It's even in Anarchy Online, or was/is? for those playing the free accounts. (Heh... I had them turned off, but then lost my AO installation to a OS foulup, and lost the mod in the process. Bummer.)

Also: StarForce is far worse than SecuROM in some very specific ways. Under some circumstances, StarForce has been known to foul Vista's licensing info (why and how is beyond my knowledge, so SecuROM is not the only bogeyman out there.

In my opinion, copy protection serves no purpose. Full stop. Ditto for "Product Activation" followed by "<name of program> Genuine Advantage" programs. In both cases, it just inconveniences the legal end-user and doesn't even slow down the pirates in Asia and the Eastern Bloc countries.

All those software companies are doing is wasting money and ticking off their paying customers. I have yet to see a game that doesn't have a no-CD or no-DVD listed on www.gamecopyworld.com and I doubt I ever will see a game that doesn't by release + 90 days.

I agree, Raymond. To the best of my knowledge, SecuROM and all the other copy-protection schemes have no effect on crooks at all. In fact, they probably help them because they annoy potential customers.

Especially when honest customers have to download a crack to play the game they legally bought!

It might be in keeping with EA's notion of entertainment: Produce software that's frustrating and annoying. :D

It's not unheard of. Anarchy Online (when playing as a "froobie" (free-account player)) displays ads all over the place when you're in a city, sometimes to the point of bogging your system to a crawl. (Heheh...somehow, I'd managed to disable said ads in my free-account client, but lost that when I had to reinstall) Of course, the free accounts were supposed to be gone by January 2008 (a bad idea, if you ask me, since a lot of free-account players later update to subscriptions, since the free accounts can't get to all the quests, and the ones they can get to can't always be solved by free-account holders). One word of caution: The client is HUGE. Nearly two gig for the full client, which also works(ed?) for the free accounts.

Being a social player of such games, I do best when I'm working alongside someone I know, or at least have learned can be trusted in-game not to injure party members in a fight. When my friend died IRL in November 2006, I eventually quit playing Anarchy Online, because it was no longer as much fun for me. Paying in excess of $130 a year for a game just doesn't cut it for me, and most MMO games nowadays are $15 a month or higher. There are some holdouts (look on www.gpotato.com for several, but look out if you're using Vista and they haven't patched the anti-hacker protection. It does bad things to Vista's licensing infos. Another holdout is The Realm (www.realmserver.com) which has changed hands about three times; last I checked, it's still $54 a year. The disadvantage is that the game (unless they've significantly upgraded the in-game engine) still uses King's Quest-style graphics. (and yes, despite Ultima Online's claim, The Realm is the oldest and longest-running of the MMOs. I still remember when UO went into beta; I'd been playing "The Realm" for nearly a year by then.)

Give competition a little time to bring the prices in line.

Command and Conquer: Red Alert (without the no-CD crack) used the CD-ROM drive so hard that I broke two playing it.
That's just it, Greg: They have been going up because the gaming companies think that people enjoy getting soaked. If magazine subscriptions were that high (and getting higher) the companies would be out of business quite fast.

Yes, paying $15 a month might make sense if the game client was a free download or came with offsetting credit to the game, but that never happens. I've seen (I think it was WoW) one client that cost $55, but only gave one free month of play. (A whopping $20 "value") That's not entirely fair to the customer, especially with the issues that copy-protection too often cause legal customers.

I have beta- (and alpha-)tested games before. First game I ever did that with was The Realm; I played version 1.13, and played continuously until (I think) v3.07. (and in case you were wondering, there was a v1.117, so it isn't a "normal" progression in all cases) The Alpha was Underlight, and, in fact, I was supposed to be a Pre-Pre-Alpha tester, but my computer at the time didn't have the oomph to run the game, and I handed off my tester key to a friend who did. (that test group was 1500 folks)

Underlight bit the big one not because of the gameplay (which was, and I quote one of the original dev-team) "written by RPGers FOR RPGers", but because the player client refused to run unless it was running in exclusive mode, was ultra-sensitive to drive fragmentation, and the GM client didn't have either restriction. The GMs, when confronted by utterly ticked-off players' rightful complaints about their abuses, claimed "RHIP" (Rank Hath Its Privileges) and blew off the complaints, while also throwing anybody out of the GM ranks who actually paid attention to what the GMs were supposed to do. Got to where the players universally distrusted (at the least) GMs in that game. When I left, the game engine was struggling hard to keep up under the load of House (UL's version of Guilds or Clans) wars that it was never designed to cope with on an ongoing basis. As I said on that forum just before I left for the final time, "I did not get into UL to participate in JADE. Goodbye and good luck." (JADE: Just Another Deathmatch Experience" (ok, ok, the original acronym has "DooM(ed)" instead of Deathmatch, but it's clearer with "Deathmatch" in there). There were people on the GM team running hacked GM clients, too, and they got away with it in spades. If a player tried to go in with a hacked client (and the thing was ridiculously easy to hack, as I discovered for myself) their account was terminated in a matter of hours, usually (but see a bit later). Even though the game was $10 a month, it wasn't worth it, since, unless you sucked up to the GMs in a very obvious way both in and out of game, you never got anywhere. If you were a close personal IRL or IC friend of one of the GMs, you could (and often did) get away with serious infractions, some of which were also illegal in the real world! Got out of UL after I came close to having a serious nervous breakdown. I had gotten so enraged by what was going on that I was not a pleasant person to be around. (Heck, couldn't stand to be around myself, for that matter.) One hacker who did get prosecuted later got hired by the FBI for his hacking skills. (Man, that just proves crime DOES pay, at least for some.)

BTW, Zirconia Wolf also recommends protecting your package files in your Downloads directory unless deliberately working on them.

Althought rdanner probably isn't reading this...

The next generation of online games has arrived. Free client download, free play, pay for the in-game items and benefits you want.

The following is totally useless information but as I'm a list-happy wolf I thought I would post it here anyway!

Here are the package file counts for each SP/EP available if anyone other than me cares. (It's a nice way to make sure you got 'em all converted to Read Only!)

Base + Happy Holiday = 786
University = 542
Nightlife = 255
Open For Business = 241
Family Fun (SP) = 104
Glamour Life (SP) = 103
Pets = 396
Seasons = 327
Celebrations (SP) = 103
H&M Fashions (SP) = 101
Bon Voyage = 288
Teen Style (SP) = 101
Free Time = 390
Kitchen & Bath (SP) = 104
Ikea (SP) = 91
Apartment Life = 515
Mansion & Garden (SP) = 110

I didn't include Double Deluxe or any of the *new* packs (which are just bundles of earlier packs) because I don't have them! :p