Or those of us with gaming laptops who do most of our PC gaming on the road and don't always have ready access to the internet.

Yep, and those deployed in the military. And those in rural areas. And those in some less developed countries. The list goes on...

Maybe Wright can give you a P.O. box to send him a check. Then you can pay him directly and steal it.

Paranoia aside(I run without a firewall in the DMZ and don't use an anti-virus) there are plenty of reasons to not be connected to the internet. Where I'm at, it's a hundred bucks a month for a seriously shitty satellite connection.

When the stars are aligned, I've killed the right people and it's three in the morning, my connection is 1200/180. With a minimum possible latency of 667 milliseconds. When they aren't, I get speeds like these.

May 8th, 10:04PM - 469/137 kbps
April 24th, 11:27PM - 83/47 kbps
April 13th, 09:33PM - 118/126 kbps
January 26th, 12:27AM - 597/173 kbps

Bits, not bytes. My usual ping response times for things are 1k+. My ping response times from the mid afternoon till late in the evening are riddled with time outs. Depending on how it's designed, I could come in to play it in the evenings, and fail the authentication every frigging day and get surprised on day 10 with a deactivated game. Maybe, just maybe, my ISP enables the NOC controlled firewall on my modem for me again and blocks secure transmissions? The last time they did that, it took over a week to be able to do things like check my email. You'd be amazed how much you can't do when encrypted data is blocked.

Everyone not dumb enough to shell out that kind of money gets to use dial-up. That means that they have to tie up a phone line to play a single player game. Just paying for a dial-up connection in this area is like pissing away money. You're paying for a crap connection on crap lines, that's completely worthless for anything real, and lets you very very slowly check your email, and do other trivial tasks.

It's true that it's not a particularly onerous requirement and most people that are playing it will have internet. It's just a stupid one. It removes people from their market, people without connections, people without reliable connections, people that are paranoid, people that want EA to drop dead for calling them pirates, and people that don't do phone home software. It adds nada, they already know the copy protection scheme doesn't work, Bioshock had much the same and was cracked almost immediately.

+1

lol... it's true... i'm not going to play my single player game with internet connection on... unless i'm going to play multiplayer games or MMORPG type of games(probably)... lol

I already own the game, played though it 4 times and bought the DLC. Is it so wrong to try it out on PC?

Not sure I understand your question.

I certainly won't be bending over and taking it like a man for corporate America. Not that I would have bought those particular crappy, overhyped console games anyway.

The sad, pathetic, moralising gimpboys in this thread have been brutalised by the media for so long that they seem to feel an emotional need to defend their abusers. If only their virtual gimp masks and ball gags muffled their typing we wouldn't be subjected to their inane drivel.

I don't give a flying f*** about some simpering loser's self-righteous moralising. I decide for myself what's right or wrong, and I'm not even vaguely interested in any criticisms of my behaviour. Mindless herd animals can kiss my arse. If I consider DRM to be unacceptable and refuse to buy games that use it, then that's my right.

Are there other copy protection schemes besides SecurROm, starforce, or the one SD advocates. I just checked the Mass Effect forums, that thread has now 97 pages of posting on it, and majority of the posters are complaining to no end and are telling EA they will either not buy the game, or wait for the game to come out and get download a crack for the exe even though if they did purchased the game. And, of course, many of them are of the opinion that EA's effort will fail to deter piracy, because the hackers will find a way to get around it.

i think every game has one but mostly securom... but sometimes it's not intrusive or it doesn't bother your gaming at all and it doesn't require you to be dependent on a server just to play the game(except multiplayer of course)...

the main issue that i can think of that is unacceptable is after 10 frakkin' days without internet connection will render your game useless... also shelf life of the game is diminished once the server is dead(it' not MMORPG anyway...)... also the issue that your gameplay will be so dependent on the server... people will just say this out of sarcasm that get an internet connection but the main issue with this is there is no other option just in case this scenario happens...


90+ pages man.. i also got tired of reading that... but still i can't find the issue of how many times you can install and uninstall the game... will it be the same issue as BS(bioshock)... i do whine about this issue because of the experience from BS(bioshock) and also if you can see user feedback(customers are always right but not anymore)lol...


at least they should implement a cd-check if you have no internet connection... (i think i posted this already... cd-check... COH does this at least you can play your game continously...) lol

Here's what I gathered from Derek French (Bioshock official) in the Mass Effect forum:

You can install / uninstall it as often as you like as long as you don't change your hardware. Apparently, the game sends information about your hardware to the EA server when it authenticates, and the server remembers that. If at some time the server notices different hardware associated with the same serial number, then it blocks you out, and you have to reactivate your account. You have three free activations (including the first installation). After that, you're at the mercy of EA support to reactivate your license if you want to play the game you paid for.

The "hardware change detection" will, according to French, not be strict, i.e. plugging another RAM chip in is not supposed to necessitate a new activation of the game. Details about this are sketchy though.

Yeah, I'm not a big fan of putting spyware on my pc. I'm thinking my anti-virus would detect it as such and delete it after the first scan too. And I'm not making an exception for it because you know someone is going to model a real virus or spyware after this activation and once I make the exception, my anti-virus won't detect either as being malicious.

Yes, the question (how much hardware change is too much) was asked directly and the answer was "We don't really know" (Kudos at least to BioWare for admitting that). With only 3 activations allowed, that's far too vague for my taste. (Well, that's a moot point anyway, as limited activations are BS in the first place).

Give the man a coconut - you got it in One.



I agree totally. I now avoid draconian DRM schemes, and refuse to buy any games product that uses them. It flags up the wrong message. Its clear these schemes use shows a Focus on Profit alone, not their Customer. You only build a long lasting "Great" Company by focusing efforts on providing Value to your Customers.

Strategy built on the latter provides long lasting loyal customers who end up helping you succeed even more - eg Stardock's way of doing business. I cannot and will not trust those using these draconian systems. I'll tolerate a disc in the drive, but thats about as far as I'll go.

There's a great quote from Henry Ford that sums this up:

"Wealth, like happiness, is never attained when sought after directly. It comes as a by product of providing a useful service"

Those who delude themselves they got it right after sales of (say) 2million DRM'd games, need to wake up. The statistics morons they are employing will always give them what they want to hear (after all they want to get paid for the Stats!) They will ignore the millions who would have bought the game, but now will not, due to the stupid heavy handed DRM system.

ggrrrrr .....

phew .... feel lots better now .... senior moment ...
I'll get back in me box .....

Regards
Zy

They yanked the "phone home" every 10 days:

http://masseffect.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=629059&forum=125&sp=0

-HM

Official word about Spore:



This should at least put Spore fans minds at ease

Obtained from:
http://www.gamingsteve.com/

I'm still not entirely happy about the DRM, but the incarnation just posted there I could probably live with. Authenticate once, and then only authenticate again when accessing online content or patches. I'm not entirely happy about the "3 installs" thing, as it means a long trek through customer support (EA's customer support... bleh) if something goes wrong, if they'll even listen to you. But it's a step in the right direction. If anything, it moved me from "no way in hell" to "maybe, depending on what other customers have experienced with it".

I dont remember where I read it, but I dont think it's limited to 3 installs anymore. If it is, I may mean only 3 active installs total. So you would deactivate one when you get a new machine or configuration and reactivate it on a the new one.

I dont think you have to worry about limited installs. I remember reading somewhere, but I cant quote where off hand. It was probably on "gamingsteve" site. I'd check there for verification.

Oh, right, from the quote above:
'You'll still be able to install and play on multiple computers.'

(Mass Effect is 3 according to the link, but I was responding to Spore)

The statment from Caryl that's quoted above sounds pretty sensible, although he didn't give us any specifics about a limited number of installs. "Being able to install and play on multiple computers" could mean anything in that regard.

The new statement from Bioware specifically states that the "3 installs on differing hardware and you need to call support" policy will stay in effect for Mass Effect. For me as a collector, who enjoys to play old games every couple of years (and naturally on hardware that has undergone changes in the meantime), it is not acceptable to be at the mercy of any game publisher if I just want to relive my enjoyment of a product I bought.

At least they tried to listen, although their new "solution" still won't work for me. I guess that a substantial number of pre-orders must have been cancelled in the past few days.

oh... i thought bioshock implements an uninstall type that reverse the count so you can install it again without diminishing your install count(i have my scenario about this because my rig is almost at it's life expectancy and i don't want to diminish my install number because of this(i'm a single user anyway so WTF))(second scenario is hardware changes people always upgrade graphics card(not always but surely it is))...



as for tech supp... i maybe whinning about this... but i don't really like talking to a tech supp like this(they are nice but they ask too many frakkin' question(techsuppphobia))... lol

Yes, Bioshock has a revoke tool so you can remove one of your licenses from their license server.

-HM

There is a difference between the limited activations of Mass Effect and BioShock. BioShock's is/was tied to computer accounts. (so if you had multiple accounts on one computer, it would eat up your activations).

Mass Effect's is tied to the HWID, so you can uninstall and reinstall as much as you like on the same system and have multiple user accounts without issue. The hazy area here is what it considers a big enough change in the hardware profile to trigger a new activation. I feel three is too few. A half dozen would be more palatable. No limit would be ideal.

wonder if a system restore would use up active install since I run system restore once every 4-6 months

Sorry, I meant *Bioware* official. I was talking about Mass Effect. I keep mistyping "Bioware" as "Bioshock", sorry.

Bioware have removed the 10 day re-activation Official BioWare/EA Response to DRM Discussion



edit:

HM beat me to it

well its because Microsoft was successful at killing peoples xbox 360 and online accounts with pirate chips and games.