New levels of retardedness

I just got another game 'Settlers: Rise of an Empire' that has some fly by night copy protection that of course doesnt work with any DVD drive thats more than 3 days old. Last Ubisoft product I buy, this is the 2nd game of theirs this has happened with. Of course if I buy it online I get an activation code and can run it without DVD but since I bougth it in the store and have a CD-KEY I cant play it. At what point did companies decide that it was better to alienate paying customers than to let hackers get the single player only version of their game a few hours earlier? I mean it should be blatantly obvious at this point that no form of copy protection will ever stop the hackers, all it does is inconvenience the paying customers.

A lot of companies make it so hard to actually pay them for their software, even if you are perfectly willing to do so, that it's easier to just pirate it. It's their own fault.

Get yourself a No-CD/DVD crack, mate In this case, I think we can actually recommend it so that you can play the game you bought legally.
Sometimes I tend to use such to get rid of copy right crap such as SecuROM.

Originally Posted by Elysia

Get yourself a No-CD/DVD crack, mate In this case, I think we can actually recommend it so that you can play the game you bought legally.
Sometimes I tend to use such to get rid of copy right crap such as SecuROM.

Such software can get your flagged by anticheat software. This is not a recommended procedure for online games, even if you legally have purchased them and have issues.

@OP: UBI sucks. Don't buy their games.

Another solution is sometimes to do a 1:1 copy of your DVD or just a copy and enable emulation with Deamon Tools for example. Though I haven't really needed to do this myself, so I can't vote for how well it works. Copy protection plays nice with my DVD drive...

UBI seem to LOVE the Unreal Engine (and weird copy protection, ie starforce), which I'm not a fan of. Terribly bloated and the way it works (dumping C++ class states to file for example) sucks. Although one thing good about Unreal is how it stops wall hackers... (just get the server to tell the client who they can see!).

Ubisoft is also stupid in other areas, for example the Far Cry 1 developers have NOTHING to do with Far Cry 2. Yes that's the Crytek developers, and if you've seen Crysis I can't see why they wouldn't want them involved.

Nothing but stupidity.

Ubisoft is horrible with their copy protection. Complaints are all all over their forums that the copy protection is either broke, breaks your game, or hoses something else on your system.

Personally I do not see why companies waste money on copy protection b/c usually within a day of release it's been hacked. Seems to be a waste of money and all the copy protection is doing is keeping the legit players from playing while the hackers enjoy a free for all. Some of the more recent copy protection systems seem to me to be more like spyware or malware than actual spyware and malware programs. I don't like extra stuff being installed behind the scenes that I have to go through a full page of instructions to remove from my drive later.

Just let me play my games.


Terrible business practices. Get rid of copy protection. It's like PunkBuster. It only boots legit people.

I think gamers have been complaining for years, but companies just don't want to listen.
Betheda, the creator of The Elder Scrolls, released Oblivion w/o copy protection (yay!), but unfortunately, they slapped SecuROM protection on the Shiver Isles expansion ;(

SecuROM has been broken since the day it was hatched. We honestly need legislation that forces companies to make their copy protection hardware friendly. They tried to get SecuROM made a standard years ago, adn one fo the reasons that the IEEE refused was because of engineering issues with the way it works, or rather doesnt work with drives that otherwise meet the standards. There are two very good copy protection systems out that work perfectly fine and do not prevent legitimate users form playign te game. Neither of them invovles proprietary methods and so are cheaper for companies to use, but they continously try to use these 'flawed media' copyprotection systems that fail in half the drives on the market.

The two that work are - CD-KEY's for the online content, since the key has to be valid and is verified by the server when connecting, this is just abotu fool proof. The other is reading the bar-code on the CD. If the drive supports barcodes and the barcode isnt the legitimate one, then fail to run, but if the drive doesnt support it or it is correct, run the software.

UBI is definately grey-listed, and unless they just impress the hell out of me fixing this problem, they will be blacklisted after this is over.

Key generators have long past defeated CD keys. Codebars aren't a reality today and if they were they would also be easily defeated.

The problem is real and it doesn't pay to blame this or that company to try and protect their investment. How many of us here have illegally copied a CD or used an illegal CD in the recent past? It would be better to drop the superlatives and agree these companies do have a point.

It is becoming a mess, I agree. But not because they aren't trying hard for it to become better. The fact is that our hardware is open and was created to stay open. It's the whole concept of today's computers. Until this changes, any copy protection mechanism is only going to act like a patch to the open architecture we have been enjoying for the past years.

The problem is that if you get on one end an ever growing crowd of crackers, and on the other hand an ever growing community of disgruntled users, soon enough the economy will try and face the issue head on. And that may as well mean the end of the Open Architecture.

What I'm truly against is crapware like SecuROM and Starforce. Things that force me to close down favorite programs such as Process Explorer should be destroyed. And crapware that puts that crap into the computer that limits what you can do, and sometimes even things that doesn't limit copying of the program, such as StarForce, should not be allowed to exist.

Starforce is the worst copy protection there is and SecuROM isn't much better.

Key generators have long past defeated CD keys.

Yes, but it wont defeat the online validation. I agree with abachler here, the only effective way to deal with piracy without causing grief for your customers it to use keys.

Fair enough its not perfect, but like bubba said most protection systems are effectively malware. At the moment they scan you computer detecting what software you have installed, for example Alcohol or Nero then deny you the right to use your game because they find something they don't like. Why not simply root though all you files building a personality profile then calculate if you are a 'good' or 'bad' person. As far as I am concerned these software nazis should all be put on a rocket and sent of out into space. Hopefully never to return.

They do defeat online validation in terrible ways. Suddenly your legit key may not work anymore because it was generated by someone else. The amount of grief is now twofold. You still can't use your CD online and now have to prove it is legit.

That is why you use something like blizzard did with a couple of their games, there are a ton of valid keys for single player, 99% of which are invalid for online play, it takes a large amount of time to find a key that actually works online, to the point that almost everyone gives up before it works. Also if your key gets banned, from a IP that isn't yours (especially if it is an IP that is far away) often times you can send in your CD case, or manual (where ever they store the key) and they will give you a new one.

Originally Posted by Mario F.

Key generators have long past defeated CD keys.

Only for single player. A keygen cant defeat online play unless it hacks the database of valid keys. Online verification is a two stage process. First it is mathematically verified, i.e. a potentially valid key, this is all that single player can do, since it doesnt usualy have a copy of the valid key database, nor woudl having it make it secure, since you coudl then just hack the local databse. The second stage is checkign that the key actually exists int eh database, this is also how you invalidate a key, by removing it from the database.

barcodes cant be defeated on current drives, as few drives can write them, although this is less secure than keys, since the program can be hacked to ignore the barcode. But then that is all SecuROM and the others are doing, is just reading a much mroe complicated and flawed method of barcoding the disk.

Open architecture isnt the problem, There are cracks for XBOX and PS3 too, both closed architectures.