[Blitz]

As far as what they have done with it is to release what is a mod of Jagged Alliance called "Jagged Alliance 2: Wildfire". It is a mod created already in the strong mod community for Jagged Alliance by this russian guy named Popov. It adds more guns, notably a lot of russian type ones, makes the game harder in that the easy setting for "Wildfire" is harder than the hard setting on the original game. By harder I mean they throw more men at you, make town loyalty harder to gain and easier to lose, and the AI will tend to dogpile you in daylight ops. Dressen airport, for instance, is extremely time consuming and difficult to take now and the AI makes damn good use of roof-tops. It is also designed so that you can run it on windows xp and down. Other than that it is essentually the same game as the original JA:2. It also has some really annoying bugs such as the sam site number 8 crash, game corrupts saves if you quick save and if you save in mine areas of a town and unfortunately because of a legal dispute between the russian modders and Strategy First over not getting payed there will be no patch fixes to the game forth comming except those fixes the JA community have been able to come up with.

That's Wildfire, which came on the Heels of Jagged Alliance: Gold (Repackaged old material). This mod, which I did not buy, is something different. For the first time since JA2: Unfinished Business, some actual new content is coming out for the game. There are two announced games, one is Jagged Alliance 3D, which is essentially the third time Strategy First has repackaged JA2. Apparently this will be the same story as JA2, but incorperated into their new engine. Finally, we have JA3, using the same engine, which is finally some new content after JA2, JA2 Gold, JA2 Wildfire and JA 3D which are all the same game. Hysterical.

Apparently you dont understand, that is the purpose of copy protection. Not worded quite that way but there are plenty of studies in the software publishing world that says copying/running legally owned software is the main problem. Piracy is a minor side-target.

Copy protection is to avoid "casual copying" of friends giving software to friends. Its an effort to keep up with software that is provided with CDs or available on shelves which "allow copying those problem CD's" without making it clear that the user might be violating an agreement.

Of course if it throws a stumble in the path of pirates for abit, thats good too but they know thats a shortlived win. Its usually worded as trying to turn a 1-day sales-to-crack time into a 3-6 week sales gap.

Oh I understand the purpose of copy protection, but in the same way I now understand why your forums are backwards. Regardless of your reasoning for inconveniencing me, it's irritating. Before buying another game from say... Strategy First, I will remember that every one of their games requires a CD in the drive and therefore the company has made a choice to inconvenience their paying customers in an attempt to prevent the inevitable.

Casual copying may have been the primary issue back in the 1990's, but today every game is available on P2P systems the same day it is released into stores. You speak of a 3-6 week jump on the pirates, this is nonsense. What is more common is a leaked gold master resulting in a 3-6 week jump for the pirates. No protection known, even the very newest Versions will give you anywhere close to a 3-week head start. If you are lucky you might get 3 days with a brand new top-end scheme from Securom that hasn't been used on any other games. The only games which are truly free from piracy are the Online games, such as Warcraft 3, or Everquest. Coincidentaly these are also the best selling games, a factor not of their popularity, but of the simple fact that each has virtually unbreakable copy protection due to the need to connect to a central server to play. The decline of the single player game is as due to piracy than any choice made by the buying public. Many Users simply steal what they can, and buy only those games which they are forced to.