Anti-Piracy Measures

Console games are, so far, exempt from negative effects of anti-piracy measures taken by publishers (at least to my knowledge), but I've read numerous complaints about PC gaming and having to deal with crappy anti-piracy measures. I'm interested in the sort of problems anyone here's had with anti-piracy measures when trying to use their purchased product legitimately (don't whine because you couldn't warez it).

The worst anti-piracy crap I had to deal with was a CD I recently purchased for my girlfriend. I imported this CD from Japan for her 'cause she fell in love with the group after hearing them on the International Channel. She got the CD and it was a major pain in the ass just to get the damned thing onto my girlfriend's iPod. I had to download a stupid proprietary player (thanks, Sony, for your crappy software) and play the songs while recording with an external program, then compress and save to MP3. It would've been 100% easier to find the MP3s online and download them if they existed, but finding Japanese MP3s is pretty hard.

I know from now on that I will never purchase a copy-protected music CD. When I buy music, it goes straight to my hard drive library so I don't have to deal with the individual disc. If a CD I pay for isn't going to let me do this, screw it--I'd rather not pirate, but if I can't use something I pay for in the manner I want then it's useless to me and piracy is my preferred option.

(Feel free to move this to Sound Off if it belongs there, but I'm mostly interested in the effects of anti-piracy on gaming.)

My guess is most people will bring up Half Life 2, and Steam.

I"m sure many people will bring up steam. So I'll do it first. Steam is a prime example of FYUTA when it comes to anti-piracy not to mention it's not that good.

Edit: Screw you Chux

anything can be cracked. so to me anti piracy is a waste of time and resources.

Eh really it's about getting the lazy to purchase. Anything can be cracked perhaps but the time, and measures required to crack are enough to make some people just go out and purchase a product.

I bought Rome: Total War, from Amazon Marketplace for $30. It arrived new and sealed, including the CDs which were in shrinkwrap. Whenever I tried to install it, I got an error copying a certain file. I went on the Activision support site and they said to try to a few things. Heres what happened:

01. Change some DMA settings for the CD-ROM drive. Nothing worked, at all.
02. Copy the files to your Hard drive and run the install from there. When it was progressing, it would fail at a certain file because of a "cyclic redundancy check". Which is, from my research, a checksum error.
03. Return it to the store and get a new copy. Not really an option.
04. Update CD-ROM drivers. Nope.

So what I had to do was take it to my work computer, and copy the files to the hard drive there, then burn the copied files to a CD-ROM, and then copy those files from the burned CD-ROM to the hard drive on my computer, and install it from there. It worked, amazingly enough.

While I take pride in my clever solution to the problem, it was fucking ridiculous.

I had a similar thing like Diffx happen to me with Max Payne 2, only I eventually realized that the reason it kept getting a bad CRC check was because some freakish white substance was literally etched into the second disc. Nice pressing job, guys.

More on topic, I would like to point out the fun of getting PlayOnline's registration process to work for FFXI, which eventually required me installing the program on a different computer in the house and registering from there, enabling me to access the account on my own PC. For whatever freakish reason it absolutely refused to to allow registration on my PC no matter what I did, if we didn't have multiple PCs in my house I would've been dicked.

Quote:

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I had a similar thing like Diffx happen to me with Max Payne 2, only I eventually realized that the reason it kept getting a bad CRC check was because some freakish white substance was literally etched into the second disc. Nice pressing job, guys.

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One of the guys at the plant brought his girlfriend over and had a spot of fun (pardon the pun) all over your CD. Heh.

i've had 0 problems with steam aside from an extra-long hl2 installation, so i'll leave that particular brand of evil for others to bitch about.

most trouble i ever had was with the recent release of pirates. at first, i thought it might have been a dirty disc, because it took roughly an hour to install (single disc dvd edition). once i tried to play the game, i was politely asked to put the game in my drive. tried again and it told me that i was using a priated copy of the game.

i had to use a third party program to fool my computer into playing dvds at a slower speed.. worked fine after that, but wtf.

Any game that detects daemon tools or Alcohol %120 and refuses to open. Fucking bullshit. I paid for this game... just because I have a virtual CD drive doesn't mean I stole your game god dammit.