verifiability of sources, fact-checking, not publishing rumour or opinion as fact, at least some attempt at providing an unbiased view. Granted, this definition would exclude the tabloid press, and most of the US media too, while simultaneously including some of the more dedicated bloggers. That's no bad thing, I think.
The question of what it installs and how to remove it have already been covered in other comments, listing the relevant files, registry keys, and services. The problem with removing it is not so much that it's "impossible", but more that the removal process is quite beyong the capabilities of your average user, so for all practical intents and purposes it is impossible to remove for them. Even worse than that, each new version of Securom adds (or can potentially add) a whole batch of new things in different locations that you'd also need to remove, so you can't even draw up a list of easy-to-follow removal instructions for the more technically capable users.
The question of how it's harmful has rather more possible answers. The obvious response is that once it is installed, it is permanently running on your computer, using up your system resources even when you're not playing a Securom game. Then again, it is quite prudent to oppose Securom just on principle, because its sole purpose is to prevent legitimate users from playing the games they have paid for (or who are downloading free games, as in the case of the Spore Creature Creator in this article) if it doesn't like the look of their CD or CD drive, or if it objects to certain software they have installed. (Pirate copies of games do not include Securom, so end-user pirates are unaffected, and the process of removing the Securom from games is largely automated, so the cracker pirate groups are similarly unaffected. Meaning that Securom quite literally does not affect pirates, and only targets legitimate users.)
Why would they want to stop you from using something that they are giving away for free? EA do not stop you from reinstalling the program, nor would they ever wish to do so. As a result, there is no justification for leaving any traces of anything behind when you uninstall.
Cogent is the one fighting for us. Fighting for lower connect costs.
Please tell me you don't really believe that? The only thing Cogent is fighting for is higher profits, and they think they can achieve that by not paying their bills. And yet every few months Cogent pulls a crazy stunt like this and their customers suffer as a result. How can you claim that Cogent's unreliability is a good thing?
Mmm, you pretty much summed up exactly what I was thinking. The major problem with this new change is that EA is a crazy irresponsible dictatorship with no oversight. There have been reports of people being banned from Spore for using the word 'drat'. No really, what the hell kind of a stick must someone have up their arse to think that that's even remotely worthy of notice, let alone actually approaching unacceptable. It's worth noting that the word 'drat' doesn't even violate the section of the TOS/EULA that they quoted. Until EA can learn to play by their own rules, they have no business banning anyone. (And yes, before someone points it out, I know that EA reserves the right to ban anyone for no good reason. But unless they can claim that the ban was justified, good luck hanging on to any customers.)
While I can't help but agree with you, I also can't help but feel that you might have missed the GP's point. You're right that stupid people are wont to inflict their stupidity on everyone else, and that makes it everyone else's problem. But the GP didn't say that it wasn't everyone else's problem, he said that it wasn't technology's problem, i.e. the problem is not of technology's causing. The implication being that the introduction of new TLDs won't cause any new problems, and any difficulty that does arise in people's understanding of it will merely be an extension of their existing lack of understanding, which is ultimately caused by their own stupidity.
Conroy has to get with the times and to stop using the 'nothing to hide' argument (in another light here: if you don't agree with us, they you are a pedo).
Y'know, every time I hear someone use the "nothing to hide" line, it always makes me think how poetic it would be if someone stole all their mail. In this case it would be especially apt to filter it for 'euthanasia material, politically related material, material about anorexia'. Given that he's a politician, he could end up losing a lot of politically related mail that way. Still, better safe than sorry, eh, think of the children? No, you can bet he'd be screaming til he's blue in the face, which just highlights the abject hypocrisy of Conroy and people like him.
In WoW today, 9 out of 10 toons are level 70. Nobody is special.
While you certainly make some very valid points, I don't think this is a very valid statistic with which to back up your claim. Many MMOs are designed on the premise that all or most of the player base is at the maximum level, and WoW probably more so than most. Yes, 9 out of 10 players are level 70, but that doesn't mean that nobody is special, it means that level is essentially not a relevant indicator of specialness. How many people can call themselves High Warlord or Grand Marshall, or ride an armoured netherdrake? Can't be more than a few thousand, surely? Out of 11 million. I'd say those people might have something to feel special about. How many people are called Scarab Lord? A hundred, tops? That's a tiny fraction of the active player base.
And to respond to:
Then you will have a tiny fraction of your paying customers left.
from that sibling post up there, I believe that WoW actually does have more than a hundred subscribers currently.
I think he's basing that conclusion on some early reports (later disproven, IIRC) that the pirate version of the game did not suffer from the egregious crashing problem that plagued the game.
Developers are not losing any money on Piracy from me. I truly wish that were the case for everyone, and we probably wouldn't be in this predicament.
Ah, there you go, expecting people to be reasonable. No, I get the distinct impression that so long as a convenient scapegoat exists, someone will try to blame it for everything, up to and including eating your babies. Piracy is just the scapegoat du jour.
Except for the fact that Impulse/Stardock Central is DRM...
Maybe I'm just reading you wrong here, but I can't help but feel that you're trying to obfuscate the issue by drawing inadquately supported conclusions, as well as twisting Stardock's words to say something they don't. Stardock aren't saying "DRM is teh evil, we must shun it", nor are they saying "Gamers have the right to do whatever the hell they want with whatever the hell they want". All that they seem to be saying is that gamers have a right to play games without an undue amount of hassle, not that developers/publishers have to bend over backwards to accede to their every whim. Reactivating your install when you move it to a new PC or delete the sig.bin (the first of which is a new install, the second of which is basically un-activating your install, both of which would therefore legitemately require you to reactivate) is not an unreasonable hassle.
So why don't you just reactivate it then? Sounds to me that you just like complaining for the sake of complaining. Because, by the way, you still haven't proven why this activation system means that Impusle is DRM. Why is it so different from a CD key check. Just because it's online? No, that's not what DRM means. If you had a limited number of reactivations, or if it prevented you from playing on another PC at all, then sure, that would be DRM. But that's not what it does. This activation scheme is functionally no different than the CD key checks of old, and that is not DRM. It's not even an unreasonable request. Or at least, if you believe it to be unreasonable, then that is purely your opinion, and that has no bearing on the fact that this scheme does not violate their Gamers Bill of Rights, nor does it permit you to arbitrarily change the meaning of DRM to mean whatever you want it to.
But that's just it, it is just as slick as they originally intended, and you certainly don't have to manually do anything. That's the entire point of the game, and you can tell that they focused on that feature a lot, maybe even at the expense of actual gameplay. The game will pull in content automatically from other players, just like they said it would. You can even customise the degree to which it does so. Granted, it is slightly disappointing if you see the same creature two games in a row, but unless you've accidentally changed some setting somewhere to completely ban it from ever downloading anything, the only time that scenario actually crops up is right after you install the game, before it's had a chance to build up a large repository of player-made creatures to pick from.
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I'm sure with a bit of custom CSS theming, you can have all the ponies you like? In fact it wouldn't surprise me if somebody had already cooked something up to do exactly that.
Honestly, I'm quite surprised that the suggestion is as long as 3 years. Personally I don't see what the fuss about the iPhone is at all. The hardware is really nothing special. I'm sure the App Store is nice and all, but as the article says, Android's more open nature gives it an advantage there. I really don't see what's so appealing about the iPhone. As far as I can see it's all marketing and no substance. I've not once been even remotely tempted to get an iPhone.
Not to mention the fact that The Register has really gone downhill over the years, to the point where pretty much every article they publish now is either absurd sensationalist nonsense, or else pandering to the whims of their readership. It really is just unreadable tripe.
The turning point for me was several years ago, when they published an "article" that was literally just an incoherent, ranting, non-journalistic diatribe accusing someone's blog post of not being journalism. I mean, besides the obvious "no shit, sherlock" factor, and the fact that the blog in question never even claimed to be journalism... I was literally boggling at how not only had someone actually bothered to write such an unreadable rant, but his buddies had actually let him publish it on what they like to call a news website. I mean, they even disabled comments on that story, so they obviously knew it was unpublishable crap.
Yes, that's right. Dammit, I HATE them Micro$oft soooo much, how dare they. Why if I hated them any more I would've... wait, I've got Windows installed. You're claiming that Windows users hate Microsoft. If that isn't proof that you're a retard, what is it? Could it be... TROLLING?
Heh, I don't think WoW's gameplay is quite as precarious as your post might imply. It's pretty much not possible* for a guild to totally shut down an entire zone and farm it to death. As the mobs respawn randomly, eventually one of them is going to spawn near to a competing player, at which point they can easily tag the mob first, which means they're the only one that gains experience from it, and only they have looting rights. It's not significantly different to how any newly released zone will be immediately overwhelmed by players flocking to see it. It can be pretty hard to find enough mobs to complete your quests or whatever, but you're guaranteed to finish eventually, because it simply isn't possible to deny you your kills (except in cross-faction PvP where one side has a large advantage in numbers, which wouldn't ordinarily happen on most servers, and even then there are PvE servers for those that prefer to quest in safety).
*Ok, so maybe it might be possible if you had an extremely large guild and you actually managed to effectively coordinate them somehow, but by that stage you'll find that the bigger problem is the cripplingly low frame rate from having to draw several hundred characters at once, if you have a low-end system.
Was that really a screw up though? I think it's more a trade off between having stable servers that you later have to migrate away from, or having massively overpopulated servers for the first month and an empty ghost town thereafter, thereby necessitating migrations and server merges. As far as first impressions of a game go, I think I'd prefer server stability, tbh.
Eh, I think he meant more that they could hypothetically decide to charge for it, if they were dumb. Oh, sorry, I meant "monetize" it. That's what they call it these days when a company gouges their customers, right? That Sony stuff strikes me as more than a little silly though. I'd heard about that before, and it just baffles me why anybody would pay to get ripped off in that way. Certainly I wouldn't pay for an expansion the size of this WAR content patch, unless it really was dirt cheap.
No, based on his other posts in this thread, it seems he's well aware of the developments in WoW post-release. He knows damned well that Blizzard has released a great many free expansions. I can only assume that he was trolling, hoping to get up-modded by people with less knowledge of WoW. Thankfully he's picked up a few overrateds as well.
Actually, the only the only reason he can get away with preying on that confusion is because Blizzard doesn't try to trumpet it up as giving away for free some amazing expansion, a word which you'd naturally associate with having to pay for. They, quite sensibly, call them patches, just like they are.
Wow, talk about a false sense of entitlement. No, they did not put in place something that should have been there before, they very definitely added new content. The content that was added in that patch, was not content that was accessible at release, nor was it intended to be. Just because you know something is going to be there, doesn't mean you have the right to access it before it's created.
Given that all the gear available that requires no rating at all is easily sufficient to get you to well above 1500 rating... (And no, I'm not talking about raid gear, or any other "hardcore" content. Not that raids are actually hardcore, nor have they been for years.)
Any truth to this comment is largely invalidated by the fact that the game (and both of its expansions) at release contained vastly more casual content than "hardcore". And that's even going by your definition of hardcore, which I strongly disagree with.
But was it really though? Oh sure, this specific example of censorship was reversed. But can you really truly call it 'beaten' if the attitude that created the situation is entirely unchanged? Seriously, read their little press release thingy where they announced that they were removing that image from the blacklist. The whole thing can basically be summarised as "we're sorry we got caught". They never once acknowledged that it was inappropriate for them to censor an image that is entirely legal. They never once apologised for treading on our civil liberties. They outright said that they believe their only mistake was getting caught. Make no mistake, the morality brigade is not beaten yet. They fully intend to continue to censor inoffensive and legal images. They fully intend to continue to force their views of morality onto everybody else. And this time, they fully intend not to get caught.
Indeed. And in fact the summary at the end of that deletion request points out that the image can indeed be used under "fair use". But when a perfectly reasonable question such as "is this image in the public domain" can result in responses such as "if you delete this image then you're a nazi", it really does make you question whether the absurd copyright laws that would restrict this image are any worse than the masses that would argue against them. And while not all the answers were that bad, the overwhelming majority of them chose to deliberate ignore the question that had been put forward, to answer a completely different (and completely irrelevant) one. One can't help but conclude that common sense simply isn't all that common these days.
Misplaced blame, methinks. Blame the website designer, not the browser. If the website is designed in some dumbass way so that all the boxes are absolutely positioned, fixed width/height, because the designer is naively assuming that "surely all the text on my precious creation must be in this fabulous font that I've chosen at this specific size" then funnily enough things will break if the font is not just so, or if the size is not just so, or if the window is not the right size. It's not the browser's fault that the website is shit, it's the website's fault.
It's exactly the same as back in the days of olde, when shitty web designers used shitty IE-specific tags, and encouraged users to blame the browser if things didn't look the way they were supposed to. Only now those same designers have cottoned on to such concepts as "standards compliance" and turned it into a buzzword without trying to understand what it means. So they create all their web pages, run it through a validator and then pretend they're good to go, when in actual fact their web page might contain dozens of braindead design flaws like absolute positioning on every single element, or fixed width/height on boxes that will need to expand if the font size is changed.
I guess I can't disagree with you on the image zoom point, although I zoom images infrequently enough that it doesn't bother me. :P
Verifiability of sources, fact-checking, not publishing rumour or opinion as fact, at least some attempt at providing an unbiased view. Granted, this definition would exclude the tabloid press, and most of the US media too, while simultaneously including some of the more dedicated bloggers. That's no bad thing, I think.
The question of what it installs and how to remove it have already been covered in other comments, listing the relevant files, registry keys, and services. The problem with removing it is not so much that it's "impossible", but more that the removal process is quite beyong the capabilities of your average user, so for all practical intents and purposes it is impossible to remove for them. Even worse than that, each new version of Securom adds (or can potentially add) a whole batch of new things in different locations that you'd also need to remove, so you can't even draw up a list of easy-to-follow removal instructions for the more technically capable users.
The question of how it's harmful has rather more possible answers. The obvious response is that once it is installed, it is permanently running on your computer, using up your system resources even when you're not playing a Securom game. Then again, it is quite prudent to oppose Securom just on principle, because its sole purpose is to prevent legitimate users from playing the games they have paid for (or who are downloading free games, as in the case of the Spore Creature Creator in this article) if it doesn't like the look of their CD or CD drive, or if it objects to certain software they have installed. (Pirate copies of games do not include Securom, so end-user pirates are unaffected, and the process of removing the Securom from games is largely automated, so the cracker pirate groups are similarly unaffected. Meaning that Securom quite literally does not affect pirates, and only targets legitimate users.)
Why would they want to stop you from using something that they are giving away for free? EA do not stop you from reinstalling the program, nor would they ever wish to do so. As a result, there is no justification for leaving any traces of anything behind when you uninstall.
Please tell me you don't really believe that? The only thing Cogent is fighting for is higher profits, and they think they can achieve that by not paying their bills. And yet every few months Cogent pulls a crazy stunt like this and their customers suffer as a result. How can you claim that Cogent's unreliability is a good thing?
Mmm, you pretty much summed up exactly what I was thinking. The major problem with this new change is that EA is a crazy irresponsible dictatorship with no oversight. There have been reports of people being banned from Spore for using the word 'drat'. No really, what the hell kind of a stick must someone have up their arse to think that that's even remotely worthy of notice, let alone actually approaching unacceptable. It's worth noting that the word 'drat' doesn't even violate the section of the TOS/EULA that they quoted. Until EA can learn to play by their own rules, they have no business banning anyone. (And yes, before someone points it out, I know that EA reserves the right to ban anyone for no good reason. But unless they can claim that the ban was justified, good luck hanging on to any customers.)
While I can't help but agree with you, I also can't help but feel that you might have missed the GP's point. You're right that stupid people are wont to inflict their stupidity on everyone else, and that makes it everyone else's problem. But the GP didn't say that it wasn't everyone else's problem, he said that it wasn't technology's problem, i.e. the problem is not of technology's causing. The implication being that the introduction of new TLDs won't cause any new problems, and any difficulty that does arise in people's understanding of it will merely be an extension of their existing lack of understanding, which is ultimately caused by their own stupidity.
Y'know, every time I hear someone use the "nothing to hide" line, it always makes me think how poetic it would be if someone stole all their mail. In this case it would be especially apt to filter it for 'euthanasia material, politically related material, material about anorexia'. Given that he's a politician, he could end up losing a lot of politically related mail that way. Still, better safe than sorry, eh, think of the children? No, you can bet he'd be screaming til he's blue in the face, which just highlights the abject hypocrisy of Conroy and people like him.
While you certainly make some very valid points, I don't think this is a very valid statistic with which to back up your claim. Many MMOs are designed on the premise that all or most of the player base is at the maximum level, and WoW probably more so than most. Yes, 9 out of 10 players are level 70, but that doesn't mean that nobody is special, it means that level is essentially not a relevant indicator of specialness. How many people can call themselves High Warlord or Grand Marshall, or ride an armoured netherdrake? Can't be more than a few thousand, surely? Out of 11 million. I'd say those people might have something to feel special about. How many people are called Scarab Lord? A hundred, tops? That's a tiny fraction of the active player base.
And to respond to:
from that sibling post up there, I believe that WoW actually does have more than a hundred subscribers currently.
I think he's basing that conclusion on some early reports (later disproven, IIRC) that the pirate version of the game did not suffer from the egregious crashing problem that plagued the game.
Ah, there you go, expecting people to be reasonable. No, I get the distinct impression that so long as a convenient scapegoat exists, someone will try to blame it for everything, up to and including eating your babies. Piracy is just the scapegoat du jour.
Maybe I'm just reading you wrong here, but I can't help but feel that you're trying to obfuscate the issue by drawing inadquately supported conclusions, as well as twisting Stardock's words to say something they don't. Stardock aren't saying "DRM is teh evil, we must shun it", nor are they saying "Gamers have the right to do whatever the hell they want with whatever the hell they want". All that they seem to be saying is that gamers have a right to play games without an undue amount of hassle, not that developers/publishers have to bend over backwards to accede to their every whim. Reactivating your install when you move it to a new PC or delete the sig.bin (the first of which is a new install, the second of which is basically un-activating your install, both of which would therefore legitemately require you to reactivate) is not an unreasonable hassle.
So why don't you just reactivate it then? Sounds to me that you just like complaining for the sake of complaining. Because, by the way, you still haven't proven why this activation system means that Impusle is DRM. Why is it so different from a CD key check. Just because it's online? No, that's not what DRM means. If you had a limited number of reactivations, or if it prevented you from playing on another PC at all, then sure, that would be DRM. But that's not what it does. This activation scheme is functionally no different than the CD key checks of old, and that is not DRM. It's not even an unreasonable request. Or at least, if you believe it to be unreasonable, then that is purely your opinion, and that has no bearing on the fact that this scheme does not violate their Gamers Bill of Rights, nor does it permit you to arbitrarily change the meaning of DRM to mean whatever you want it to.
But that's just it, it is just as slick as they originally intended, and you certainly don't have to manually do anything. That's the entire point of the game, and you can tell that they focused on that feature a lot, maybe even at the expense of actual gameplay. The game will pull in content automatically from other players, just like they said it would. You can even customise the degree to which it does so. Granted, it is slightly disappointing if you see the same creature two games in a row, but unless you've accidentally changed some setting somewhere to completely ban it from ever downloading anything, the only time that scenario actually crops up is right after you install the game, before it's had a chance to build up a large repository of player-made creatures to pick from.