Gaming miscellany

If you needed yet another reason to avoid Ubisoft games completely, they have just provided one. Apparently they are moving some of their services to new servers, and during that time, certain games will not function. At all. Even if you only want to play single-player games. That's because those games won't run unless they can access those Ubisoft servers. Behold the supreme idiocy of DRM.

They haven't even bothered to estimate the duration of the outage, so all you can do is keep trying until your game finally starts working again. So lame.

As if that's not bad enough, many in the tech industry (including myself) are scratching their heads, wondering why moving a critical service to new server hardware would be planned to involve more than a few seconds of downtime. This is not rocket science: get the new hardware up and running, flip the switch, then when everything looks okay, pull down the old servers.

The details are in this Ubisoft announcement:
http://static2.cdn.ubi.com/transition/details/

Wow. I thought Ubisoft was bad. EA's new Origin gaming service - which you'll need to use if you want to play any of EA's new games (including Battlefield 3) - wants access to everything on your hard drive. If you install one of the new games, you agree to the use of Origin, which means you also agree to its terms of use, one of which allows EA to root around in your computer, using what it finds in any way it chooses.

Let me think about this for a moment... it seems I have a choice: play EA games and give EA access to my computer, or stop buying EA games. Seems like a no-brainer to me. I'm officially boycotting EA games (for PC/Windows) until they come to their senses (unlikely).

Here are the details:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/2011...data.shtml

Et tu, Blizzard? Abandoning your single player, LAN gaming base is going to be a costly mistake. Sure, plenty of Diablo fans will buy Diablo III despite being required to have an always-on Internet connection, but those of us who still fondly remember Diablo LAN parties will shake our heads sadly and give D3 a pass. Blizzard, what do you think made Diablo so huge in the first place? Do you really think you lost any sales because of LAN gaming? No. Even if a dozen people at a LAN party all played with one copy of Diablo, the promotional value made up for any imagined loss in ways you clearly have never imagined possible.

To make matters worse, the real-world-currency market in D3 is going to give wealthy people a distinct advantage in the game. Yes, that's what the world needs: more advantages for rich people.

Screw you, Blizzard, and screw your accountants and lawyers who pushed for these changes. You just lost a customer. And speaking of promotional value, don't forget that it comes in negatives as well.

Ghastly details: http://games.slashdot.org/story/11/08...tion-House

UPDATE: Blizzard responds to the outcry with more bullcrap. Details below.

UPDATE 2012Jul26: The backlash against Diablo 3's senseless DRM ramps up in Germany:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/2012...ents.shtml

UPDATE: As of August 18, Ubisoft has started panicking about all the backlash. In a move that will surprise few, they have decided to 'remove' the always-on Internet requirement for its new games - by actually leaving it firmly in place. Which leads to the obvious question: say what? Here's what they've actually done: you still need an Internet connection to start the game, but you don't need one to keep playing once you've started. In other words, this change will only be helpful for people with dial-up and intermittent Internet connections. All twelve of them. Attaboy, Ubisoft! Way to listen to your customers.

You may recall that Ubisoft has a history of making some very poor choices in trying to prevent what they still view as 'piracy' of their games. In this not-so-fine tradition, they have once again implemented a seriously misguided DRM system for their most recent games, including Driver: San Francisco. This despite having earlier stopped using this same kind of DRM, which requires an always-on Internet connection, in response to widespread complaints. Ubisoft seems doomed to repeat its failures and never to learn from them.

What Ubisoft astonishingly fails to realize is that their copy protection efforts only really hurt legitimate, paying customers. All copy protection schemes are defeated, some within hours of being made available. People who want to get a game for free are going to do it anyway. Meanwhile, people who pay for the game are getting something that is less useful than the same game without the draconian copy protection. In fact, more and more legitimate, paying customers are getting fed up with these measures and downloading unprotected versions. Some of these people will buy the DRM'd-to-the-point-of-uselessness game, but play the unprotected version to save their sanity.

There is a large and growing amount of evidence showing that 'anti-piracy' efforts are doomed to failure; that they only hurt legitimate customers; that they don't prevent 'piracy'; that people who 'pirate' games are actually the people who spend the most money on games; that basic economics show that the best way to reduce 'piracy' is to reduce price; and that the backlash from customers to particularly nasty forms of protection can be seriously damaging. Ubisoft, pull your heads out of your collective asses and get with the program.

To demonstrate just how backward Ubisoft's thinking is, try not to facepalm as you read this PCGamer post about Ubisoft's new DRM.

Sony doesn't want anyone to be able to fiddle with their own, legally-purchased PS3, so they're going after anyone who posts the code required to "Jailbreak" the console. Well, here it is again, Sony. Do your worst. The notion that you can survive as a business by treating your customers like criminals is simply idiotic.

erk: C0 CE FE 84 C2 27 F7 5B D0 7A 7E B8 46 50 9F 93 B2 38 E7 70 DA CB 9F F4 A3 88 F8 12 48 2B E2 1B
riv: 47 EE 74 54 E4 77 4C C9 B8 96 0C 7B 59 F4 C1 4D
pub: C2 D4 AA F3 19 35 50 19 AF 99 D4 4E 2B 58 CA 29 25 2C 89 12 3D 11 D6 21 8F 40 B1 38 CA B2 9B 71 01 F3 AE B7 2A 97 50 19
R: 80 6E 07 8F A1 52 97 90 CE 1A AE 02 BA DD 6F AA A6 AF 74 17
n: E1 3A 7E BC 3A CC EB 1C B5 6C C8 60 FC AB DB 6A 04 8C 55 E1
K: BA 90 55 91 68 61 B9 77 ED CB ED 92 00 50 92 F6 6C 7A 3D 8D
Da: C5 B2 BF A1 A4 13 DD 16 F2 6D 31 C0 F2 ED 47 20 DC FB 06 70

UPDATE: Here's the code embedded in the notorious "Free Speech Flag" image's colours:

I've played more hours of Battlefield 1942 than any other game on any platform. I even run a Battlefield 1942 co-op server called Tanks 'n' Planes Unlimited. But as good as BF42 is, BF2 is better in almost every way. Keep reading to find out how.

Oh boy, here we go again. When will game publishers finally realize that copy protection is a waste of money. It doesn't prevent games from being cracked and distributed worldwide to those who don't want to pay for them, but it does annoy the hell out of paying customers, such as myself. If a game publisher persists in using particularly lousy protection, I tend to do one of two things: avoid buying their games in the future, or download a version without copy protection for free from just about anywhere.

Hooray!

Check out these sites and mainstream news articles:

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/01/30/...ware_.html

http://www.glop.org/starforce/

I've reported StarForce as malware to the StopBadware site (http://www.stopbadware.org/) and suggested publicly on various forums that StarForce should be examined in the kind of detail as the SonyBMG rootkit. It remains to be seen whether someone like Mark Russinovich will take up that particular challenge, but I sure hope so.

Codemasters is another development group using StarForce. As you might expect, there is a lot of traffic on the Codemasters support forums related to StarForce. Here's a typical response from a Codemasters support person:

The original poster said:
"thats like saying "spyware is ok, its part of the product you're installing""

And here's the response:
"No it's not. It's like saying that dll files or codecs are part of the product you are installing. No other software will inform you when they install dll files or media codecs (which affect other applications far more).StarForce installs 4 drivers, which can be listed under device manager "Non Plug and Play Drivers" (you'll have to click on show hidden devices first). Do you know what all of those other drivers are? Shouldn't you be concerned about those too?Genuine customers should rest easy. The only reason any fuss is being made about StarForce is that it's causing pirates problems. The more agro we get on this subject, the more it reinforces what a good job it is doing."

Hoo boy. Where do I start? Of course DLLs are installed along with applications. But a DLL file installed with an application is essentially inert as long as the associated application isn't running. Even the old (and no longer an issue) "DLL Hell" was less of a problem than StarForce drivers. A driver runs all the time. It also typically inserts itself between the hardware and the operating system. This is clearly the case with StarForce: the drivers are hooked into the removeable media process in such a way as to affect all operations related to removeable media. Sure, proponents will say that the drivers have no affect on any operations except those related to StarForce-protected games, but that is essentially impossible. Every CD/DVD operation passes through the StarForce drivers and is either ignored or acted upon, but the drivers are involved in every CD/DVD operation.

As for "all those other drivers" - Microsoft has a quality assurance program for hardware drivers. Have the StarForce drivers been certified by Microsoft? In general, I don't install a driver unless it's certified. And if I break that rule, I am very aware that it's at my own risk. But the StarForce drivers are installed totally without my knowledge!

The last two statements are unbelievably crass. Sure, StarForce is causing headaches for software crackers, but it's clear that StarForce is also causing problems for legitimate users - myself among them. And if aggrivating legitimate users is the goal of Codemasters, then indeed StarForce is doing a good job.