Any software worth cracking can and WILL be cracked.

DRM is only an annoyance to the honest buyer. To those who pirate it, DRM means nothing at all, except maybe even more incentive to pirate it in the first place.

I've already quit buying steam only games, and i guess i'll quit buying ubi games as well.

Sorry, but im not putting up my hard earned dough for a product that i can't guarantee that i'll be able to play whenever i want. I lost my job last year, and had to give up the internet for awhile. All those steam games i had were rendered unusable.

This whole concept of merely "Licensing" a product is ridiculous. I pay $50 dollars for it, it's mine... get out of my way and let me enjoy it.

Sad to say, but at this point I think it's clear that whatever it was The Devs actually wanted, UBI-Soft management had other ideas; SH5 is heavily targeted for the American market--- Welcome to America--- where it's all about "marketing."

Marketing defined: The ancient and mystic art of words and deeds, which cause people to think that they are actually getting SOMETHING for their money, when in fact they are not.

And I digress...:nope:

This quote from some website sums up my feelings on it:

"When you ask a gamer to pay for a game with online activation, you are asking for a great deal of trust. Which is outrageous, since the entire reason the game has activation is because you refuse to trust them."

Well yes, there's still hope with some publishers. Bohemia Interactive even dropped the basic CD-Check from Armed Assault 2 with the 1.05 patch. They purposely "unprotected" their game for the convenience of the paying customers. And that is after all the best military ground sim currently on the market, not a budget title.

Fallout3, the best RPG of last year, also came with Copy Protection only on the setup interface, the game executable itself runs without disk check.

So there are Triple-A titles made with little to no protection, still. I just hope if "always online" becomes en vogue with the big publishers, these smaller companies will not follow.


BTW, for example with Black Shark - if DCS would promise to patch out the Activation requirement a year or two after release, I would buy it tomorrow. I don't see why they can't remove online DRM after a given time if other companies can remove the last bits of copy protection fully.

Well, to be fair, neither Black Shark (Starforce-Based one-time activation) nor NeoQB Rise of Flight (always online) have been cracked yet. Okay, these are niche games for the flight simulation crowd, but I truly believe that an "always online" game can be protected - if you need a key to decrypt the game files, and that key is never stored on your system, always flushed after uses - good luck emulating that.

OTOH we know that for World of Warcraft, there exist black servers for pirate players. So if they were able to reverse-engineer a MMORPG server, who knows what these people might be able to do with UBI. Obviously mass market titles will push the incentive for cracker crowds.

Everything can be cracked. Just monitor the program disassembly registries (the orders sent directly to the CPU) at run-time, determine what does what, what you'd need to change, monitor all information sent/recieved, compile an all-assembly app, and there you go! Sure, I wouldn't be able to do that, because I don't know the assembly language or how to program it neither I have the knowledge of the low-level stuff needed to manipulate code at assembler level, but crackers (the good ones, not those that just write batch-files to do "format c:" in unprotected Windows PCs) can do all that if they know their thing, and more. There's no such thing as impossible in programming, there's just the lack of knowledge by those doing the programs.

Cheers :rock:

Actually you are wrong about ROF.

And wrong about the Black Shark (the cracking part).

Well, I searched high and low (with the intention, of course, to buy the game and use the crack for conveninece) and while there are a ton of torrents available, none mentions that it can get past the online requirement.

Edited for Dowly: Same for Black Shark. I know there are torrents out but they are commented as "not working".

Then you arent looking hard enough. ;) BS was cracked shortly after it's release, only russian version is available (I'd guess due to it's genre), but the little dimwits have already made tutorials on how to change the game from russia to english, so there.

And wait until the first massive sales 3d arcade game uses this system , out of the niche market the protection is more vulnerable.
( a lot of hardcore gamers, teams, crackers, searching for a cure)

March 16, Assassin Creed 2. 'nuff said. :haha:

If ROF is cracked, then the ONLY argument in favor of OSP is gone.

O_o and why?

If I'm not wrong, "steam only games" can be also purchased through the "classic" dvd-release, and if not they only need to be dowloaded once (then you can make backups).
Furthermore a single player can be played in offline mode (no internet connection).
Steam remains a great service, and way above this UBI crap.

PS: I noticed SH V isn't available on steam yet, so I guess the UBI drm crap will be the only option available. Another ingenious decision by Ubisoft, congrats :)

I bought an ETW DVD, and I had to load steam just to install it.

If I was less forum savvy (I had found the modding forums before I even bought it) I'd have been tearing my hair out to install it properly (it just crashes on install and no where tells you to install steam first, and in fact, even that doesn't work, it tries to DL the whole thing).

Major PITA, frankly.

Then the mod that makes it worth playing got nuked by an auto-update that was for some add-on I don't even have. So far my only Steam experience has been crap, frankly.