Spore Copy Protection Q&A

[EAUK_Aurora]

Back on topic please.

[RedGiant]

Originally Posted by MetroPolice

Yeah right... whos trolling who at the moment? Damn... that wos really last time i evin lookt on this thread. Just dosnt worths it. I bet theyre not evin concerned about SecuROM anymore. They just use SecuROM as way to insult others.

IF YOU LIVE IN A GLASS HOUSE, SON. POT CALLING THE KETTLE BLACK AND ALL THAT. You have by far the lowest well informed argument to unhelpful comment/insult ratio of ALL on the SecuRom issue. Are you being payed off by EA?

[Remora Wraith]

Originally Posted by Wishbone77

Or they're the ones who'll find a decent publisher in the future. One that treats their customers with respect. And then, they just might be incredibly successful

I doubt very much that anyone involved financially in Spore will lose any money. But, with luck, some of the people doing the actual work may see that EA is heading in a direction they themselves do not wish to go.

It's not easy to just get a job in the games industry, even with experience you're competing against hundreds of other candidates and more and more are trying to get into it. So it's not as simple as just working for another publisher or developer, sometimes you need to take a job which might not be as good as you'd like but that'll open doors for you that would otherwise be closed. And I believe EA has minimum term contracts for their employees and I know they have contracts that prevent individuals from working with other members of their team at other companies for five years after leaving EA.

[Shireknight]

Ho Ho EA have blown it, I have been thinking about buying Spore for quite a while now and I came here tonight to have a good look at all the comments from people leading up to the games release to see if the overall view is positive or negative but on seeing this thread I now know I won't be buying this game -the reason being the online authorisation procedure.

This is the exact same reason I returned the Half Life 2 Orange box set the day it arrived, when you purchase disks for a game you expect to be able to play that game wherever and whenever you want -you certainly shouldn't have to have an internet connection just to install a game in the first place that just defeats the purpose of buying a standalone game and you might as well have just brought it through an online service like Steam.

Well at least I can now cross Spore off my list of games and I don't have to worry about reading any further previews lol

Good luck with your game EA and god help your Customer Services department when people without reliable internet access start to realise they have got a game that they can't play even though they purchased it all nice and legally

[Watashiii]

Originally Posted by RedGiant

You have by far the lowest well informed argument to unhelpful comment/insult ratio of ALL on the SecuRom issue. Are you being payed off by EA?

Must be minimum wage

[Deside]

Originally Posted by flatfroggerx

I picked up on it purely because you because of the timespans you used, they where similar to that of typical upgrade cycles.

Good post and fair play to you also. The whole point of forums is so people can disagree politely. :-D And to be honest I do buy a new PC every five years, but the PC I had last, HAL2002 (wow, six years then) who died earlier this year (RIP) I think had the original box and motherboard and everything else was new. Sort of like the old joke about a sword in a museum “oh yeah, it’s the original. The handle’s been replaced three times and the blade twice.”

I’m a typical “not afraid to hack her PC to bits to make a game work but can’t afford an all singing all dancing rig” – in that I buy a PC about every five years, and when I get a game that breaks the acceptable threshold I’ll throw some more memory in, then a new graphics card, then a bigger hard drive, etc. etlalalalail it dies or I have money to get a new one.

But I’m of the opinion that most of the people that will torrent Spore would have done it anyway, copy protection or not. And cracked copies tend to have a few amusements built in. Either a virus, or phishing, or malware of some sort, spyware, or even just the fact that the patches refuse to talk to it. I like my new computer too much to put something I’ve got hold of from some random bloke somewhere. If I’ve bought it and something goes wrong with it, the onus is on EA to sort it out. The law works both ways. I bought it, I have rights too. If you have problems with a cracked copy they’ll tell you “told you so” and that’s that.

[Watashiii]

Originally Posted by Deside

The law works both ways. I bought it, I have rights too.

This is the point of the whol topic. We're supposed to have rights if we buy the game

[Remora Wraith]

Originally Posted by Deside

Good post and fair play to you also. The whole point of forums is so people can disagree politely. :-D And to be honest I do buy a new PC every five years, but the PC I had last, HAL2002 (wow, six years then) who died earlier this year (RIP) I think had the original box and motherboard and everything else was new. Sort of like the old joke about a sword in a museum “oh yeah, it’s the original. The handle’s been replaced three times and the blade twice.”

I’m a typical “not afraid to hack her PC to bits to make a game work but can’t afford an all singing all dancing rig” – in that I buy a PC about every five years, and when I get a game that breaks the acceptable threshold I’ll throw some more memory in, then a new graphics card, then a bigger hard drive, etc. etlalalalail it dies or I have money to get a new one.

But I’m of the opinion that most of the people that will torrent Spore would have done it anyway, copy protection or not. And cracked copies tend to have a few amusements built in. Either a virus, or phishing, or malware of some sort, spyware, or even just the fact that the patches refuse to talk to it. I like my new computer too much to put something I’ve got hold of from some random bloke somewhere. If I’ve bought it and something goes wrong with it, the onus is on EA to sort it out. The law works both ways. I bought it, I have rights too. If you have problems with a cracked copy they’ll tell you “told you so” and that’s that.

Not all of them do, the first releases by the "scene" groups tend to work fine it's the people in between, but if you're using a public torrent tracker you're asking for trouble with a great big bullseye on your head. There are hundreds of private trackers that require invitation only membership and such, thus saving you a lot of agg with fake torrents, viruses and such. They also usually have communities so you can get and give feedback on what you've downloaded.

As for it being on EAs head to solve your problems, it's not, if you read the EULA it generally says they provide the software as is and if it doesn't work TS they provide customer support and such but that's a joke not matter what your problem and what you tell them they will always tell you to uninstall, reinstall, scan for viruses and such even if you explicitly said you've done that. And ultimately they have the right to not support it at all, and to turn off the activation servers when they get bored without releasing a patch to allow legitimate customers to continue using the software. The only legal right you have is to return the software to the store, and pirates don't have that problem anyway.

If you think you're more protected by being a legitimate customer then you're gravely mistaken, the pirates have just as many rights as you do when it comes down to the bottom line. You don't have the right to get support if it doesn't work or breaks your computer, but neither do they. And at least the pirates aren't buying the software and getting treated like a criminal, I resent the fact that as a paying customer I'm treated as is everyone else like I'm out to steal from and screw over EA, I paid for my game so why the chuffing hell should I be treated the same as the people who pirate it, and it's that which is driving me more to the fine F*** YOU I will pirate it then if that's how you're going to treat me.

[Lethn]

EULA means **** all in terms of the law it doesn't protect EA in any way against providing their legitimate customers with a basic service if it conflicts with the law then the EULA means nothing not the other way round. Oh and I'm seriously starting to lose patience here EA should have given us a response ages ago but they have done nothing, I think I'm just going to go ahead and pirate in this case, they'll have a working crack out within the week anyway, I'd rather not, but EA have pushed me the wrong way for the last time.

[Remora Wraith]

No the EULA doesn't mean anything against the law, but in terms of software there is no laws protecting customers beyond the standard trading standards laws which basically means the only right you have is to get a refund. But all the parts of EULA that don't concern the law represent a legally binding contractual agreement between you and EA when you agree to it on installation.

[Darksci]

Bah rights...

Its like the way the computer industry works now. We have one of those end user licences or something.

Say you have this situation, you want a mac. But don't want to fork out two billion dollars for a decent one. So you buy a second hand crappest of them all one.

You then get a mac compatable high end PC.

Its by end user agreement to install the MAC OS from the crappy computer onto the non-mac PC. Even if you totally destroy the real mac.

So yeah, buying a game doesn't mean we have rights anymore since the introduction of end user agreements.

PS: Just checked what its called. end user license as An end user license agreement (EULA).

But this isn't a problem to tech people anyway. Hack your way to success!

[Lethn]

And I just checked the scanning on the back of the box, if that's true then this is even worse than what EA were planning with the 3 activation limit, I am DEFINITELY going to pirate this sodding game now, shame on you EA, you decided to ignore a legitimate player base concerned with what you were doing and brushed of their comments pretending that they were being passed on to the developers.

I sincerely hope you go bankrupt and will make sure people know about what your trying to pull I also find it amusing that in the scan you deliberately made the text small enough that someone who's just eager to get the game to get home and play it wouldn't bother reading it.

[Darksci]

Originally Posted by Lethn

And I just checked the scanning on the back of the box, if that's true then this is even worse than what EA were planning with the 3 activation limit, I am DEFINITELY going to pirate this sodding game now, shame on you EA, you decided to ignore a legitimate player base concerned with what you were doing and brushed of their comments pretending that they were being passed on to the developers.

I sincerely hope you go bankrupt and will make sure people know about what your trying to pull I also find it amusing that in the scan you deliberately made the text small enough that someone who's just eager to get the game to get home and play it wouldn't bother reading it.

Am pretty sure that if people get grief with the whole 3 activation thing, then they'll just use the crack.

And I'm also sure people will find out ways to create their own spore server universe, that or create a repository of critters.

Three activation limit probably wont be a real problem to users till maybe 3 months time. And by then Spore will be 100% cracked together with some kind of unofficial server repository.

So either way, no problem. I'm only buying the game cause I support Maxis. As for the whole EA deal, well... it appears there are options to it lol

[Eroneouse]

Well no official replys here yet which really hacked me off personaly but one of the mods did assure me yesterday that the concerns being expressed in this thread are being passed along to the powers that be and I have no reason to doubt it as this is after all what these guys n gals are supposed to be doing.

Thank you mods at least for that

[Peteuplink2]

Originally Posted by Eroneouse

Well no official replys here yet which really hacked me off personaly but one of the mods did assure me yesterday that the concerns being expressed in this thread are being passed along to the powers that be and I have no reason to doubt it as this is after all what these guys n gals are supposed to be doing.

Thank you mods at least for that

Personally I think that's just lala... This threads been going since 15th May 2008 and the first concerns about the copy protection were raised pretty much as soon as the thread was created. That's roughly about 15 weeks.

I don't think anyone is passing any of our concerns onto the "powers that be".

[Eroneouse]

Originally Posted by Peteuplink2

Personally I think that's just lala... This threads been going since 15th May 2008 and the first concerns about the copy protection were raised pretty much as soon as the thread was created. That's roughly about 15 weeks.

I don't think anyone is passing any of our concerns onto the "powers that be".

I do as it is their job to do just that IE pass on the feedback from this forum. I just do not think the powers that be give a monkeys play thing about this issue but thats not the fault of the web mod team.

Edit - plus it all depends on the hierarchy structure, example mods make notes on feedback pass on to feedback assessor he reads those notes and discards all the ones deemed dealt with, questions here have already been dealt with IE post 1 so all notes relateing to this thread are discarded thus never get any higher than him/her. Theres more than one reason why no official answers come to us but you can be fairly sure its not because the forum mods are not doing their job, after all when was the last time you went to work and did not do your job day after day. It doesn't happen and if it does it doesn't carry on for long. Add to that were not just talking about a single person moderateing here but a team they cant all not be doing their job.

[Wishbone77]

Originally Posted by Peteuplink2

I don't think anyone is passing any of our concerns onto the "powers that be".

Oh, I think they are. I just think the "powers that be" don't give a rat's *ss. The "passing on" is probably via an internal email account named forum_feedback@ea.com that either A) nobody reads or B) the EA execs have a good laugh about on friday afternoons.

[Peteuplink2]

Originally Posted by Wishbone77

Oh, I think they are. I just think the "powers that be" don't give a rat's *ss. The "passing on" is probably via an internal email account named forum_feedback@ea.com that either A) nobody reads or B) the EA execs have a good laugh about on friday afternoons.

Well I know from working as a moderator for infogrammes that we were always under instructions to say we were passing stuff on and then ignore it because the people upstairs didn't want to hear about it.

I've seen no evidence to suggest EA's moderators have been told otherwise.

[Sithjedimatt]

I have a plan to get A reply, depends how inviting the guy who made this forum is on xbox.
A couple of us could add me on xbox and have a proper chat with him?
Anyone for it ?
I will.

[Eroneouse]

Originally Posted by Peteuplink2

Well I know from working as a moderator for infogrammes that we were always under instructions to say we were passing stuff on and then ignore it because the people upstairs didn't want to hear about it.

I've seen no evidence to suggest EA's moderators have been told otherwise.

Lets hope EA's mods do not work the same way.

[Remora Wraith]

They most likely do, no offence to the mods here but they are bottom of the ladder, like very bottom, or if they do pass stuff on it gets ignored in favour of random noises from the lead designers lalalalalalaed, blind, deaf 2 year old daughter. Companies like EA are all the same, just like your local supermarket, you think any complaint you have with the customer service guy goes any further than the admin office bin you're sorely mistaken.

[tangfastic91]

Has it been released in Australia? Where are the Aussie forums on spore?

[akridine]

Can EA tell us why are they still including securom with spore when securom has been cracked?

why are EA making things difficult for the customers when the software has been proven to make no difference in reducing piracy?

Punishing paying customer is going to encourage piracy, not reduce it.

[Naenia]

yeah where as if they left it out..it wouldnt really change the situation that much...and thats better than making it worse

[reza666]

Finally the game is out for order and just now I was one click away from ordering the game when i thought lets search the forum if there are any monthly fees involved and guess where i ended up !
As soon i saw SecureRom i googled for a torrent and guess what the game is already hacked. 1-0 TO THE PIRATES BABY!!!!

I always buy the games i like with the exception that they should not have SecureRom or any other DRM virus! I had a bad experience once where i could not delete one damn file from my own PC so thats when i decided never more. Also i'm not a big fan of activation and 3 installs only!

EA who are you kidding really, if you are trying to compete with the scene(pirates) then you are more stupid then people say. If you are protecting the paying customers then a serial number is more then enough.

No DRM virus on my pc thank you. If you offer a clean software i will most definitely buy it but until then well....