Widescreen Gaming Forum

Remember all the furore over Mass Effect and Bioware stating that it would need to reactivate ever 10 days (10 plays, I forget which) and would lock you out if you CD Key had been Keygenned? This DRM is as bad or worse, so where is the internet outcry?

There is internet outcry, though it is not as loud. There have been news articles about it, rockpapershotgun had a post with like 1,000 replies and so do most of my forums. If there is a difference though it is probably very simple: when Mass Effect was announced the standard DRM was a disc check, now the standard DRM is activations and other such things.

Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age aside almost every game I have bought in the last year had some sort of DRM on it. Given that I think people have largely given up on getting DRM-free games, at least full price AAA titles. So, the end result is "which DRM is acceptable to me? Which is best?"

Personally my priority is playing the game in 20 years if I choose to. I play a lot of old games, a lot of them ones that were never very popular, and so games I buy today working in 20 years is the important thing for me. Steam, internet activation and this new online all the time DRM unfortunately ALL mess with that, but the simple fact no one seems to talk about in these debates is this: I can crack SecuROM activation, it takes about 2 minutes of effort and I can burn the crack to a CD and put it in the game box and never worrry about it. Done, finito, no sweat off my back. Steam is a much more complicated beasty, so I tend to prefer SecuROM to Steamworks.

This Ubisoft thing should take care of itself if they keep their word to patch it out eventually, and I think we can trust them because they patched out Farcry 2 and Dawn of Discovery's DRM, as well as others I am sure. So I feel rather secure I can play it in 20 years, and that is what is important to me.

Being online all the time? Who cares, I am anyway. I literally couldn't care less about that.

My ubisoft account is banned for whinging about them not releasing the DLC for PoP i think....

Or maybe it was for complaining about DRM on Farcry 2...

Can't remember...

So yeah... can't join the outcry this time and can't be bothered using a proxy (which i already have setup as a single click proxy to get around the impending internet filter in australia... cause we suck)

Just won't buy it.

Being online all the time? Who cares, I am anyway. I literally couldn't care less about that.

my point of view on this:
-I don't care at all about internet activation periodic check (such as once per week, or once per game update as Mass Effect is)
-I care a little bit but nothing major if the internet check is "once every game startup" : my internet is a bit slow (1024/128kbit and shared)
so it might very well add a couple of seconds on the startup of the game...
-I am kind of annoyed if the internet check is permanent : my internet has its downtimes here and there and it's annoying as hell already without having a game throw you out of it while running ...
and of course the servers WILL have down times, never ever saw a server with more than 99% up time even google had its share of issues even though they have truly massive clusters of servers...

also don't know about other countries, but in France, ADSL coverage is NOT 100% so that means there's still people with limited pay-per-time internet connections out there, depending on where they live ...
(not going into security & privacy issues since these were discussed before already)


edit: thought of something else: imagine the following situation
someone is playing it, but having some difficulties getting through a specific stage, he gets killed & restart about 9 times
then on the 10th times he's about to finish when *poof* no internet connection... how annoying is that ?
Also how will cutscenes be handled ? will it cut you off in the middle of it ? will it allow you to resume where you were in the middle of it ? or will it allow you to restart the whole cutscene ? or will it save the game before exiting as if you had finished viewing it therefore preventing you from watching it again ?

I assume they have thought about most of that, and more importantly the game pauses if you lose connection, it doesn't quit. You can alt-tab and figure out the problem and then go back to the game.

I am not saying it won't have quirks, it very well might, but it seems a minor issue to me because I always have internet anyway and mine is very stable. If there are brief periods where I cannot play similar to an MMO then I will accept that as an anti-piracy measure... IF it works. As I said before if it doesn't work and the game is pirated anyway then what a hassle for no reason, etc. etc..

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=235290

http://kotaku.com/5474209/assassins-creed-ii-pcs-drm-sounds-as-pleasant-as-a-stab-in-the-neck

Read these - the CVG bit in particular has a "paint/screenshot" (as Ubisoft "asked" CVG not to post them) of what happens when your connection dies. So even better, you lose the connection, it boots you back to the last checkpoint.

edit: If they can't stop the game being leaked to crackers before launch, I reckon AC2 will be cracked and available to pirates anything from 3-14 days before the official release. If they manage to stop that, and the crackers have to wait until release day, I give it about 4 days before there is a working crack.

edit: If they can't stop the game being leaked to crackers before launch, I reckon AC2 will be cracked and available to pirates anything from 3-14 days before the official release. If they manage to stop that, and the crackers have to wait until release day, I give it about 4 days before there is a working crack.

Such pessimism! A simple activation boggled pirates for quite a while on Mass Effect, I think a constant server connection could have them working for quite a while.

A lot of people seem so defeatist on this stuff, telling Ubisoft there is no point in trying. I don't think a company their size will ever have that attitude, honestly, for better or worse. Personally I want piracy stopped so the PC platform can continue on better than it is now, so I hope it works. Demanding DRM-free gaming and acting like piracy just has to be ignored is like having your head in the sand if you ask me.

Such pessimism! A simple activation boggled pirates for quite a while on Mass Effect, I think a constant server connection could have them working for quite a while.

A lot of people seem so defeatist on this stuff, telling Ubisoft there is no point in trying. I don't think a company their size will ever have that attitude, honestly, for better or worse. Personally I want piracy stopped so the PC platform can continue on better than it is now, so I hope it works. Demanding DRM-free gaming and acting like piracy just has to be ignored is like having your head in the sand if you ask me.

well I have the total opposite opinion, there will always be criminality but whatever I don't want to restart the debate on this front ...
maybe you could consider I'm pessimistic but realistic is more to my liking, I would like to be proven wrong but I have yet to see it..

about mass effect : err what are you talking about ??? just looked it up and :
the game was out on 28/05/2008 (format dd/mm/yyyy) in the US, and on 05/06/2008 in France
the first crack was out on 30/05/2008, that is two days later than the US launch...

thanks for the links, I thought I would quote some of that article here :

Ubisoft: The system is made by guys who love PC games. They play PC games, they are your friends.


PCG: So you can commit to saying that those systems will be patched out?


Ubisoft: That's the plan.


PCG: It's the plan, or it's definitely going to happen?


Ubisoft: That's written into the goal of the overall plan of the thing. But we don't plan on shutting down the servers, we really don't."

I put in bold the thing that made me laugh :doh
Anyway, it's a good thing that they announce their intent however for me they should go further than just promises, after all it will still be up to ubisoft to hold the promise or not while nothing legal binds them to anything, so it means it's a question of trust...
I think they should go further and put this in their EULA or something...

about mass effect : err what are you talking about ??? just looked it up and :
the game was out on 28/05/2008 (format dd/mm/yyyy) in the US, and on 05/06/2008 in France
the first crack was out on 30/05/2008, that is two days later than the US launch...

Just because the game was on torrents or a crack was said to be out does not mean it was functional and working. At the time the pirates were frustrated as hell and could not get a fully working game, I assure you.

Chronicles of Riddick Assault on Dark Athena was another, it has a new version of TAGES and took quite a while to crack.

Something else people with your arguement say, no offense intended, is that these games were cracked easier and quicker than they were. It's easy to do a google search and see cracked versions, but them actually working is another story.

i personally don't mind drm or steady internet-connection to play, as i have one. StingingVelvets argumentation has its points and i support any way to fight piracy. what i don't support is the way it's implemented, just think of all the problems the industry had with any copy protection so far - not recognizing discs, failure to connect to auth-servers, and on and on and on. if it works, then i say yes, do it, but if it doesn't go screw yourself gaming-industry