[PhilD]

Turin said:
1.Bad word of mouth.
People don´t know that it´s copyprotection, so people assume it´s a bug.

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.

2. Alienating semilegitimate users:

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.

3. Wasting programming time:
I don´t know much about programming, but implementing and checking that the copyprotection works correctly must take some time.

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).

4. Not trusting customers:

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.

The reason I´m interested in this is that I´m a student of economics and I have focused on behavioral economics, which deals with issues like fairness/trust/reciprocity in an economic background. And given the results of the papers/experiments I have to read there regarding trust and reciprocity, I just can´t see how the new copy protection scheme makes sense.

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).

For example why don´t you put at least an errormessage like Nagot gik fel:badcdkey after the error, so that the pirates know it´s not a bug and you don´t get the bad word of mouth effect?

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...