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Forums - PC Discussion - EA's anti piracy screwing up PC Mass Effect.

naznatips said:

@Gnizmo that's not how it works.  You don't have to renew it every 10 days, just every 10 days you want to play.  For example, you could not play Mass Effect for a month, and when you connect it will do the same verification it would do if you hadn't played it in 10 days.  It just means that every 10 days and longer since your last activation, when you go to start up the game it will require verification.  Most likely a process that takes less than 30 seconds. 


That is exactly how it works. Read my example again. If I go a month without playing it, the next time I try to play it then I will have to verify it. If my internet is down, which it often is at home for a number of reasons you could not care less about, I can't play the game. When my internet goes out I tend to look at old games I want to play, and a lot of the time those are PC games. Steam is less of an issue because I can just turn it on and keep it running with zero to no affect on my general performance. When the internet goes down most of the time steam doesn't try to update. The few times it has I have been pissed and grumbled until I found a different game to play. Running a game in the background would slow my computer down.

This is not the absolute horrific issue people are trying to make it out to be though. I am in a very small minority who will be aggravated by this problem. I do have a "moral" objection to single player games requiring and internet connection, but thats really nothing at all. I certainly will not pay support the system though. It certainly does affect me in a way I percieve to be relatively major. I really hope they remove this feature from Spore. 

@Ail

Read my post again, and then try to blow it off. I have a solid internet connection at school and work, but a sketchy one at home. 90% of my posts are from school or work. 0% of them are from home when my internet craps out for the day. Trying to use my post count as a way to dismiss my complaint is stupid.



Starcraft 2 ID: Gnizmo 229

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Yes, but if your internet dies within those 10 days, you're absolutely fine, it'll still play.



LEFT4DEAD411.COM
Bet with disolitude: Left4Dead will have a higher Metacritic rating than Project Origin, 3 months after the second game's release.  (hasn't been 3 months but it looks like I won :-p )

naznatips said:
Ignorance isn't an insult. It's a descriptive term for lack of knowledge on a subject. I'm ignorant of a lot of things, but the PC market isn't one of them. I know very well what you meant by your original post, and you were simply wrong and tried to back out of it. You're wrong that it's in a decline too.

You are welcome to your opinion of PC gaming, but health of a market depends on facts, and you lack them. Saying "I have a feeling" is meaningless in a discussion of facts. The people who do complain about PC gaming either have nothing to do with developing PC games (like Cliffy B), or haven't made a good one in a while (Hey there id).

The PC gaming market is healthy and expanding in ways that the console market will NEVER be able to match. Consoles can never go >50% digital distribution like PCs are. PC gaming has made its own market, and I'm sorry you can't see that, but I don't recommend you continue a discussion on a subject you are uneducated on and ignorant of.

I'm not trying to back out of it. I still believe the industry is in decline, I feel it's obvious. It's certainly expanding in some areas.

There are avid fans of the PC just as there are of any other console and some of them purposefully block out any evidence contrary to what they believe is the truth. Pretending that my point isn't valid and calling me too ignorant to argue it, while at the same time only presenting half the story is something I see all too often.

In fact, you have quite a reputation for "going off" on people who have opinions opposed to yours about how bright the future of PC gaming is.

More importantly, I guarntee you if I started out a couple of replies with, "You're ignorance astonishes me." or something along those lines, I would at least get a warning.

I guess I'll shut my ignorant mouth up, and the next time I get the bright idea to present my opinion, I'll make sure I don't suggest such an impossible thing as PC gaming being on the decline, because I know that I'll suffer the ultimate humiliation at your hands, yet again.

I will give you something to go out on though, so you can just other, more informed people, and I can keep out of it:

 

Infinity Ward's(CoD4) Community Manager Robert Bowling:

Monday, January 21, 2008

They wonder why people don't make PC games any more.

"We pulled some disturbing numbers this past week about the amount of PC players currently playing [Call of Duty 4] Multiplayer (which was fantastic)," writes Robert Bowling, on the game's community blog. "What wasn't fantastic was the percentage of those numbers who were playing on stolen copies of the game."

"The amount of people who pirate PC games is astounding," he added. "It blows me away that people are willing to steal games (or anything) simply because it's not physical or it's on the safety of the internet to do."

PC games sales have decreased in recent years due to rampant piracy of software and other digital goods over internet sharing sites.

 

Or

 

A post written by a former ILE ( Titan Quest ) developer after his company closed its doors.

Quote:

Greetings:
So, ILE shut down. This is tangentially related to that, not why they shut down, but part of why it was such a difficult freaking slog trying not to. It's a rough, rough world out there for independent studios who want to make big games, even worse if you're single-team and don't have a successful franchise to ride or a wealthy benefactor. Trying to make it on PC product is even tougher, and here's why.

Piracy. Yeah, that's right, I said it. No, I don't want to re-hash the endless "piracy spreads awareness", "I only pirate because there's no demo", "people who pirate wouldn't buy the game anyway" round-robin. Been there, done that. I do want to point to a couple of things, though.

One, there are other costs to piracy than just lost sales. For example, with TQ, the game was pirated and released on the nets before it hit stores. It was a fairly quick-and-dirty crack job, and in fact, it missed a lot of the copy-protection that was in the game. One of the copy-protection routines was keyed off the quest system, for example. You could start the game just fine, but when the quest triggered, it would do a security check, and dump you out if you had a pirated copy. There was another one in the streaming routine. So, it's a couple of days before release, and I start seeing people on the forums complaining about how buggy the game is, how it crashes all the time. A lot of people are talking about how it crashes right when you come out of the first cave. Yeah, that's right. There was a security check there.

So, before the game even comes out, we've got people bad-mouthing it because their pirated copies crash, even though a legitimate copy won't. We took a lot of shit on this, completely undeserved mind you. How many people decided to pick up the pirated version because it had this reputation and they didn't want to risk buying something that didn't work? Talk about your self-fulfilling prophecy.

One guy went so far as to say he'd bought the retail game and it was having the exact same crashes, so it must be the game itself. This was one of the most vocal detractors, and we got into it a little bit. He swore up and down that he'd done everything above-board, installed it on a clean machine, updated everything, still getting the same crashes. It was our fault, we were stupid, our programmers didn't know how to make games - some other guy asked "do they code with their feet?". About a week later, he realized that he'd forgotten to re-install his BIOS update after he wiped the machine. He fixed that, all his crashes went away. At least he was man enough to admit it.

So, for a game that doesn't have a Madden-sized advertising budget, word of mouth is your biggest hope, and here we are, before the game even releases, getting bashed to hell and gone by people who can't even be bothered to actually pay for the game. What was the ultimate impact of that? Hard to measure, but it did get mentioned in several reviews. Think about that the next time you read "we didn't have any problems running the game, but there are reports on the internet that people are having crashes."

Two, the numbers on piracy are really astonishing. The research I've seen pegs the piracy rate at between 70-85% on PC in the US, 90%+ in Europe, off the charts in Asia. I didn't believe it at first. It seemed way too high. Then I saw that Bioshock was selling 5 to 1 on console vs. PC. And Call of Duty 4 was selling 10 to 1. These are hardcore games, shooters, classic PC audience stuff. Given the difference in install base, I can't believe that there's that big of a difference in who played these games, but I guess there can be in who actually payed for them.

Let's dig a little deeper there. So, if 90% of your audience is stealing your game, even if you got a little bit more, say 10% of that audience to change their ways and pony up, what's the difference in income? Just about double. That's right, double. That's easily the difference between commercial failure and success. That's definitely the difference between doing okay and founding a lasting franchise. Even if you cut that down to 1% - 1 out of every hundred people who are pirating the game - who would actually buy the game, that's still a 10% increase in revenue. Again, that's big enough to make the difference between breaking even and making a profit.

Titan Quest did okay. We didn't lose money on it. But if even a tiny fraction of the people who pirated the game had actually spent some god-damn money for their 40+ hours of entertainment, things could have been very different today. You can bitch all you want about how piracy is your god-given right, and none of it matters anyway because you can't change how people behave... whatever. Some really good people made a seriously good game, and they might still be in business if piracy weren't so rampant on the PC. That's a fact.


Enough about piracy. Let's talk about hardware vendors. Trying to make a game for PC is a freaking nightmare, and these guys make it harder all the time. Integrated video chips; integrated audio. These were two of our biggest headaches. Not only does this crap make people think - and wrongly - that they have a gaming-capable PC when they don't, the drive to get the cheapest components inevitably means you've got hardware out there with little or no driver support, marginal adherence to standards, and sometimes bizarre conflicts with other hardware.

And it just keeps getting worse. CD/DVD drives with bad firmware, video cards that look like they should be a step-up from a previous generation, but actually aren't, drivers that need to be constantly updated, separate rendering paths for optimizing on different chips, oh my god. Put together consumers who want the cheapest equipment possible with the best performance, manufacturers who don't give a shit what happens to their equipment once they ship it, and assemblers who need to work their margins everywhere possible, and you get a lot of shitty hardware out there, in innumerable configurations that you can't possibly test against. But, it's always the game's fault when something doesn't work.

Even if you get over the hump on hardware compatibility - and god knows, the hardware vendors are constantly making it worse - if you can, you still need to deal with software conflicts. There are a lot of apps running on people's machines that they're not even aware of, or have become such a part of the computer they don't even think of them as being apps anymore. IM that's always on; peer-to-peer clients running in the background; not to mention the various adware and malware crap that people pick up doing things they really shouldn't. Trying to run a CPU and memory heavy app in that environment is a nightmare. But, again, it's always the game's fault if it doesn't work.


Which brings me to the audience. There's a lot of stupid people out there. Now, don't get me wrong, there's a lot of very savvy people out there, too, and there were some great folks in the TQ community who helped us out a lot. But, there's a lot of stupid people. Basic, basic stuff, like updating your drivers, or de-fragging your hard drive, or having antivirus so your machine isn't a teetering pile of rogue programs. PC folks want to have the freedom to do whatever the hell they want with their machines, and god help them they will do it; more power to them, really. But god forbid something that they've done - or failed to do - creates a problem with your game. There are few better examples of the "it can't possibly be my fault" culture in the west than gaming forums.

And while I'm at it, I don't want to spare the reviewers either. We had one reviewer - I won't name names, you can find it if you look hard enough - who missed the fact that you can teleport from wherever you are in TQ back to any of the major towns you've visited. So, this guy was hand-carting all of his stuff back to town every time his inventory was full. Through the entire game. Now, not only was this in the manual, and in the roll-over tooltips for the UI, but it was also in the tutorial, the very first time you walk past one of these giant pads that lights up like a beacon to the heavens. Nonetheless, he missed it, and he commented in his review how tedious this was and how much he missed being able to portal back to town. When we - and lots of our fans - pointed out that this was the reviewer's fault, not the game's, they amended the review. But, they didn't change the score. Do you honestly think that not having to run back to town all the time to sell your stuff wouldn't have made the game a better experience?

We had another reviewer who got crashes on both the original and the expansion pack. We worked with him to figure out what was going on; the first time, it was an obscure peripheral that was causing the crash, a classic hardware conflict for a type of hardware that very, very few people have. The second time, it was in a pre-release build that we had told him was pre-release. After identifying the problem, getting him around it, and verifying that the bug was a known issue and had been fixed in the interim, he still ran the story with a prominent mention of this bug. With friends like that...


Alright, I'm done. Making PC products is not all fun and games. It's an uphill slog, definitely. I'm a lifelong PC gamer, and hope to continue to work on PC games in the future, but man, they sure don't make it easy.

Best,
Michael.

 

 

I might be completely and utterly ignorant of everything in the PC gaming industry(even though I thought I had a pretty good idea of the overall landscape, considering Crytek, Epic, and many more recent leavings, as well as the formation of a group created for the soul purpose of "saving PC gaming" as well as MS's claim in 1995 that Vista would "save PC gaming.")

At least all the developers are as ignorant as I am, and acknowledge the fact that PC gaming might have some issues that it didn't have a few years ago, and these issues cause less games to be sold and more to be stolen, possibly.

...but I guess any developer who abandons the PC only makes games that suck, so it doesn't matter.



I don't need your console war.
It feeds the rich while it buries the poor.
You're power hungry, spinnin' stories, and bein' graphics whores.
I don't need your console war.

NO NO, NO NO NO.

you can play your steam games without internet connection through 'offline mode'
for ME, you'll need internet connection every 10 days even though its an offline game.

Sure, activating is quick and easy and its not a big deal if you have 24/7 internet but it sounds annoying having to veryfy every 10 days. What I don't like is how the customers that bought their game legitly have to be trated like a suspect of pirate. Oh and it WILL get pirated sooner or later. People on this thread are already planning to crack it so they can bypass the 10day authentication. ha!

This different methodogy from ME but remember Bioshock PC had a load of verification problems? Like people that bought the game couldn't install it and the 2K servers were down etc...complaints after complaints. I wonder if it had any effects on sales?
They need to stop this kind of rediculous methods to secure their game.

Seriously, release it on Steam or something instead of this BS.



crappy old school NES games are more entertaining than next-gen games.

ihira said:
you can play your steam games without internet connection through 'offline mode'
for ME, you'll need internet connection every 10 days even though its an offline game.

Sure, activating is quick and easy and its not a big deal if you have 24/7 internet but it sounds annoying having to veryfy every 10 days. What I don't like is how the customers that bought their game legitly have to be trated like a suspect of pirate. Oh and it WILL get pirated sooner or later. People on this thread are already planning to crack it so they can bypass the 10day authentication. ha!

This different methodogy from ME but remember Bioshock PC had a load of verification problems? Like people that bought the game couldn't install it and the 2K servers were down etc...complaints after complaints. I wonder if it had any effects on sales?
They need to stop this kind of rediculous methods to secure their game.

Seriously, release it on Steam or something instead of this BS.

Someone in this post said that if your authentication messes up 3 times, then the game thinks it's pirated and you can never play it again, and will be forced to buy a new copy.

 

If that's true, then that is my only concern. 



I don't need your console war.
It feeds the rich while it buries the poor.
You're power hungry, spinnin' stories, and bein' graphics whores.
I don't need your console war.

NO NO, NO NO NO.

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BenKenobi88 said:
Yes, but if your internet dies within those 10 days, you're absolutely fine, it'll still play.

And once the internet comes back up it will be fine. I agree with you that the situation is completely blown out of proportion. I just can't stand the fact that some are trying to dismiss it out right as not an issue at all. It has made me seriously reconsider getting Spore.



Starcraft 2 ID: Gnizmo 229

Gnizmo said:
BenKenobi88 said:
Yes, but if your internet dies within those 10 days, you're absolutely fine, it'll still play.

And once the internet comes back up it will be fine. I agree with you that the situation is completely blown out of proportion. I just can't stand the fact that some are trying to dismiss it out right as not an issue at all. It has made me seriously reconsider getting Spore.


It's not a problem for me at all unless this is true:

 

Taken from a poster on destructoid:
"http://masseffect.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=628375&forum=125&sp=3
Mass Effect and Spore will have a limited number of activations, similar to Bioshock before it. The number of these activations will be three. Every time Securom makes your game "cease to function" because it couldn't verify the legitimacy of the game, getting the game reactivated will blow an activation. Thus, after three such events, your game is bricked. Go buy a new copy, get a new CD-key." (or call tech support, possibly)

 

Somebody posted it earlier and I must say, it's shocking to say the least. 



I don't need your console war.
It feeds the rich while it buries the poor.
You're power hungry, spinnin' stories, and bein' graphics whores.
I don't need your console war.

NO NO, NO NO NO.

First post :)

Well there is something pretty big everyone is missing.

Lets say for example that Diablo 1 (released 1996) was released with this every-10 days authentication system, and Blizzard closed down in 2004 and didn't release a patch for diablo 1 to play without the authentication and one day in 2008 I decided to play the game...

... but I can't...


alot of us on Console and PC replay our old games. I fired up Chrono trigger late last year for another play through, and in febuary I fired up Doom again (using Zdoom). if the company closes down and doesn't release a patch before hand to remove this system, I feel its a pretty big loss to the player since well they will have to crack the game if they wish to replay their title in years time to come.

 

 Just another perspective on the subject..



 

^You made a valid point on a first post. Vgchartz first? I think so.
Welcome and congratulations, man!



@Shinlock

Be glad that you're still able to play Chrono Trigger, when most people already have their SNES broken of age (It's no different than What's happening to Mass Effect). PC games are the only ones that can you play it on a new system in 1 way or another.

Someone from Bioware said on the forums that if the authentication service does indeed go down, then they would address this problem and release a fix to remove the authetication process.