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eb0ny
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icon Re: Mass Effect, Spore - extreme DRM (0)  
That's exactly why most of us will apply the crack. Usually companies do not encourage such behaviour.

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05-08-2008 at 05:18 PM
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Nillo
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Suppose that I have a computer here with a decent internet connection. Sometimes it goes down, but mostly it's online. Now, I want to have something to do when my internet is down, so I purchase a game, install it, try it out, and then resume my normal tasks.

Then a month later, my internet goes down again, and I find myself wanting to play a game. In this situation, I have not run the game in ten days. I have left it there for the specific purpose of playing it when the internet connection is down, and that's exactly when it won't work. So I'm going to have to run the game every five days or so just to have it work when I need it to.

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05-08-2008 at 07:22 PM
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NiroZ
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Well from what I've experienced from bioshock, everyone from strangers on the internet to store clerks are very eager to inform you that you need internet access to play the game. So it's such a hypothetical situation that I think you would be better off campaigning for iphone functionality for windows xp x64.

[Last edited by NiroZ at 05-08-2008 07:40 PM]
05-08-2008 at 07:26 PM
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Nillo
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But my hypothetical computer did have an internet connection with 95% uptime. It's just that I would probably forget to revalidate it or whatever before the timer ran out, and even if my internet goes down for just a few hours, I would still be unable to play the game at that point.

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05-08-2008 at 07:38 PM
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Briareos
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NiroZ wrote:
Well from what I've experienced from bioshock, everyone from strangers on the internet to store clerks are very eager to inform you that you need internet access to play the game.
Hooray... so it's basically the publisher saying "go die in a fire" to internet-less customers? Because the game desperately needs an internet connection?

Of course, it would perfectly possible to make full use of the game (i.e. play all of it) without an internet connection were it not for the copy protection. Which, the last time I checked, is meant to hinder the bad guys, not the good guys (i.e. your paying customers) - right?

Maybe it's just me, but putting as-good-as-always-having-to-be-online copy protection into an offline-and-nothing-but-offline game - if that isn't crazy, I don't know what is.

Why don't they just admit it and slap a "download a crack, you know you want to" sticker on it? :huh

np: Notwist - Gravity (The Devil, You + Me)

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[Last edited by Briareos at 05-08-2008 08:17 PM]
05-08-2008 at 08:11 PM
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slimm tom
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The bill on the first page is just awful. :-O Lucky for me that in Holland we can only get a connection on a monthly pay rate with no data limit. That means I have a 20 MB broadband connection for about € 35 a month, and I can download or upload as much as I want.

I guess that isn't the case everywhere, looking at that bill. :? You'd almost believe the company by purpose did not close his connection after he exceeded his limit.

[Last edited by slimm tom at 05-08-2008 08:14 PM]
05-08-2008 at 08:13 PM
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NiroZ
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Briareos wrote:
NiroZ wrote:
Well from what I've experienced from bioshock, everyone from strangers on the internet to store clerks are very eager to inform you that you need internet access to play the game.
Hooray... so it's basically the publisher saying "go die in a fire" to internet-less customers? Because the game desperately needs an internet connection?
No, I meant that for someone to be unaware of the games restrictions would be very unlikely.
05-08-2008 at 08:18 PM
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Banjooie
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oh, b0rsuk, you and your adorable hostility. <3

I don't think anyone actually has statistics on the percentage of people using P2P for legitimate, non-piracy use. I know there IS a percentage, it's probably sizable, but I have a feeling it's still less than half. I'd be interested to know if I'm incorrect on this.

I'd really appreciate it if somebody could explain to me this remarkable idea that EA will just shut down the servers for their game in <length of time> without releasing some sort of program to deactivate the DRM.

We'll accept that corporations are evil because I am never going to convince you people otherwise. And they're even greedy. But they're greedy in an intelligent way.

If this turns out to be a terrible, horrible idea that makes the game unsalable, they'll just release a deactivation patch. There just isn't really a way to test to see if DRM works unless you put it on things, so until they find some sort of foolproof way of stopping pirates (And you can keep telling me it's impossible, sure, but they're going to keep trying, live with it), they're going to have to try things that might inconvenience the cosnumer.

05-08-2008 at 09:02 PM
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b0rsuk
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Banjooie, your posts in last 2 threads were similar enough to ad hominem. Instead of discussing the topic and its merits, you wrote stuff along the lines "it's posted by b0rsuk, so he means X Y Z". I don't need to put up with it.

Banning or interfering with P2P in any way just because it can be used for pirating is silly. Not only not all of it is file sharing, but also some artists are very happy that their music is shared. In some cases musicians were angry because RIAA acted in their name, without being asked to. Some say that they don't earn much/anything from cds anyway, and they need extra publicity to attract people to concerts.
And people also share stuff that's perfectly legal.
If we just allow that, they will keep banning any new protocol/app that can be used in illegal file sharing. Many ISP's limit bittorent, for example. It's frequently used for distribution of game patches and other legal stuff, video "pamphlets", interviews, books that are no longer covered by copyrights... Also, anything covered by GPL, BSD, or one of Creative Commons licences is meant to be shared freely.
Blocking P2P = carpet bombing.

Speaking of servers going down:

Ars Technica wrote: Customers who have purchased music from Microsoft's now-defunct MSN Music store are now facing a decision they never anticipated making: commit to which computers (and OS) they want to authorize forever, or give up access to the music they paid for. Why? Because Microsoft has decided that it's done supporting the service and will be turning off the MSN Music license servers by the end of this summer.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080422-drm-sucks-redux-microsoft-to-nuke-msn-music-drm-keys.html

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[Last edited by b0rsuk at 05-08-2008 10:17 PM]
05-08-2008 at 09:56 PM
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Tim
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Banjooie wrote:
I'd really appreciate it if somebody could explain to me this remarkable idea that EA will just shut down the servers for their game in <length of time> without releasing some sort of program to deactivate the DRM.
I'd really appreciate you to follow the link in my previous post on the previous page. They just did exactly that last year to 1 to 2-year-old games.

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[Last edited by Tim at 05-08-2008 11:02 PM]
05-08-2008 at 11:02 PM
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NiroZ
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Tim wrote:I'd really appreciate you to follow the link in my previous post on the previous page. They just did exactly that last year to 1 to 2-year-old games.
Game servers (which allow optional, online play) and activation servers are utterly different things.
05-08-2008 at 11:11 PM
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Tim
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NiroZ wrote:
Tim wrote:I'd really appreciate you to follow the link in my previous post on the previous page. They just did exactly that last year to 1 to 2-year-old games.
Game servers (which allow optional, online play) and activation servers are utterly different things.
Does EA would care about that distinction? EA is a company with good commercial sense, so they will shutdown its activation servers after some time. I have no doubt about that.

There is a good reason why consumers don't like DRM, and it's because DRM is regarded as Anti-competitive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-competitive_practices).

I would even claim that supporting EA would kill PC gaming even sooner. They have proven to have negative value to the PC gaming industry by releasing multi-platform. They have also used anti competitive methods to crush other PC development companies. The quality of their PC games are less than okayish. They would do the PC gaming market a great favor if they split up.

(Note: I have no problem with EA as a company, and I would buy their stocks if I could.)

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05-08-2008 at 11:59 PM
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Banjooie
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alright, fine, you're all right, companies secretly want to not make money.


or something.

i'm done arguing
05-09-2008 at 06:28 AM
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Tuttle
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Banjooie wrote:
I don't think anyone actually has statistics on the percentage of people using P2P for legitimate, non-piracy use. I know there IS a percentage, it's probably sizable, but I have a feeling it's still less than half. I'd be interested to know if I'm incorrect on this.
I'm sure it probably is less than half. It's still significant enough that shaping P2P is a dumb idea -- among other things, BitTorrent is the primary distribution mechanism for World Of Warcraft patches, and that's a lot of users to annoy.
slimm tom wrote:
I guess that isn't the case everywhere, looking at that bill. :? You'd almost believe the company by purpose did not close his connection after he exceeded his limit.
Pretty much. Where unlimited plans at consumer-friendly prices aren't economically viable, there are only a handful of ways to deal with that. The ones that come to mind are:
1) Set a quota and restrict service (slow down or cut off) when exceeded.
2) Set a quota and charge an excess fee when exceeded.
3) Underprovision the network and let everyone suffer.
4) Underprovision the network and try to direct the suffering through P2P shaping etc.
5) Charge consumer-unfriendly prices.
6) Go bankrupt.

Restrictions and excess fees seem to be fairly popular. Here in AU at least, most ISPs go for speed capping (typically 64 kbps), with a couple still going for excess charges. Underprovisioning the network usually results in losing customers unless you have a monopoly. High prices can be okay for businesses but won't win you any home customers, and going bankrupt is generally a loss all around.
05-09-2008 at 10:38 AM
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Briareos
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FWIW, Penny Arcade's Tycho also totally dislikes this move (with a comic to go along with the topic) and says that they've okayed running ads for Mass Effect PC on their site without knowing this - I take this to say that they wouldn't have ran those ads had they known about the SecuROM brouhaha beforehand...

np: Kettel - Whom (Re: Through Friendly Waters)

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[Last edited by Briareos at 05-09-2008 08:34 PM]
05-09-2008 at 08:33 PM
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Briareos
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Heh...

That is all.

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05-09-2008 at 11:23 PM
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Briareos
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Ummm... my link above says exactly that - it's now an authentication upon installing, and it'll get re-authenticated when you do an online update to install extensions...

Okay, it's not totally removed (which would be a bit unrealistic, don't you think?) but it's on par with other stuff that's around. Still, sucks for you if you don't have an internet connection on the machine you want to install the game on...

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05-22-2008 at 02:10 PM
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