Beware of BioWare!

[Machina]

"Hi everyone,

My name is Keehwan Her and I am the Atari producer for Mysteries of Westgate (MoW) among other D&D products. Most of you know that the release of Mysteries of Westgate has been delayed because of ongoing development of a new security system. Near the end of MoW’s development last year, we realized that the traditional protection of the .exe file would not work with it so we scrambled to find a reliable commercial method that would do the job. At the time, there was no solution that met our requirements. That is why, since the end of 2007, Atari has been working hard to develop a new security system that can be used not just for MoW but for all Atari products that need protection for data files without using the traditional route of wrapping the .exe file. Unfortunately, developing this system has taken longer than we anticipated and MoW’s release has suffered as a result, because it is the first product that will use this new system.

Atari has been working closely with Obsidian and Ossian to try to integrate the new system with NWN2 and MoW specifically. Although we wanted the security modifications to go out with Update 1.12, it simply was not ready in time so we unfortunately had no choice but to push it into Update 1.13.

I realize that many of you are anxious to get your hands on Mysteries of Westgate, and I know from firsthand experience that it is a fantastic adventure. MoW has been ready to ship for a while now and we are close to finalizing the new security system that will ensure that it has its proper day in the sun. In the meantime, we are working hard to keep cool information about the game coming.

Thank you,

-Keehwan"

[caki]

rofl

[Joe Forster/STA]

So the crackers will release a general software that removes the protection from the data files of Atari titles. (And, thus, make the game run faster...)

[acal3000]

He must be refering to this pile of crap

http://nwn2forums.bioware.com/forums...3831&forum=122

Activation systems the most idiotic thing M$ invented that don't stop really piracy but make only things more difficult to to legitime users

And NWN2 was way horrible compared with NWN1

[wolfsrain]

I loved what Stardock did. No invasive protection, no activation, just a serial number and a game registration for support access(patches, bonus content). I have the Galactic Civilizations series from them, very happy with the way they handled things.
And one thing that I really don't understand. Bioware belongs to EA now, so why the hell Ossian it's present on the Bioware forums and not on the ATARI forums, because NWN2 it's an ATARI product. Also NWN2 was developped mostly by Obsidian which is pretty much an independent game studio at the moment. Why not use Obsidian's forums??? If I would be a bigwig at EA I would stop access at the forums for the other publishers/developpers.

[DABhand]

Thats why your not a bigwig at EA :P hehehe

[Pigdog Ratsnake]

EA is going to kick Atari in the **** for this. Or maybe EA will just buy Atari and make Atari's board of directors into street prostitutes.

Besides that, if you are familiar with anything Atari has done -- the modern fake Atari, not the good old Atari -- then you know that their copy protection system is going to be a comedy laugh riot, fun for the whole family and full of bugs. Atari develop something? They can't even patch most of their games! And we are supposed to be surprised that it has been "delayed"? Bwahhahahaa. Yeah, take a guess why it's been delayed. Atari doesn't have any real programmers, it hired Devry University dropouts who only know how to "code" in HTML.

[nando2002]

Mind your language - you don't need to insult others just because you don't like them.

Atari was the creator of many consoles like 2600, 5200, etc and many games - good old days
Atari after the disaster years ago with the Tetris game - Nintendo wins the battle against Atari in the Tetris game - the company change a lot. Nowadays they are a publisher - just like Blizzard is coming to be and others will follow - and so they don't need to create game but to distribute them. The bugs are not related to them but the devs companies Atari supports. If Atari or other publisher don't support devs companies (paying them to produce games) you don't play games.
What Atari is trying to do is just what JoWood did/does: create a custom protection system to protect their investment.

[wolfsrain]

I don't remember Jowood doing an invasive copyprotection. Today's Atari it's not Atari anymore. And from this fall it will be completely integrated in Infogrames as they've bought the rest of the shares. So Infogrames owns now the whole Atari. I've had a great deal of respect for the old Atari, but the new Atari it's just a company who uses the brand. Nothing else.
Atari promised the DLC for Test Drive Unlimited on PC. They've delivered a bastard product. You can only download the product and activate 3 times. LIke you will install the game only 3 times. NWN2 it has more patches than the first(way more). No cumulative updates. You need to have a lot of space to install the patches. Crashes due to the poorly implemented protection which hampers the game. What they fix in one patch they are braking in the next one, while trying to update the protection.
So I'd wish That EA take the DND license from Wizards of The Coast or buy Infogrames(which it's not doing so bright either, they've barey managed to go on profit).
And unfortunately the big companies would rather have a full control over the products they are publishing.
So my support goes to companies like Stardock, which are trying to offer a good game at a decent price, a game made to work on most of the systems, with no invasive copy protection and only the need to register the game to have access to the support section and some extra content. I'd like to see more companies adoptin this model. But they would rather blame the pirates for every failure. And saying that the today's people prefer short games with fabulous graphics. But you can't play graphics, and most of us would rather have more than 4 hours of gameplay(Frontline : Fuel of War, The Turning Point: Fall of Liberty, just to name a few such games) and something that wouldn't make us upgrade our PC at about 3-4 months.

[nando2002]

JoWood develop his own protection which include in the games it publish. Intrusive or not they create a protection just like Atari is doing - each one follows his own path.

I still believe in big publishers like Sierra, THQ, JoWood, etc. Even if some of the products they publish don't worth a cent.
The support is a formality for the publisher if the dev company has his own forum, ex:
CoH/OF/DoW: Relicnews
World in Conflict: Massgate
Universe at War: Petroglyphgames
The Witcher: thewitcherforum
etc.
The Witcher, Never Winter Nights, and others has his own space in Atari forums but is useless in content comparative to the devs forums.

Many others uses the publisher forum space as HQ for they customers like:
Phenomic (Spellforce) uses JoWood forums
Eden Studios (TDU), Eugen Systems (AoW) uses Atari forums
etc.

[TippeX]

jowood had a bit more 'skill' though... even if their protections were very intensive (and occasionally buggy)... didn't really help them much in the end though...

[nando2002]

This conversation leads me to a story (false but true at the same time):
An engineer's competition between USA and Japan was raised to found who can create a machine to make the most thin gold wire in all the world. In the end no one could create that machine but the japaneses develop another machine that will drill the most thin gold wire in the world.

[AstralWanderer]

Originally Posted by wolfsrain

I loved what Stardock did. No invasive protection, no activation,

Excuse me? Are you talking about THIS Stardock? Who made a big deal about GalCiv not including any CD checks but then slipped in online authentication on later patches?

Online authentication is, IMHO, far worse than CD checks since it gives the publisher the ability to arbitrarily terminate your usage of their software. Now Stardock's online activation may be less oppressive than most (and certainly better than Bioware's NWN Premium Modules though Atari is apparently the real culprit there) but they have made it clear that they will deny users the right to resell their software (see point 3 of their Activation FAQ).

In my case, it took 3 weeks (and 4 attempts by Stardock support) before I received a valid key for a game I purchased legitimately (I now use a crack from GCW to avoid having to repeat this process). The one silver lining was that I found this applied to their other products, resulting in me boycotting them completely (saving the cost of an Object Desktop renewal and GalCiv expansion packs).

[wolfsrain]

That was the case for the first GalCiv indeed. For the second, I never had that problem. Neither for Sins of a the Solar Empire. But to get their patches, usually you have to get the game registered

[DABhand]

Originally Posted by AstralWanderer

Online authentication is, IMHO, far worse than CD checks since it gives the publisher the ability to arbitrarily terminate your usage of their software.

Only would be worse if you didnt buy the game itself, or like to sell copies of your originals to friends.

So one would believe you dont like this method because you adopt one of the 2 things I mentioned.