Very nasty surprise.
 

I have heard of this wonderful game on the net. I investigated on it reading various reports and reviews (including the horrible GS review!). I decided it was the game I should have. I was a lover of MoM, Fantasy General and Warlords II, you know, and AoW hasn't one tenth of the appeal.
So I described it to my friends. Two (rpg mates) fantasy lover gamers agreed with me to buy together a copy of this game to play in multyplay. I found only two, you know, it is hard to find turn based game lovers, especially in a language different from yours (I'm Italian). It is harder we are not young students anymore and real life bothers us. We bought this wonderful game at a very high price (I think are many years I don't buy a game full price). The game is truly wonderful. After a couple of training plays we decided to set up the pbem game.
I think you have understood how it went. What a nasty surprise!. Multiple CD keys do not work.
I think to be one of the very few Italian DominionsII players (this from the Italian language pc.games.strategic ng: nobody knows it) and I was avertising in all the ng how wonderful this game was (well, the game itself IS wonderful).
I don't think I'll ever play it in multiplayer, I can't ask my two friends to pay 50 Euros (=60$) to play a game they are not deeply loving like me. I'm very, very disappointed.
I could understand these protection politics taken by a big production/distributor company, but not from Shrapnel/Illwinter.

Sorry for the rant, but I'm seriously disapponted.

Re: Very nasty surprise.
 

i think i can understand you, i would be pissed off if it was me. There should at least be some kind of spawn install, just like blizzard was doing with their early game (diablo, starcraft)

Re: Very nasty surprise.
 

What is a spawn install?

Re: Very nasty surprise.
 

If your friends like the game they should buy it too, if they think its not worth 50€... have a look in the forums. Pbem and normal mp starts at times.

I was disappointed too about the high cost (payed 50€) but so far there is no regular european publisher.

Re: Very nasty surprise.
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Spawn install is something Blizzard did with some of their older games (they no longer do it, just like no one else does it), which allowed you to play the game multiplayer on a LAN with only one purchased copy of the game.

Re: Very nasty surprise.
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Multiple installs from the same "master", usually spawns are MP-only.
IMHO current limitations in MP are too tight and ultimately counterproductive (for people that *would* be interested in buying *if* they can play the game somewhat in MP with owners)
So spawning could be a nice feature to spread Dominion http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

Re: Very nasty surprise.
 

If multiple CD-keys would work in same game no one would buy this. Some people buy the game because they want to support Illwinter, some because of the manual, bur i think almost everyone buys it because thay want to play multiplayer.

If we all could play with 1 CD-key i think there would be no patches or even dreams about Dom III

Re: Very nasty surprise.
 

you can play a small pbem game with one single key, if you are confident in your host: give him your password (or dont set password), and let him open your turn, then submit and close. It will fingerprints your turn with his comp sig and cd key, and no conflict will arise.

Re: Very nasty surprise.
 

Everything has its pros and cons. With Dom1 the price was something like 20 and I bought 6 copies. All my machines (5) had one and one frined who was determined to "borrow" it so I just bought him a copy. I was very unhappy to see the pricing on Dom2 since I knew I wasnt going to do 5 or 6 copies.

On the other hand, as a programmer I understand the difficulty in having this kindof game understand multiple LAN copies and still tell the difference between that and multiple computers across the net. And I WONT say that its not worth the money. Definetly try the demo first but IF you can get past the learning curve then I can pretty much gaurantee that it will live on your machine 10 times longer than any other game you can buy now for the same price. Its worth the money and Illwinter does deserve to get paid for it.

I did suggest to Shrapnel (they actualy control things like pricing and cd keys) that a way to pay less money and download a key (not get a disc or manual) might be good but apparently its not cost effective.

Re: Very nasty surprise.
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Yes, you are right.
But several things made me think at least mp would be allowed:
- the game is costly
- the "no big company" atmosphere around the game (very much like that of freeware or shareware games), a game that is a forever work in progress with great enthusiasm and feedback between fans and autors
- I think, but i could be wrong, that another great Shrapnel game I have (SEIVG) allows mp gaming with one licence
- the fact that a game like this has no advertising apart that of fans
- the fact that lovers of turn games are almost disappearing, and is difficult to pull any other real time high graphic junk fan to access this sort of "steep learning curve" type of game.

Ok, i think something like the cited spawn install, where I and only I could be a host should be the best.

Re: Very nasty surprise.
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I slap myself on the forehead for the obivousness of that statement but I dont think anyone ever brought that scheme up specifically before. I would be worth a discussion.

So the host would still check IDs but would allow other machines to play if their CD keys matched the host? Hmmmmmmm

No come to think of it someone would probably setup a site where they would host games and say "download this" so that hundreds could play for free. mmmmm I dont think that would work well.

The "big company" thing you mention usually means they can have programmers who will work on headaches like "lan recognition while not allowing other computers not on the lan". Thats not as simple as it seems and gets harder every day just like any other protection scheme.

Re: Very nasty surprise.
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I slap myself on the forehead for the obivousness of that statement but I dont think anyone ever brought that scheme up specifically before. I would be worth a discussion.
[...] </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Sorry,
I intended what Cainehill told:
<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">for me it would be good

Re: Very nasty surprise.
 

[quote]Originally posted by Gandalf Parker:

Quote:

[qb] So the host would still check IDs but would allow other machines to play if their CD keys matched the host? Hmmmmmmm No come to think of it someone would probably setup a site where they would host games and say "download this" so that hundreds could play for free. mmmmm I dont think that would work well.

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Actually, it'd be easy to make it work well.

First - these "spawning" games would limit how many other human players were allowed - something like 2 or maybe 3 would be reasonable.

Second - spawning servers would definately check with Illwinter to verify the CD keys. One CD key per IP address, period - this keeps multiple people from doing this with a single pirated, er, "shared" copy of the game. (Actually, all server games should do this, probably, Norfleet's concerns (and my own lesser ones) be damned.)

The server might also pass on CD key and IP information to illwinter, only for the spawnees. [IE, the reporting only gets done when the same key is used for multiple players.] This makes it easy to track abuse if it turns out 37 different IP addresses are using the spawn capability, but might not be necessary.

Third, and more complicated to implement, would be to limit the number of such spawned games being run concurrently by a server. Again, possibly not necessary - there probably isn't a huge black market area for MP games limitted to a max of 3 or 4 players. But if done, it'd make it tougher for that hypothetical site hosting dozens or hundreds of bootleg games via the spawn functionality.

"Spawnees" wouldn't be allowed to play unless they allowed the packets to go out to Illwinter - they didn't pay for the program, they can't complain if they tell Zonealarm or routers to do egress filtering. No communications to Illwinter, no comm for MP games - they could still legitimately play hotseat. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

[ April 08, 2004, 19:48: Message edited by: Cainehill ]

Re: Very nasty surprise.
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">There are a lot of greys between black and white.
I'm very fond with this game, my friends are fond too, but not like me, and 50E for a game is much (I don't think things could be different if there were an EU publisher).
I think that, if a single key allowed mp games, the game would be a lot more played, even between friends and not only between fans. I don't think I'll spread the "DomII word" in Italy, I'm from a small town and have other things to do, but I think communities would born and grow much faster.
But I'm not marketing man of Shrapnel.

Re: Very nasty surprise.
 

Beorne,

While I might agree that the MP license policy is a bit restrictive (and counterproductive), your friends could always install and play via the demo Version. True, they'd be limitted in their choice of races, magic research is capped, and the game ends around turn 40 - but that would probably allow them to decide if they enjoyed the game enough to buy it.

On the other hand, I fail to see why you refer to a "Very Nasty Surprise" - you bought one copy, not three, so why would you expect it to allow three (or 10, or 20) people to be allowed to install and use it?

Finally - there's several other Italian players out there; I've run into at least 2, Cohen and one other.

[ April 08, 2004, 12:48: Message edited by: Cainehill ]

Re: Very nasty surprise.
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">As others have mentioned, it allowed one purchased copy to allow, typically, two other computers to play the game, but only in MP mode, and only with the machine with the "master" installation hosting the game - I think they tended to use the CD as indication of which machine was the legit/master.

You might be able to do something like this for server games, but I don't see how it'd work for PBEM....

Unless ... If the CD keys are encrypted into the turn files, and all the turns are coming from the same CD key, allow the game to proceed as though it was a somewhat less limitted demo. Maybe keep the turn limit, but allowing race selection & research as normal. This has the benefit of requiring minimal changes to the program - checking the keys, and ending the game early if all keys are the same.