It’s been some time now since I played anything that could be regarded as an “A” title. And I’d been kinda looking forward to giving Mass Effect a try, since the minimum specs are surprisingly low. Not anymore.
No, no Mass Effect for me. Over on the official forums, Derek French posted about the copy protection for the PC version. It is more horrible than I could have imagined.
They are using SecuROM with a CD key. You have to log in to activate the game. Right there is a black mark. But it gets much worse.
You then have to log in to the server once every ten days to keep the game active. Yeah, once isn’t enough. You have to keep running back there and saying: “Look, Ma! I’m honest! I’m not a pirate!”.
What a slap in the face to everyone who buys the game. It has nothing to do with “lots of people have broadband”. It’s the very fact that you have to keep proving your copy is legitimate.
And they wonder why people pirate games. This is one reason why. And I have no doubts that Mass Effect will be up on the torrents fairly soon after release, with plenty of people ready to download it, just to avoid the inane “copy protection”.
So Mass Effect is scratched off the list. Maybe it’s time to just forget about these “A” titles and stick with indie products. They’re a lot less hassle, and more fun.
I was so infuriated by this, I forgot to include the link to the message:
That’s a bummer — I was looking forward to that game too. But… I hate those intrusive forms of copy-protection. Just cancelled my pre-order.
I know how that must hurt, Ben. It’s so terribly disappointing that they still don’t care about the people who buy the games.
I really don’t have (much) of a problem with online activation. I have been doing it with Steam for some time and never had any issues. But that was once for the initial time, not repeatedly every 10 days. There has been several times I have been unplugged longer than that - once after moving and several extended vacations.
There have been quite a few posts on the Bioware forums:
http://masseffect.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=628375&forum=125&sp=0
One thing I read is that the reason for re-authenticating every ten days is to prevent someone from registering with a fake key. Reading between the lines that means to me that your authorization could be revoked.
It also looks like EA is going to use the same system on future products. Spore was mentioned on the forum as well. I agree with Scorpia, it will be cracked in short order, so once again only the paying customer is going to be inconvenienced.
What irritates me the most is that it is a lose/lose situation for PC gamers. If we boycott the product due to these type of protections they are just going to blame the lost sales on piracy and call for even stronger copy protection.
I, like Scorpia, was going to buy this one. Now I am going to give it a pass. I bought Bioshock when it first came out before finding out about it’s copy protection, but this time I have been forewarned.
I know my comment won’t be widly embraced but it doesn’t really bother me that much. I’m happy to exchange having the DVD in the drive for occasional internet checks.
(And apologies for doubling up because I originally commented in the wrong thread. :/)
Boycotting sounds like a good suggestion!
I probably mentioned this before (and, if so, apologies for repeating myself) but my current policy is that if a game doesn’t work on Wine in Linux, it wasn’t worth playing in the first place. Copy protections often make games fall under that category.
I might as well stick to DOS RPGs and MMORPGs…
I hate Steam. I don’t like things that run in the background and/or force things on to me. I bought Portal last week and Steam has crashed my system twice already. I was able to force crash it a third time by trying to Exit steam while the game was running. I don’t mind activating, registering, whatever ONCE. But I’m done with all this extra crap needed to play a game. I was planning to pick up Mass Effect when it came out. But after my experiences with Bioshock, I’ve decided to pass. Sadly, Bioware won’t even realize they’ve lost a sale in my case. I didn’t pre-order and I’m not voicing my opinion on their forum (there would be little point since it was probably EAs decision). It’s not at all surprising to me that PC gaming continues to decline. If not for Warcraft (and MMOs in general), it might already be dead.
Dhruin, alternate opinions are always welcome. I’ll remove the duplicate comment from wherever you put it.
I don’t have a problem myself with the key disk method (DVD in the drive). But then, I got used to that way back in the “golden era” of gaming.
Xian, registering with a fake key? Once you activate, surely they have the key on record?
And I note they’re allowing only three activations. So you have it on your current machine and a laptop. Then you upgrade to a new PC, and that’s all you can have. So very generous of them.
You know, I wouldn’t mind seeing all these companies go out of business. It would make more opportunities for the independents.
A sad day for gaming indeed. A new genre of gaming is born. Single Player Online Game.
If we could get some kind of GUARANTEE that after 3 years or whatnot, they’d have a patch out that would disable this check, I’d feel a lot happier about it.
I don’t mind losing the CD / DVD checks. That’s antique technology anyway.
But I am a retro-gamer. I frequently go back to play games that are no longer supported by their developers or publishers - assuming either still EXIST. Sure, by that time, I suppose there’ll be third-party cracks out there that disable the online checking. Nevertheless, having spent a little bit of time in the computer security business working for Symantec and learning how the black hats operate, I really don’t know how we’ll I’d entrust the security of my computer to some pirate-generated crack.
Will / would this copy protection system be a problem for me in the short term? No. I’m online all of the time, anyway. But is it an issue? Yeppers.
Scorpia, what I was meaning was that say you got a fake key and enabled the game. Then they had a thousand other people trying to use that same key. If the first check had allowed you to play with no further checks then there would be nothing that they could do, the horse is already out of the barn. By having the repeated checks then they can ban keys and disable your client.
Note that I am not advocating such a system, just thinking through the reasons of having multiple repeated checks. Of course inevitably some poor guy is going to get caught in the crossfire and his key will be banned due to a keygen or someone stealing it though other methods.
The other thing I haven’t seen mention of is a revocation tool like Bioshock, though that didn’t work out very well for me either. They allowed 5 installs and I think I am down to 2 due to my son’s PC crashing and another that I had already uninstalled before the tool was released.
I have no problem from Steam and I actually sort of prefer buying from them. With little ones in the house CDs and DVDs aren’t safe from destruction. You can turn Steam off and disconnect from the net and still run the games. I like that.
However, I won’t buy Mass Effect with that kind of stupid copy protection. I don’t mind online activation but that is a violation of Fair Use and Consumer Rights and I will not support that.
If Spore, a game I’ve looked forward to since it was announced, uses that same copy protection then I will sadly not be buying it either.
That also means no more EA products for me. Ever. Not even old games from bargain bins.
F[CENSORED] EA. Their filth. I might even purge my rather large, completely purchased (no pirated games here), game collection of all EA games. If they do this they are dead to me.
However, I can’t wait for Left4Dead and look forward to buying it over Steam.
Just read some more through the posts, it’s up to 46 pages on Biowares forum. Some people make some very good points. Say you had a busy week, out of town working like I do frequently. You haven’t played the game in 11 days and when you decided to play your internet connection is down. In other words, you would be unable to play during the time you would most likely want to play a single player offline game due to not being able to get permission to play it. That’s bovine excrement.
Well Vag, if you have old EA games that you like and that don’t require jumping through hoops, I recommend keeping them.
Xian, I read somewhere that they’ve locked down the thread on the forums now. That’s not likely to make anyone happy, either.
This whole thing is so stupid. Especially the 3-activation limit. Someone with deep pockets ought to sue them over that.
“can turn Steam off and disconnect from the net and still run the games.”
Ok, I couldn’t get Portal to work that way. Can anyone explain how to do this. If I turned off Steam and ran Portal, Portal would re-run it and if I exited Steam while Portal was running, the game crashed. Heck, if I could, I’d use Steam to install/register the game and then uninstall it, but I have a feeling it wouldn’t like that.
I haven’t turned Steam off, but if I am not connected to the Internet I can still play Portal and the other Orange Box games. It will attempt to connect to Steam and find there is not an active Internet connection then ask me if I want to play in Offline mode. I can also tell my firewall to deny Internet access to Steam and I get the same results, the prompt to play in Offline mode. I don’t think you can quit the Steam program itself, but you can play the games while not connected to the Internet after the initial authorization. When it was first released, Half Life 2 required you to be online for the single player game but there was a lot of complaints and that was no longer required.
@Darkbridger - what I normally do is have my cable modem turned off unless I’m playing online or if my 6 year old is playing for piece of mind. When you have Steam install the game have it create it’s own icon. So all you need to do is click the icon and the game launches offline.
I also don’t have steam autoconnect when I startup the computer. Like you I don’t want stuff running in the back ground unneededly.
@Scorpia - nope. If EA is gonna be that way then I must show my contempt by destroying all EA games I own. It’s a tactic I learned from reading Russian history. I believe it’s refered to as the “scorched earth” policy. I shall bite off my nose and run it over with a steamroller to spite my face.
I have to think that this policy of EA’s is in direct violation of current consumer rights and fair use. I bet a civil action law suite to get it changed would work. The lawyers would get richer but we’d get their horrible anti-consumer crap removed with a patch.
Well Vag, up to you (condolences on the nose ;).
Dunno about “fair use”; that’s more in the copyright area. But restricting the installations, that’s another matter entirely. So is that “10-day check in” business.
The sad part is that too many will buy the game anyway.
They locked the original thread, but left the other one.
http://masseffect.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=628724&forum=125
79 pages, 1175 replies, 58444 page views
Good Heavens! No wonder you are infuriated!
I sometimes go weeks, even months (in one case years)before I can get back to a game.
This is truly a mess.
But as Ron White says “You Can’t Fix Stupid.”
Trouble is you can’t shoot it and put it out of our misery either.
Bioware is backing down after all the bad publicity. It is now just going to require a single online authentication check and not require any others except to download new content.
http://kotaku.com/5008452/bioware-backs-down-from-draconian-mass-effect-authentication
Hopefully the same thing will happen with Spore.
The official Bioware response. At least they listened to their fans.
http://masseffect.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=629059&forum=125
Well thanks for the update Xian. My old EA games have been given a reprieve - for now. However I will not buy Mass Effect until after it’s out and I see they’ve kept their word.
Interesting, but I still don’t plan on buying it, so long as it has SecuROM. I don’t like that it installs itself into the operating system itself, and doesn’t get removed when the game is uninstalled.
I just posted on that, and I’m still not buying it. As for “listening to the fans”, I have serious doubts about that.
I don’t like having Securom but it’s nearly impossible to avoid if you want to still play PC games. Titan Quest, Neverwinter Nights 2, Command and Conquer 3, Overlord, F.E.A.R, The Sims 2, and many more use version 7.x and there are many more that use older versions such as both Diablos and both KOTORs.
Maybe, Xian. But I didn’t have to go online and “prove” that I had legit versions of NWN/NWN2, both Diablos, and Titan Quest. Nor were there any restrictions on how many times I could install/reinstall the games.