Tribes3 -- no cd check please

with online multiplayer games I always ddump and daemon them on my hard drive which is a holy hell pain in the ass and a sacrifice of hard drive space but less of a pain in the ass than dedicating a piece of hardware to a piece of software.

there HAS to be a better way. the time limited cd check isn't great but it's certainly better than nothing. you could also make a random check like once every 10 times someone fires up the game for the first 4 months.

this still wouldn't keep me from copying my legit purchases to my hard drive but it would ease the pain for some who don't go through this ugly process.

CD in tray for patches is the best thing you can do. Otherwise, it's gamecopyworld for I.

Wouldn't the reason 1000s of people returned tribes2 in the first month be b/c it was a buggy piece of shit that wouldn't run on their machines (UEUEUEUEUEUEUEUE)

I don't think your numbers will make a substantial differnce.

Of course now I know they don't deactivate cd keys. So basically I can buy a copy, dump the iso, and return the game with a perfectly working cd key. Thanks for the heads up. (they'd probably just give me store credit...although circut city has a no questions return policy I think).

I think your best bet is to just make your game worth the buy -- but now you've got me with this mental image of a computer dumbass finding out his game has no cd chk so he returns the cd to the store.

Thats his problem, if hes dumb to return the CD and try and rip the game developers off, hes in for a surprise come patch time.

Well they're looking to deter. Once he returns the game it's unlikely that when a patch comes out and he can't play anymore he'll go out and buy it.

Pretend you're marweas for a moment and all you care about is money. The idiot we're talking about here is an oppurtunist and will only return the game when he sees he can install it and not need the cd. It's that time window right there that you cash in bigger, b/c the person wants to play. Down the road we'll probably lose intrest and there's less a chance he'd go BACK out and but the game.

Of course I somewhat question the very existance of people like this as I've never met one or seen one. I suppose they can exisit tho b/c you automatically get at least 1 smart point if you know how to fins a forum (and forum whores are all I really know about sample wise).

CD check for patches should work. Also maybe set something up when a cd is returned the account is deactivated. Not to sure how you would do that however. Maybe put something on the cd and box telling the store owner to go to such and such a place and type in such and such a key and password inorder to deactivate the account.

People seeing that info on the cd and box will be a deterrant in itself.

Also if you buy a cd that was used you could enter the info yourself in order to get the account.

I kinda chuckle to myself when I see threads like this.

Let me get this straight - you guys are getting mad at us because we have to protect our games against theft?

I mean really, you can't possibly deny that people steal our work. We spend a lot of time, and our developers specifically spend as long as three years of their lives, making a game that will entertain you for a really long time in exchange for somewhere between $35 and $50. There are a significant number of people who don't feel like they should have to pay us anything for this entertainment, and thus we have to find some way to make it harder for them to steal from us.

The only reason we have any sort of copy protection in our games is because people steal them. It's not like we sit in a room and try to figure out ways to annoy our customers.

So the bad apples, many of whom are reading this message and even more ironically many of whom are the very people complaining about this, are the ones who spoil it for you, and they spoil it for us because we have to put annoying things in our games like a CD checker.

You put a stop to piracy, stop condoning it and encouraging it, and you'll see copy protection go away. Until then, we're going to do everything we can to annoy the hell out of pirates without going far enough to stop legit buyers from buying our game.

I hate people who say: "it's just gonna happen anyway"

If you own a store and you leave all your goods out on the street, and you don't pay attention to people stealing stuff, it's gonna get stolen way more than if you are in an enclosed store with video-cameras etc. blah blah blah

I must find these stores that allow you to return open software for a refund. It's very suprising to me that such stores exist.

You know what T3 needs?

One of those "manual codes" in the manual every time you run it, like in Indiana Jones & the Fate of Atlantis
Aaaaaah... those were the days...

Sir Lucius said:

Wouldn't the reason 1000s of people returned tribes2 in the first month be b/c it was a buggy piece of shit that wouldn't run on their machines (UEUEUEUEUEUEUEUE) .

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No, this was Technical Support calls from people who had purchased a game and couldn't create a new account because the key had already been used. I have no idea what the return rate was, but my boss at the time was Piltdown who also ran Technical Support, and so I lived thru it.

Want another example of outright theft of software?

At one point fairly early in the life of Tribes 1 we had sold in 35,000 units (that's our sales to stores, not to users). So at that point the maximum number of units that could have been in customer hands (sell thru) was 35,000, but sell thru was probably more like 20,000 units. We were seeing around 50,000 unique IP addresses per day on the master server. Certainly some of those would have been the same person being assigned a new IPs, but very obviously there was massive theft going on there, and while some of those people may have purchased the game later (at $10 likely), that doesn't excuse the theft. We're talking (conservitively) $200,000 lost right there, on one game. That's three or four engineers salery for a year. I wonder what where the names of the engineers who lost their jobs?

So by all means, copy away. It's not your family that's hurt.

Thrax is my hero

Have CD Check, just don't have it done on map changes. That was what sucked the most.

CD Check on every OOB Snipe

Thrax Panda said:

CD Check on every OOB Snipe

Click to expand...

I wonder how many people got addicted to t1, because it was so easy to warez - and otherwise wouldn't have bought it - and then bought it later, followed by T2 and will buy T3. Hell, would even buy a re-released versino with all 3 in one pack after already owning them.

I am one of those, until tribes (and orginal wolf) i had never bought a fps. Other then the tribes franchise i still haven't. As a genre it doesn't really excite me that much.

PyroTeknik said:

You know what T3 needs?

One of those "manual codes" in the manual every time you run it, like in Indiana Jones & the Fate of Atlantis
Aaaaaah... those were the days...

Click to expand...

I was thinking the same thing. Remember how Star Control had like 3 or 4 wheels and you had to decipher the "alien" language to get in the game. Drakken had one where there were code words or something, but it was written in really dark text on pretty dark paper so it was impossible to copy, at least for copiers of that era.

Menzo said:

I kinda chuckle to myself when I see threads like this.

Let me get this straight - you guys are getting mad at us because we have to protect our games against theft?
blabalhblahblahblahblahblahlbahlbhalbhlahblahbalhlb

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Ok, We understand that part good enough now.

So start working on that "CD for Patch" thing.

Think about it! There are BOUND to be patches... no offense, but there are always patches in online multiplayer games. If said person does not have the CD when he patches, he is FUCKED because you can't play on servers with an old version of the game.

Beren said:

I wonder how many people got addicted to t1, because it was so easy to warez - and otherwise wouldn't have bought it - and then bought it later, followed by T2 and will buy T3. Hell, would even buy a re-released versino with all 3 in one pack after already owning them.

I am one of those, until tribes (and orginal wolf) i had never bought a fps. Other then the tribes franchise i still haven't. As a genre it doesn't really excite me that much.

Click to expand...

I think I'm one of the 5 that actually bought the game without "Trying it out" first. You KNOW the people that said "I uhhh bought the copy after using my friends for a while" are just bullshiting themselves.

SonGohan said:

Ok, We understand that part good enough now.

So start working on that "CD for Patch" thing.

Think about it! There are BOUND to be patches... no offense, but there are always patches in online multiplayer games. If said person does not have the CD when he patches, he is FUCKED because you can't play on servers with an old version of the game.

Click to expand...

But what's the point? It's easily defeated by a burned copy. Stores and game publishers just need to get together and make sure CD keys get deactivated. They can't resell an opened game anyway can they? I know one publisher was having people mail the returns directly to them to get the refund. The publisher probably loses money on that though because of store mark-ups.