Biggest threat to the SOW series

[Bobb4]

Originally Posted by BadAim

Bollox. A thief is a thief.

And a game is but a game, your point?
I own Il2, pacific fighters, that stupid gold edition, the one the buggers brought out just before 1946 and of course 1946.
I also own CFS3, all the battlefield games, armed assault, Guild Wars and a host of other...
Both Supreme Commander and Company of Heroes have given me grey hairs regarding copy protection.
One minute I can read the disks the next I cannot.
That is why I advocate the elicence system, it is simple, effective and does not stuff-up your system.
Having attended many lans in our neck of the woods, piracy is rife, games are out before they are even officially released.

So yes a thief is a thief but tell that to a thirteen-year-old at a 1000-man lan.
Is he the thief or is it the countries that allow sites like piratebay to operate.

[Oktoberfest]

Originally Posted by Mogster

Oktoberfest: apologies for the 'Off Topic', but I must ask if you can play Panzer Commander on XP? Ever since I upgraded to my Sony Vaio some four years ago, I have been unable to run this tank simulator, even when telling Windows to emulate Windows 95. The game loads, but stalls and locks up about 10 seconds into a scenario. As a marginally computor literate, I would appreciate any advice.

No.... I tried to let it run but I had a lot of graphic bugs in it. And yes, the game froze everytime I wanted to play it. So did red alert too, that I really liked for the briefings etc.... But today it says : Red Alert doesn't run under windows NT.....

[Mogster]

Thanks for the response, Oktoberfest. Too bad . . .

[BadAim]

Originally Posted by Bobb4

And a game is but a game, your point?
I own Il2, pacific fighters, that stupid gold edition, the one the buggers brought out just before 1946 and of course 1946.
I also own CFS3, all the battlefield games, armed assault, Guild Wars and a host of other...
Both Supreme Commander and Company of Heroes have given me grey hairs regarding copy protection.
One minute I can read the disks the next I cannot.
That is why I advocate the elicence system, it is simple, effective and does not stuff-up your system.
Having attended many lans in our neck of the woods, piracy is rife, games are out before they are even officially released.

So yes a thief is a thief but tell that to a thirteen-year-old at a 1000-man lan.
Is he the thief or is it the countries that allow sites like piratebay to operate.

I'm no more a lover of copy protection than you are, especially when it causes problems like securom does, it's the suggestion that a lower price will stop thievery..... If people would stop stealing the stuff the prices would go down on thier own because the software companies would stop wasting time and money on preventing theft.

It's the idea that piracy is the software companies fault that wrangles me (you might get me to listen in Microsoft's case). Guy's like Maddox and crew are not going to get rich on thier software, how can we take the bread from thier table and say it's thier own fault for not locking the door?

I meant no personal attack but I'm passionate about the subject as I protect peoples property for a living.

[Blackdog_kt]

I'm not specifically for or against piracy. What bothers me with piracy is that it creates problems for people that make the games we play and then they make no more games. What bothers me with anti-piracy is the poorly implemented software protection that looks more like a trojan/virus than a protection program. Most of all it's the fact that anti-piracy is not really what's on some people's minds, they use it as an excuse to gradually implement software and hardware solutions that will make it easy to monitor and file everything we do on our PC, either for advertising purposes or for other more sinister purposes.

I think that responsibility here is shared. A developer that's rushing half baked projects and delivers less than promised can't expect me to pay 40 Euros for a disc with an unfinished game in a very cheap package. I will download and try the game based on what i read in reviews, if i like it i'll buy it and play through it, if not i'll uninstall it before completing it.

It also depends on the company that released the game, the way they operate, how much they value their customers and the quality of their products. In the case of IL2 i have never downloaded anything, because it's coming from a company i trust to bring me quality products and listen to feedback about improving them. It's also a small company and i want to support them with my money to help them make more quality games.

In the flight sim genre it would be highly hypocritical of me to pirate games, even if it was for sampling puproses only, when most of us complain that there's not enough independent developers and not enough good sims around. It's the same with decent RPG games too. I might still download shooters to see what it's all about, but if i don't like a game i will still delete it and if i like it i will buy it.

There could be a workaround to this, i think 1C has alreade done it and it's mentioned in this thread as well. One of my friends bought a license for Theatre of War and he told me that you can get 2 keys for one license. This is a very clever way to make more people aware and interested in the product, without doing something illegal in order to try out the game. If you don't like it, you can uninstall it and deactivate your key so that someone else might receive it-->another person that you can "advertise" the game to. Sooner or later, someone will think "hey, this is a cool game, i want to buy it too".

I would still prefer to have printed manuals and goodies in the box, instead of just the discs and a couple PDF files. I know this will drive up the retail price, but maybe it could be done if the company agreed to ship different versions for a different price (just like 1946 special edition). I know that 90% of the people in this forum would gladly pay 10-15Euros extra to have BoB:SoW with a manual. That is, as long as it was a well researched manual that includes real, useful advice and tips for each aircraft in the sim. If CEM goes the way we were discussing in the other thread a manual would be indispensible and that alone would drive piracy down. Imagine someone pirating the game only to find out that he kills his engine right away because he doesn't set the correct RPM and manifold pressure that's listed in the manual

[bhunter2112]

The US music industry is an interesting study of piracy.
I am 38 yrs old and probably have not bought a CD in 15 years. (I have never downloaded a song of the internet either)
The CD were to expensive - I remember seeing a normal album for $21.99 or $27.99 , that to me was a major rip off and so I never bought any.
After the whole internet download craze their sales hit the basement. Now albums go for $7.99 or $9.99 and that to me is a fair price and I buy them.
Make it cheaper and you will sell more.

[Chivas]

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If CEM goes the way we were discussing in the other thread a manual would be indispensible and that alone would drive piracy down. Imagine someone pirating the game only to find out that he kills his engine right away because he doesn't set the correct RPM and manifold pressure that's listed in the manual
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Unfortunately, they soon get that information from the forums of legit users. Having a printed manual will have a positive effect but not enough to make a difference on Piracy.

[ManicGibber]

I bought Forgotten Battles in early 2003 after reading about it in a pc magazine. I then bought AEP and PF and finally 2 separate copies of 1946, I must be a fanboi. I didn't buy PE2 as I don't like the idea of paying money for a tiny amount of electricity that is used to transfer binary code to my hard drive LOL and I refuse to buy over the internet anyway and I refuse to use internet banking.

I'm at the stage now of seriously thinking about using a no-cd hack because I'm sick and tired of having to restart 1946 because secure-rom is such a poorly written piece of malware it can't recognise my pioneer dvd drive. I forgot to mention how long it takes to decide to work or not work for that matter. Normal load time is one minute-plus in which I have to sit twiddling my thumbs anxiously waiting to see if the game is going to load or crash or say "insert the original dvd in the drive". I know one minute isn't all that long, it's just tiresome not knowing if it will load after one,,,,,,,,,,,,whole,,,,,,,,,,minute,,,,,,,,,,,. It happens so often that my grey matter has now been re-programmed to expect it to fail, one minute has now turned into two,,,,,,,,,,,minutes. My wish is that secure-rom goes bankrupt in the not too distant future.

[VMF-214_HaVoK]

Originally Posted by Bobb4

Elicences are the way of the future, no one yet has managed to crack Theatre of War's eLicence procedure and my guess is the PC Gaming industry has taken note.

Not a very popular game either. The more popular a game the more time hackers will spend trying to crack it.

S!

[Loco-S]

I have all the IL2 disks up to Forgotten battles, and I dont have 1946 ( not yet...I have it on order), reading this post left me thinking...what if. you buy the game and the cd/dvd only contains the basic info on the game, but you have to log in your CD key ( which will be tied up to your game/name and customer number) to download the part that makes the game work?..not like steam that verifies the game, but an actual and critical part of the game that without it the game will not work?....sounds like a good alternative., and that part downloaded can only be unlocked with your name/customer number?....and at no time can be the same number more than once online, hard coded on the game.

I would like that option, instead of root kits and disabling features from star force or securom.

that way, you can have the unlocking part of the game on your backup, but already tied up to the system, and only available to one account/CD key, any other combination or fake number would disable the game until the correct match be introduced at reinstall.