Mass Effect: Activation Policy Angers Customers
Mass Effect: Activation Policy Angers Customers
Maybe you have heard about the way EA tries to stop piracy with their newest hit Mass Effect: If you install the game, your key is getting registered - somewhere. After activating the game three times, the installation menu of Mass Effect will tell you that it's had enough of you. Now what?!
Ok, once again: You can only install the game for three times.
That's it. It's not that cool, but well, EA is not exactly known for being cool or something.
But what people really don't like is that they try to make a secret of this thing. Read what The Consumerist writes about this issue. That guy asks EA why you don't gain an activation by uninstalling the game. But it took him several emails to get a proper answer instead of long sentences without the information he wanted.
Stuff like that does not really make people trust in EA. What is your opinion? Do you keep things like that in mind when you buy new games?
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I definetely keep those things in mind. Too bad that EA keeps publishing really good games.^^
Copy protection doesn't work. Why not just save the money?
Actually, I think it does. If a game is hyped really well and everyone wants it, I'd say you sell a lot more units if there is no easy illegal way in the first 2-4 weeks. But I don't have any statistics about that, maybe someone has?
C'mon, don't you see how fast the pirated versions come out?
The only good protection was starforce. It took PoP:TtT half a year to get cracked, but now that it is...
2-4 weeks is ridiculously long, the pirated versions are much faster available.
I'm with bolle,
as I wrote in the last article about copy protection, the copy protection doesn't have to work forever, just for the first few weeks as bolle said.
Also, it's true that some people will always find a way to get around it, but if you have to read in forums, loads cracks and special emulating programs and maybe even special disc images to make it work, than the copy protection is already working, because a lot of people won't bother with this.
I agree, but most of the time good cracks are available within one week and special tedious workarounds as the only solution are rare.
SOME COMMENTS WERE DELETED BECAUSE DISCUSSING CRACKS FOR MASS EFFECT.
What's the problem, we didn't link or offer anything, we just discussed it.
Are you going to censor this now? Looking away isn't going to make those cracks disappear.
Discussing murder is also not illegal, but will be deleted non the less.
Either you buy your games and can discuss copy protection with us from a theoretical standpoint, or you loose all credibility anyway.
And this is of course only my point of view and not the one of the GG-Staff.
So you're accusing me of doing the opposite?
I'm not accusing you of anything, I'm inviting you to discuss this with us without getting off-topic.
The topic is copy proctection and if copy protection will stop you from buying a game, not how to break it.
Good.
Ah well, you know how fastly one drifts away into off topic (even if that was only an inch away from the main subject).
The only protection that is going to keep me from buying a game is steam.
I'm with you on that a 100%
Steam will never touch my harddrive.
OnTopic: We all understand software well enough to know that there can never be a perfect protection, maybe one day the effort to break it will be so high that it would take month, but I won't hold my breath for that.
It was deleted because there was information about cracks.
Stating that there are cracks (or leaked versions) is absolutely okay. But, for example, claiming to be in possession of a crack and offering it to other people definitely is not okay. Hope this clarifies the "censorship".
If you want to hear my thoughts on this:
I hate copy protection as much as the next guy, I bought the game and payed good money for it, why do I have to prove this? And God only knows what they are transmitting during that online activation, but in the end I really don't care it's by far not the worst copy protection I saw. The thing I hate most is copy protections that take 30seconds to check your disc and tell you in 50% of the time that your disc is not the original.
But Mass effect has nothing of that, I put in the disc, start the game and don't get bothered with any of this. If you ask me, they could do an online check every single time I start the game for all I care, if that meant that I could leave the disc in the casing. The complete data gets copied to my harddrive anyway.
Don't get me wrong, this has nothing to do with the old argument "I have nothing to hide", I can get mad about security and privacy issues as well, for me Steam is the best copy protection of all, because I will never install that Big-Brother-software...ever.
But online activation, pfff so what, reading these lines proves that you have internet, and if you really need to reinstall your complete windows every 2 weeks than you have bigger issues anyway.
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