[Turin]

Archonsod said:
Generally, if people had 'pirate friends' I doubt they'd bother buying the game. Why spend money when your friend can give you a copy? It's the same as the "pirates might buy a game" argument - the small number of people who would fit into this description would hardly register on the sales front.
Generally, most purchasers would use reviews on websites or magazines for their 'word of mouth'. You tend to find a lot of people would put such bugs down to the difference between systems (especially if the problem somehow implies the friend's system is inferior. E-penis envy should never be underestimated!)

Well people are different, so even if I have pirate friends, I might have higher morals/more disposable income and want to buy the game in a legit manner.
In addition dominions is really a niche game with very few reviews on mostly nonmainstream sites so word of mouth or forum posting hype is very important. It´s the way I came to the series and I guess many others got into the series that way as well.
For example the somethingawful thread I linked to has currently about 6000 views, which is more than most of the stickies in this forum. If it wasn´t for Tombom´s explanation people would assume that dominions 3 is a cool, but buggy game. I can´t see how that helps sales.

2. Alienating semilegitimate users:

They've already ordered it. Presumably they'd figure it out when the legit copy arrives. If not, in the words of Johnny Rotten "We have your money". If they pre-ordered it then they may cancel, but after that the sale is made (I doubt you'd be required to refund the consumer if you could state the problem was an illegitimate key being used). The odds on them having the game prior to it's release (the point when the order is despatched or otherwise 'too late to cancel') is fairly slim.

Well I don´t know how many people exist out there to whom the scenario applies, but it is a somewhat likely scenario to lose sales or the goodwill of paying customers.
You also presume that the customers find out that their problems are due to an illegal cd-key or bother using their legit one after the game is already installed. And before my thread the only mentioning of it being a cd-key issue was a post three pages back.

3. Wasting programming time:

99% of requested features are always ignored anyway. It's not normally a factor to programming time, since the developer usually knows precisely what they want to add to the game from it's initial development stage, usually.
To implement this kind of protection is rarely time intensive at all (presumably it just checks the key against a blacklist). Even with more advanced types (such as those which actively scan the memory and system environment) it's not necessarily a waste of time - not only are you protecting your investment, but the methods used for the protection are often part of something else (in other words, the protection is more of a secondary feature to another bit of coding).

Well I certainly don´t know if the copyprotection is part of anything else which is useful.
But there have been quite a lot of reports of the bug appearing even with legit keys, so I guess the developers should have spent more time testing the code. So it seems that implementing and properly testing copyprotection takes a significant amount of time.

4. Not trusting customers:

Not really an issue. It's like saying manufacturer's should stop using car alarms because it will alienate car thieves : a legitimate user should never encounter the security feature, while illegitimate users (i.e. those who haven't paid for your product) are prevented from using it. You have a small percentage of false positives, but this is comparable to the small percentage of problems any feature would cause to people with particular system configurations.

Granted it´s a pretty weak point and only important to me, because I´m interested in the subject due to my studies. Since the copyprotection isn´t affecting legitimate users I don´t have a big problem with it.

It really makes no sense not to have a logical errormessage that tells the error is due to a bad cd-key. If you tell people that anyway via the forum, then the pirates can certainly figure it out.
Of course if you want to take legal action vs pirates, then it would make sense, but that really seems pretty farfetched.