Dear Electronic Arts,
I have had your game on order from play.com for the PC since the 8th January 2007.
I got on-line today only to read about the copy protection that will be applied to the game. In summary the checks, assuming I have understood the criteria correctly (as taken from the Mass Effect forum here:
Mass Effect Community - Mass Effect for PC System Specs, SecuROM and FAQ), are as follows:
- The game requires on-line activation. If the activation fails the game will not install/start.
- The game will require an on-line check every 10 days to re-validate my CD key. If the check fails for any reason the game will not start.
- I upgrade my PC in some unidentifiable way then I lose an activation; of which I have 3. If I run out of activations the game will not start. There is no way to reduce the number of activations (e.g. by uninstalling the game first).
- I will have no control over when the on-line check takes place.
- The game will not require me to have the DVD in the drive.
Presumably these steps are to combat piracy. While I will conceed that they may make 0-day piracy slightly less likely (after all, that's the principle STEAM uses) ultimately it will mean that I, as a paying customer, will have an inferior product to the free-loaders.
If I take my PC on holiday, or lose my Internet connection for any reason, or your servers crash, my installation of the game may stop working. Will this happen to someone with a cracked copy? No.
If I make any hardware change to my PC I
may lose an activation (of which I have 3). I used the word
may there because even the techy guys that should know how it works don't. To quote Derek French (Technical Producer from Bioware):
Quote:
"Its a hard question to answer simply because it is so hardware and situation specific.
I have changed my video card on my computer and nothing happened. But then a different type of video card change may trigger it."
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Needless to say, people with a "liberated" copy of the game will suffer no such inconvenience.
Now, I don't mind an on-line check when the game is installed.
I could live with the periodic on-line check if I could force a validation whenever I wanted to, and the check wasn't every 10 days (once every 30 would be fine). I will quite often take my PC away on holiday with me as it gives me something to do in the evenings once my family have gone to bed. While on holiday I don't have an Internet connection. Why the hell would I want to buy game that can stop working on a whim? That's just stupid.
The invisible "activations" due to "unknown hardware" changes is an absolute killer. My PC is a few years old now. It's due for an whole suite of upgrades, from processor to graphics card, to sound card. But not even your technical people can tell me which upgrades will cause an activation to trigger.
And if I have issues trying to play the game then I can always contact EA technical support. I've not checked but I bet it's a premium rate call.
If all this is just to avoid having to have the DVD in the drive, then having to dig the DVD out to play the game is
far less intrusive.
As much as I was looking forward to this game, I will be canceling my pre-order, and will most likely never bother with the game. I am not a criminal, and I do not feel that it is fair that people who pirate the game actually have a better product than paying customers.
I believe that this level of "protection" is also used in Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and Mysteries of Westgate as well. I won't be buying them either. I will also no longer be pre-ordering any other EA game until I have found out what level of copy protection has been applied to it.
Yours sincerely,
Darren Latham