lol uncrackable DRM

[Kudistos Megistos]

This article, particularly the "last updated" part and the first line of the last paragraph, provide some interesting reading.

So...Ubisoft actually started using a pirate's patch? Sorry, had to say it.

It's not unheard of for companies to use patches made by fans (whether they be legitimate patches or just cracks). I actually seem to remember something being said somewhere about one of qhimm or Jedwin's patches being used by Eidos, but I'm probably just going senile.

Seriously though, there's never going to be a perfect DRM (although I think Steam's is pretty good). I wonder why they keep bothering making tougher and tougher restrictions to dissuade pirates that are going to break into those things anyway. That's just making better pirates.

And making piracy more attractive. FF7 didn't have any of this kind of DRM, and a lot of the time the people who have trouble with it are people who downloaded some kind of cracked version. With PC FF7, the real thing is better than the pirate version, and we can tell people with the pirate version that they won't get the same functionality out of it (without lying); with ACII, the opposite is the case.

[nfitc1]

FF7 didn't have any of this kind of DRM, and a lot of the time the people who have trouble with it are people who downloaded some kind of cracked version. With PC FF7, the real thing is better than the pirate version, and we can tell people with the pirate version that they won't get the same functionality out of it (without lying); with ACII, the opposite is the case.

See this is, I believe, just the pirates purposefully being malicious. I've seen plenty of cracks and keygens that plant little viruses or trojans on a users computer. I kind of feel this way about those that made the FF7 "Ultimate Edition" or whatever. I made the smallest of changes to my ff7.exe to get it to not require the CD (no, I won't tell anyone how) and it didn't require anything that would have otherwise hindered the game. Didn't they (the creators of the Ultimate Edition) attempt to delete the movies or re-encode them with a better video codec to make the game smaller? That would require a few more alterations on the executable's part I suppose.

I kinda want to get my hands on the Ultimate Edition's executable now and see what they've done differently to it to give people so many problems.

[Kudistos Megistos]

FF7 didn't have any of this kind of DRM, and a lot of the time the people who have trouble with it are people who downloaded some kind of cracked version. With PC FF7, the real thing is better than the pirate version, and we can tell people with the pirate version that they won't get the same functionality out of it (without lying); with ACII, the opposite is the case.

See this is, I believe, just the pirates purposefully being malicious. I've seen plenty of cracks and keygens that plant little viruses or trojans on a users computer. I kind of feel this way about those that made the FF7 "Ultimate Edition" or whatever. I made the smallest of changes to my ff7.exe to get it to not require the CD (no, I won't tell anyone how) and it didn't require anything that would have otherwise hindered the game. Didn't they (the creators of the Ultimate Edition) attempt to delete the movies or re-encode them with a better video codec to make the game smaller? That would require a few more alterations on the executable's part I suppose.

I kinda want to get my hands on the Ultimate Edition's executable now and see what they've done differently to it to give people so many problems.

Purposely malicious? I'm going to assume Hanlon's razor instead.

I get the feeling, from reading the countless threads about it, that there are lots of "Ultima editions" floating around in the intertubes, some of them with much more modification than others. I'm almost certain that some of them have the movies edited (or even deleted). There are posts on these forums about the Ultima edition from the days when nearly everyone had dialup, so it wouldn't be a surprise if someone wanted to cut down on the 2.2GB of downloading they'd have to do if they wanted the ISOs.

Really, the Ultima edition should be a relic by now. Maybe in the olden days no-one could mount ISOs and it was more expensive to download the whole game than buy it, but I can't see why anything like that would be popular now. It's also like putting a big sticker on your head saying "pirate". If the forum rules and ethos were different, and we had a general tolerance of piracy, I'd still tell people off for downloading it because downloading the original of the game would save so much bother. 

I apologise to any Ultima edition owners who are offended by this and think that I'm misrepresenting their beloved hack (and there's a good chance I'm factually incorrect on a few points), but you can't tell me how great your experience with it has been without admitting to downloading it, so HA!

[Bosola]

Little thought experiment: what if a PC game ran in its own Operating System (some small Linux derived majig) that was *built* from the ground up around having some kind of online authentication system? Like, the game actually needed to go online to obtain portions of its executable.

[nfitc1]

Purposely malicious? I'm going to assume Hanlon's razor instead.

Perhaps in the case of the FF7 Ultima Editions, yes. This was more of a generalized statement. The Ultima Editions probably do have screwed up movies which would require more modification to the executable.

Little thought experiment: what if a PC game ran in its own Operating System (some small Linux derived majig) that was *built* from the ground up around having some kind of online authentication system? Like, the game actually needed to go online to obtain portions of its executable.

You still run into the same problem of if the servers go down you can't play.

[Kudistos Megistos]

Moar copyright fun, this time from Viacom:

http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2010/03/broadcast-yourself.html

[yoshi314]

You still run into the same problem of if the servers go down you can't play.

think about people that might try the game few years from now, and the auth servers no longer support the game.

now that's evil.

[Kudistos Megistos]

You still run into the same problem of if the servers go down you can't play.

think about people that might try the game few years from now, and the auth servers no longer support the game.

now that's evil.

Ah, yes. The game will be unplayable.

Or maybe not, because I can see it being patched sooner or later so that it can be played offline; surely Ubisoft know that they dropped the ball with this one. They've already patched the game so that being taken offline automatically saves (or something like that), because they realised their DRM was ruining the game. Hopefully they'll know when to admit defeat (I say hopefully because it isn't anywhere near certain to happen).

There is another evil benefit to this kind of thing (I can't be bothered checking to see whether anyone else has said this ); it kills the resale value of games. And if the game can only be played whilst it is supported, people will have to get their copies while they're hot (and expensive!).