The gawd-almighty merged DRM in Silent Hunter V thread

[Adriatico]

By the way, don't you think that min. of civilised approach by Ubi would be specification of needed "outgoing" and "incoming" speed of connection - at official site ?
...or specification of FAQ ?

( ...instead of bull****t on WW2 battleships - who would guess that Bismarck participated at Atlantic? )

[Jerik]

Originally Posted by Adriatico

By the way, don't you think that min. of civilised approach by Ubi would be specification of needed "outgoing" and "incoming" speed of connection - at official site ?
...or specification of FAQ ?

( ...instead of bull****t on WW2 battleships - who would guess that Bismarck participated at Atlantic? )

They did, in a way. ADSL is 56kbps up, 768kbps down (peak ratings).

[609_Avatar]

Originally Posted by Skullcowboy

This is one of the things the upsets me THE MOST. If you have no problem being treated like a pirate out of the gate, good for you. By all means buy the game and I won't badmouth you a bit. But please don't insult me with insinuations that because I am standing up for something that I must just want to pirate games.

I have paid for every single PC game I have ever owned. I think piracy is wrong. But only a little Googling will show that DRM does more to inconvenience paying customers than it does to stop piracy or even slow it down. Several of the most heavily DRM laden games were on the torrent sites BEFORE THEY WERE EVEN RELEASED. So yes, I get a little PO'd when I am treated with suspicion and my ability to enjoy what I have legitimately purchased is hindered by something that really is ineffective at what it is 'supposed' to do.

I am not a pirate. I am a customer. Pirates don't buy games, customers do. Stop treating me like a pirate.



Piracy is copyright infringement, not theft. There are volumes of laws written to cover copyright infringement and that is what you are charged with if you are caught doing it, not theft. Theft involves the loss of a tangible good, copyright infringement does not. So stealing physical books has no connection with pirating a game. A stolen book cannot be sold by the original owner. The original of a copied game can still be sold to someone else who might buy it.

But limiting my ability to use a product I have legitimately purchased because you think I might pirate it? If you think that is okay and want to equate copyright infringement with theft (and I'll play along for just a sec) how about this.

Would you be okay with having a police officer assigned to you who goes everywhere and never lets you out of his sight because, you know, you MIGHT steal or perform some other unlawful act? It's the latest service offered. It will enhance your life experience, too. Oh, and you get to pay them to do this.

Well put!

[Heretic]

Originally Posted by Letum

Yup, OLC is right.

If you buy anything in the UK and have any reason not to be happy with
it, you can return it for a refund; whatever the end user agreement is.

Ha! That's what you get for living in a socialist hellhole! Here in the States, we recognize the God-given right of Corporations to screw over their customers any way they can. Best government money can buy.

[609_Avatar]

Originally Posted by Letum

And you complained about my analogies!

Touche!

[scrapser]

Just wanted to throw this in. Bioshock 2 is out and many are very disappointed because you can't even save your game unless you are online! That's right, if you play the game for hours and cannot save your progress because of a bad Internet connection you're SOL. Brilliant!

I really hope this trend dies a quick death.

[HundertzehnGustav]

Boh Wulfmann in da houz



Nice to see ya Wulfmann!

[onelifecrisis]

Originally Posted by Letum

And you complained about my analogies!

Originally Posted by Adriatico

OLC, as you would say - analogy is not appropriate. (A.M.)

I didn't just say your analogies were broken, I pointed out exactly where and why they are broken. Something tells me you two will have trouble doing the same with mine.

Originally Posted by Adriatico

Barking at Aston Martin is bitching.

You'll notice I was making a point out of the fact that I am not barking or bitching at Aston Martin. Still, if you have poor internet then I can understand you being upset and venting that frustration. I'm a bit tired of the rhetoric and broken analogies and claims of "wrong doing" but I do sympathise with those who just won't be able to play the game due to circumstances beyond their control.

[onelifecrisis]

Originally Posted by Heretic

Ha! That's what you get for living in a socialist hellhole! Here in the States, we recognize the God-give right of Corporations to screw over their customers any way they can. Best government money can buy.

[Radioshow]

Don't forget about all the people with high speed connections but very limited bandwidth. Most people I know have 5-25GB limits and that's all they can afford or are offered in the plan(mine is 90GB, $60 mo.). Most of my Aussie clan mates go through their limit in less than a month.
How do you play SH5 now with your dial up or equivalent connection?
No bandwidth=no game. And this is a single player game.
I live in Canada where almost everywhere you can get good internet. My Bell DSL is fast and never down yet. But..... The majority of people online here are using cheaper plans with limited bandwidth due to cost.
It's not hard to use up alot of bandwidth these days.

Again its not having to connect that is the problem, its being connected the WHOLE time and the consequences of that. Put in an offline mode and that should be sufficient. I am not prepared to trust UBI servers yet.
You cannot compare WOW servers to UBI. Apples and Oranges. UBI has a history of bad servers and worse customer support and not much experience.

[HundertzehnGustav]

Control...

thats part of it.
Ubisoft KEEPS control. they shut down the service, yer screwed.
and that puts everyone who bought it in the "bent down, looking for the soap" position i recon.

and dont tell me that wont happen sooner or later...

poor souls, those who still buy it without being able to go offline...

[Elder-Pirate]

Originally Posted by Darkreaver1980

Hi there,

im realy suprised that so many people are upset. For myself, i already preordered silent hunter 5. Why should i cancel my preorder because of this DRM? I will open the game, install it and than play right away, my router is connected 24/7 anway and i think about 90% of all people have a permament connection too.

So, where is the drawback? i buy this game to have fun, because i love submarine games and i am able to play it...thats the only thing i want.

Only problem that i could see is that to many people are buying it and that the server will crash because of it.

i would say after 2-3 days the server will run 100% stable.

i just hope that we are able to chat in some global chat...because all people are connected to Ubi anyway...wouldnt this rock?! Chat with other people while you are sailing around! brag about your newest kill!

i also think that this copy proctection is a good way to go, its virtually not crackable, because the game needs an active connection to a server to work

Edit: And no, i dont work for Ubisoft lol

You sure like being led by the ring in your nose don't you.

[Jerik]

Originally Posted by Skullcowboy

This is one of the things the upsets me THE MOST. If you have no problem being treated like a pirate out of the gate, good for you. By all means buy the game and I won't badmouth you a bit. But please don't insult me with insinuations that because I am standing up for something that I must just want to pirate games.

I have paid for every single PC game I have ever owned. I think piracy is wrong. But only a little Googling will show that DRM does more to inconvenience paying customers than it does to stop piracy or even slow it down. Several of the most heavily DRM laden games were on the torrent sites BEFORE THEY WERE EVEN RELEASED. So yes, I get a little PO'd when I am treated with suspicion and my ability to enjoy what I have legitimately purchased is hindered by something that really is ineffective at what it is 'supposed' to do.

I am not a pirate. I am a customer. Pirates don't buy games, customers do. Stop treating me like a pirate.

Piracy is copyright infringement, not theft. There are volumes of laws written to cover copyright infringement and that is what you are charged with if you are caught doing it, not theft. Theft involves the loss of a tangible good, copyright infringement does not. So stealing physical books has no connection with pirating a game. A stolen book cannot be sold by the original owner. The original of a copied game can still be sold to someone else who might buy it.

But limiting my ability to use a product I have legitimately purchased because you think I might pirate it? If you think that is okay and want to equate copyright infringement with theft (and I'll play along for just a sec) how about this.

Would you be okay with having a police officer assigned to you who goes everywhere and never lets you out of his sight because, you know, you MIGHT steal or perform some other unlawful act? It's the latest service offered. It will enhance your life experience, too. Oh, and you get to pay them to do this.

There is, of course, a counter-argument to this. The point of view from EA is that they are trying to protect their investment. What gives you the right to demand that they shouldn't protect their product in a way they deem fit?

The anti DRM argument, in a way, is similar to asking a bank to leave the vault open for your convenience, because "you are not a thief". Frankly, they know this -- the DRM isn't here to offend you, or treat you like anything. Nor is the bank vault there because they want to treat you like a thief. The reality is, however, that thieves do exist, and they wish to protect their interests, and investments.

Part of this, perhaps, is not understanding the scope of piracy in the gaming industry. To demonstrate, I have some articles below. The first is a non-official survey of game downloads in 2009:

http://kotaku.com/5435876/report-the...-games-of-2009

MW2 had 4 million downloads. As they note, each doesn't necessarily represent a unique download, or a lost sale, but it is interesting to note. The Sims 3 has just over 3 million downloads.

Here we can see sales of MW2 on the PC in November, at about 300,000 copies, an estimated toal including Steam sales. Let's assume that in December it sold another 300k copies (very unlikely). So, 600k copies sold total.

http://kotaku.com/5426474/report-mod...00-in-november

As you can see, the game may have been pirated sixfold over purchases -- a massive difference. Even if only 1/8th of all potential downloads were actual lost sales, this still means only half of potential sales were made; a big difference for an industry with high development costs.

The Sims 3 may be a better example as the game was only released on PC.

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/...atures;title;2

From this, we can see that through Jan of this year, 4.5 million copies sold -- not bad at all. However, there were 3 million potentially pirated copies; if even a quarter of those potential downloads were lost sales, you're looking at pushing sales over 5 million copies, or forty-million dollars (assuming $60/unit, 700k units).

I'm not a big fan of DRM either. I buy all my music from Amazon or Beatport, because those sites sell with no DRM. I use Good Old Games because they offer great support with no DRM as well (<3 IL-2). But, you need to realize that even 200k lost sales due to piracy at $60 a unit is still a whopping twelve million dollar loss.

If the PC industry can't control piracy, it will die. The cost of developing for PC, along with a comparably low playerbase makes development a rather lousy business venture. It is possible that this move, requiring online verification, will curb piracy by a reasonable amount. PC piracy is easy compared to consoles, and this shows in the data above -- MW2 was potentially pirated on XB360 1/4 as much as PC, despite the fact that consoles are a more popular means to play those games. They need to make PC piracy hard enough to strongly discourage it among the general population, and to make PC game development a reasonable venture.

[Heretic]

How is having an unreliable internet connection any different from not meeting the minimum system requirements? If you buy a game that plainly says you need a Wazoo 3000 video card or better to play when you only have the Whizbang 50, do you rant and rave and demand the company reduce the system requirements?

Other DRM issues aside, if the system requirements say you need a constant internet connection and you don't have that, you don't meet the system requirements.

[HundertzehnGustav]

so you basically think this is going to work?
They can protect all they want...
but if their product always depends on their goodwill to work, is that still "protection"?
Hell no...