Re: What�s the point of the new copy protection?
 

It doesn't sounds like a very good way to do it, either.

For a good way to do it, consider the ancient game "Stars!". If it detected key problems you would have problems with your orders because there was doubt as to whether you were the true ruler of your empire. (I forget the wording of the message and never even saw it myself, just discussions of it.) IIRC if you didn't fix it units started defecting also.

Don't make it buggy, make it disobedient.

Re: What�s the point of the new copy protection?
 

People at http://forums.somethingawful.com/ pay to register on a forum but not for games. It may be a religious thing, or perhaps psychiatric, nothing can be done imho.

Re: What�s the point of the new copy protection?
 

This is definitely deliberate?? If so, it seems to have been implemented buggily, as I've had it a few times and my copy is direct from shrapnel.

Re: What�s the point of the new copy protection?
 

That depends on what you regard as expert moderators. An expert as a moderator can easily work as long as he/she can keep the expertise and the social aspect of moderator duties separated and has both the maturity and temperament to enable him to avoid appealing to his own authority. Sadly, there are rather few who can avoid both pitfalls. Usually you just get one or the other but not both. Accountability is also a big issue. A moderator who abuses power has to be immediately and permanently stripped of his rank and privileges or abuses will happen.

As long as you have the right setup in place, things can run well. It'll be impossible to accommodate everyone, of course, but it is not impossible by any stretch to get it to work.

Edi

Re: What�s the point of the new copy protection?
 

I can confirm this is apparently a cd-key protection/bug.

I own the game, and at one point I installed it at work from the CD. I forgot the manual so I just hopped on the "internets" and got a key. It was running fine at work until 3.06 came out and it started to bug out exactly as was described. So I deinstalled it and reinstalled it with my good key and worked just fine.

Personally I think its an awesome Copy-write protection for the game to allow you to play for a little while and then pop up with a message saying something like "We hope like the game... please buy it!" and quit. Unfortuantly it just bugs out.

My thought is that this wasn't intended, as it would be a quite silly protection idea as it looks exactly like a bug. If I didn't see it listed in the forums I would have assumed Dom3 is the problem - not the cd-key.

Re: What�s the point of the new copy protection?
 

I tend to agree that copyprotection should be clearly marked as copyprotection, and not pose as a bug, but in this case, it's a pretty lenient protection anyway - basically, the patch comes with a list of known pirated CD keys, and checks for them. No serious effort is made to make the life of legitimate users, and this is, IMHO, the #1 thing that copy protection should ensure - and, most of the time, fails miserably.

The game has a pretty functional demo. Pirating a game until your copy arrives is still pirating a game, and doesn't qualify as legitimate use (it's something I wouldn't do, anyway); I completely fail to feel sorry for the "semilegitimate users" you are describing, and, honestly, I'm not sure many really exist.

Frankly, programming in this kind of copy protection takes negligible time. Even I could probably do it, and I don't know much about programming (I only teach it, which, believe me, doesn't mean much about my skills).

It's still a completely nonintrusive copy protection. You can install the game on several computers if you like, and don't need the CD to play (something I'm pretty happy with when I go on a mission and take my laptop with me - I can still play in my MP games, even if I don't take my laptop CD drive with me). I'll repeat myself, but this copy protection doesn't hurt legitimate users in any way, so anyone who can rightly feel "not trusted" has to be an illegitimate user; again, not feeling sorry for them.

I really don't know anything about economics (OK, I dabble in game theory), but the purpose of this kind of (half-serious) copy protection is to make life slightly harder for the pirate; no half-user-friendly scheme (that I know of) has any chance of achieving more than that. And most likely, the scheme itself is a result of Illwinter having "few" developers (like, one) and not much interest in programming anything more serious in (I mean, UI programming isn't fun, but at least you get to use the better UI after it's done; when you put in hours of work into a copy protection scheme, you're working on feature you are 100% sure you won't use personally when you use the software).

Here I tend to agree, but then, if the pirate can too easily identify the "problem" as coming from a "bad CD key" (which I'm pretty sure means "known pirated CD key from a finite list"), this basically tells him to find another one which isn't on the list...

Re: What�s the point of the new copy protection?
 

Yes I like games that shift a bad cd key into demo mode. It would be great if Dom3 could support it.

Re: What�s the point of the new copy protection?
 

I just received the game in the mail 2 days ago...immediately patched to 3.06. I've experienced this "copy protection" once as I started a MA Vanheim single player game. Didn't even get past the first turn. If it's copy protection, it's buggy.

Re: What�s the point of the new copy protection?
 

What are you talking about? Nobody there encourages piracy, which is banned on sight. There is no reason that people there pirate more compared to anywhere else and there have been threads which have encouraged other people to buy the game.

Oh wait I just checked the thread I see what you mean

Re: What�s the point of the new copy protection?
 

Any Paradox game.. Just off the top of my head