What´s the point of the new copy protection?

[PhilD]

Stardock also doesn't use CD-based copy protection, and don't use an intrusive protection either. But then, they also like to send their games through download, so requiring the CD to be in the drive would be a bit harsh...

[krpeters]

Just putting my $0.02 in: I haven't seen this "bug", but from what I've seen described of it, it is a pretty silly method of copy protection. Bug reports damage the reputation of a game. If pirates go onto a board complaining of weird effects in their game, current users are going to fear that theirs might start acting up, and prospective buyers can get scared off. Not a good strategy.

Also keep in mind that pirates are "prospective" buyers, if they can be "scared straight". That is, you let their version work, but encourage them to buy a working version... say, by slapping horror marks on their commanders randomly every turn. Display a little message -- "Horrors have eaten 13 computer game pirating commanders". They'll get the picture,and if they still like the game, they'll buy it.

Bugs just confuse them and encourage them to walk away from the game altogether, which is not what you want to do.

[Dedas]

Come on, if Illwinter wants to try punishing people for pirating let them. It's their game after all.

However, as some pirates may get scared, annoyed, bugged to buying the game, I believe the majority of them will just wait for a new crack to come out. I mean, it is computer code after all, it can be cracked.

[Velusion]

Dedas said:
Come on, if Illwinter wants to try punishing people for pirating let them. It's their game after all.

However, as some pirates may get scared, annoyed, bugged to buying the game, I believe the majority of them will just wait for a new crack to come out. I mean, it is computer code after all, it can be cracked.

Eh, if they think its a bug, they will just assume the game is crappy and quit playing.

I don't think anyone is saying that Illwinter isn't well within thier rights to do whatever they want to pirates, we just question the practical business reasoning of the method currently employeed.

I like Krpeters idea about the horror marked pirate captians

[Loren]

Velusion said:

Eh, if they think its a bug, they will just assume the game is crappy and quit playing.

I don't think anyone is saying that Illwinter isn't well within thier rights to do whatever they want to pirates, we just question the practical business reasoning of the method currently employeed.

I like Krpeters idea about the horror marked pirate captians

Exactly. Anti-piracy measures should make it clear that that's what they are, they shouldn't look like bugs.

Consider the old Command and Conquer game. There was some sort of anti-pirate thing in it that would cause all your units to explode maybe 30 seconds into the game. It caused all sorts of gripes in discussion forums because people would trip it. Not true pirates but those who had a problem with Windows that they fixed by doing an over-the-top install. (This was W98SE, before the days of a repair install. Same concept, though.)

You knew you had a legit game that had been working--it's not the sort of thing you would think to blame on the reinstall.

[Archonsod]

This kind of copy protection is present in most games to some degree these days, usually on top of the usual disk protection or similar.

Turin said:
1.Bad word of mouth.
People don´t know that it´s copyprotection, so people assume it´s a bug. That certainly will drive people off, who are thinking about buying the game, but hearing from their pirate friends that it´s a really buggy game.

Generally, if people had 'pirate friends' I doubt they'd bother buying the game. Why spend money when your friend can give you a copy? It's the same as the "pirates might buy a game" argument - the small number of people who would fit into this description would hardly register on the sales front.
Generally, most purchasers would use reviews on websites or magazines for their 'word of mouth'. You tend to find a lot of people would put such bugs down to the difference between systems (especially if the problem somehow implies the friend's system is inferior. E-penis envy should never be underestimated!)

2. Alienating semilegitimate users:
Unless it has changed recently, it can take quite a while for the copy to arrive when ordering from some publishers. Since many people aren´t very patient, it´s pretty likely that they will use a pirated copy until the real one arrives. Now guess what happens when they find out that the 55Euro game they just ordered has strange bugs/crashes.

They've already ordered it. Presumably they'd figure it out when the legit copy arrives. If not, in the words of Johnny Rotten "We have your money". If they pre-ordered it then they may cancel, but after that the sale is made (I doubt you'd be required to refund the consumer if you could state the problem was an illegitimate key being used). The odds on them having the game prior to it's release (the point when the order is despatched or otherwise 'too late to cancel') is fairly slim.

3. Wasting programming time:

99% of requested features are always ignored anyway. It's not normally a factor to programming time, since the developer usually knows precisely what they want to add to the game from it's initial development stage, usually.
To implement this kind of protection is rarely time intensive at all (presumably it just checks the key against a blacklist). Even with more advanced types (such as those which actively scan the memory and system environment) it's not necessarily a waste of time - not only are you protecting your investment, but the methods used for the protection are often part of something else (in other words, the protection is more of a secondary feature to another bit of coding).

4. Not trusting customers:

Not really an issue. It's like saying manufacturer's should stop using car alarms because it will alienate car thieves : a legitimate user should never encounter the security feature, while illegitimate users (i.e. those who haven't paid for your product) are prevented from using it. You have a small percentage of false positives, but this is comparable to the small percentage of problems any feature would cause to people with particular system configurations.

1. The developers can get the feeling of satisfaction that no pirate is enjoying their hard work.

Not really, unless Illwinter issue a patch everytime someone produces a keygen or key then it's never going to be up to date. What you can do is make it just that little bit harder for the game to be pirated, which generally reduces the amount of people who use a pirated copy.

For example why don´t you put at least an errormessage like Nagot gik fel:badcdkey after the error, so that the pirates know it´s not a bug and you don´t get the bad word of mouth effect?

The main problem with this is you're telling the real pirates (those who produce the keygens/cracks) precisely what the problem is, making their job easier. I guess the idea is that these guys get fed up with the buggy game, and decide not to bother.
There's also a secondary purpose, though I only know of one company which has ever used it. If someone reports the problem, then you can usually identify them (for example, their IP address from a forum post) and take legal action.

[Actuarian]

I remember that at least one game (Master of Orion?) had a copy protection scheme that turned the difficulty level up to completely impossible after a certain number of turns if you played with a pirated copy.

[Velusion]

Archonsod said:
The main problem with this is you're telling the real pirates (those who produce the keygens/cracks) precisely what the problem is, making their job easier. I guess the idea is that these guys get fed up with the buggy game, and decide not to bother.

While I agree with most everything you said previously, I can't see how this makes sense from a business perspective.

Games sell based on a number of factors... one of them is hype. This copyright protection causes negative hype - because it isn't easliy identifable. What you have is lots of pirates flooding the boards (both here and all the other game sites) with messages like "this game is buggy and broken." This hurts business directly when legitimate demo players assume that the game has bugs. It also confuses other players who might have somewhat simliar video issues.

Being fairly familiar with the pirate scene (hacker culture and all) I can say this really will have no effect because, quite franky, Dom3 just isn't popular enough to crack more than once. I.E. if Ilwinter implemented a different copy write protection for every patch in all likelyhood the crackers wouldn't bother because the title is so obscure. Whatever group cracked the game got the credit already, which is all they care about.

The only real effect this has is to annoy some pirate users (which is a laudable enough goal) but the downside is negative hype about the stability of the game.

[Turin]

Archonsod said:
Generally, if people had 'pirate friends' I doubt they'd bother buying the game. Why spend money when your friend can give you a copy? It's the same as the "pirates might buy a game" argument - the small number of people who would fit into this description would hardly register on the sales front.
Generally, most purchasers would use reviews on websites or magazines for their 'word of mouth'. You tend to find a lot of people would put such bugs down to the difference between systems (especially if the problem somehow implies the friend's system is inferior. E-penis envy should never be underestimated!)

Well people are different, so even if I have pirate friends, I might have higher morals/more disposable income and want to buy the game in a legit manner.
In addition dominions is really a niche game with very few reviews on mostly nonmainstream sites so word of mouth or forum posting hype is very important. It´s the way I came to the series and I guess many others got into the series that way as well.
For example the somethingawful thread I linked to has currently about 6000 views, which is more than most of the stickies in this forum. If it wasn´t for Tombom´s explanation people would assume that dominions 3 is a cool, but buggy game. I can´t see how that helps sales.

2. Alienating semilegitimate users:

They've already ordered it. Presumably they'd figure it out when the legit copy arrives. If not, in the words of Johnny Rotten "We have your money". If they pre-ordered it then they may cancel, but after that the sale is made (I doubt you'd be required to refund the consumer if you could state the problem was an illegitimate key being used). The odds on them having the game prior to it's release (the point when the order is despatched or otherwise 'too late to cancel') is fairly slim.

Well I don´t know how many people exist out there to whom the scenario applies, but it is a somewhat likely scenario to lose sales or the goodwill of paying customers.
You also presume that the customers find out that their problems are due to an illegal cd-key or bother using their legit one after the game is already installed. And before my thread the only mentioning of it being a cd-key issue was a post three pages back.

3. Wasting programming time:

99% of requested features are always ignored anyway. It's not normally a factor to programming time, since the developer usually knows precisely what they want to add to the game from it's initial development stage, usually.
To implement this kind of protection is rarely time intensive at all (presumably it just checks the key against a blacklist). Even with more advanced types (such as those which actively scan the memory and system environment) it's not necessarily a waste of time - not only are you protecting your investment, but the methods used for the protection are often part of something else (in other words, the protection is more of a secondary feature to another bit of coding).

Well I certainly don´t know if the copyprotection is part of anything else which is useful.
But there have been quite a lot of reports of the bug appearing even with legit keys, so I guess the developers should have spent more time testing the code. So it seems that implementing and properly testing copyprotection takes a significant amount of time.

4. Not trusting customers:

Not really an issue. It's like saying manufacturer's should stop using car alarms because it will alienate car thieves : a legitimate user should never encounter the security feature, while illegitimate users (i.e. those who haven't paid for your product) are prevented from using it. You have a small percentage of false positives, but this is comparable to the small percentage of problems any feature would cause to people with particular system configurations.

Granted it´s a pretty weak point and only important to me, because I´m interested in the subject due to my studies. Since the copyprotection isn´t affecting legitimate users I don´t have a big problem with it.

It really makes no sense not to have a logical errormessage that tells the error is due to a bad cd-key. If you tell people that anyway via the forum, then the pirates can certainly figure it out.
Of course if you want to take legal action vs pirates, then it would make sense, but that really seems pretty farfetched.

[Archonsod]

Velusion said:
Games sell based on a number of factors... one of them is hype. This copyright protection causes negative hype - because it isn't easliy identifable. What you have is lots of pirates flooding the boards (both here and all the other game sites) with messages like "this game is buggy and broken."

Unlikely. Pretty much every mainstream game since 2000 has incorporated similar protection, and this hasn't really happened yet. I doubt you'd see this sort of thing happening, most pirates I know would simply delete the game once they encountered the bugs rather than go complaining on the forum.

The only real effect this has is to annoy some pirate users (which is a laudable enough goal) but the downside is negative hype about the stability of the game.

One would hope that the amount of legitimate users would far outnumber those of pirate users on any mainstream forum. In other words, the main negative hype would likely be on pirate sites themselves, which one could rationalise by the fact that you wouldn't be losing paying customers. Thing is, I'd expect that anyone familiar with this kind of thing would be able to figure out precisely what was happening from this.

If it wasn´t for Tombom´s explanation people would assume that dominions 3 is a cool, but buggy game. I can´t see how that helps sales.

In this specific instance then it might not, but then Illwinter have always stated they're not that bothered about sales. With a mainstream title, then you always have a legitimate fanbase who'll usually point out that the reported bug isn't affecting them (in greater numbers than the pirates one would hope).

You also presume that the customers find out that their problems are due to an illegal cd-key or bother using their legit one after the game is already installed.

Given that they'd have potential problems with multiplayer otherwise one would expect they'd switch keys as soon as they had the legit one in this case. I guess you could also assume that legit users in this situation would either find out themselves (by looking for users with similar problems) or else contact support and be told why they're having the problem.

Well I certainly don´t know if the copyprotection is part of anything else which is useful.

In this case probably not, but it's not a complicated mechanism.
In an example I gave with a more complicated mechanism (the memory/environment scan) it can detect hacks and similar cheat methods too. If you had an online game, then you'd want to implement this kind of thing as a fair play measure anyway, so it doesn't take too much (if any) modification to apply it to looking for game cracks. Similarly, back in the olden days when video or similar content needed to run from the CD while the game was being played, it doesn't take too much more effort to check the CD being played is legit.

But there have been quite a lot of reports of the bug appearing even with legit keys, so I guess the developers should have spent more time testing the code.

Depends on why it's being triggered. If your checking against a list of known suspect keys, then those people with legitimate keys who are being flagged have either had their key stolen or else have made it available to the public (breaching their EULA). Since I don't know what exactly Illwinter has implemented I can't say for sure why or what they are going to do about it. I know with other companies employing similar protection they're usually happy to issue a new key or similar if you can prove ownership.

It really makes no sense not to have a logical errormessage that tells the error is due to a bad cd-key. If you tell people that anyway via the forum, then the pirates can certainly figure it out.

Most would probably figure it out without the error message to be honest. I guess it's purely down to the preference of the authors. I suppose one thing which you would avoid is someone trying to break the protection again - if you get an error saying "wrong CD Key" then there would be nothing stopping you looking for another key until you found a working one. You could of course simply say "illegal version detected" or similar, which wouldn't tell the user precisely how it detected it.