SEV: What am I REALY getting for my money?

Draxis · #1 August 14th, 2006, 09:03 AM

I for one really like steam - I dont have to bother carrying a hard copy around with me, and unlike the lame D2D service which I hope is already dead, with steam you can install on as many comps and redownload as often as you need. Patches are all taken care of, downloads are fast (most games its quicker for me to download than go to town and find the game) and prices are good. Its got an easy interface, doesnt mess me about, and the 'friends' feature is really handy.

As for torrents...cant you just spoof the tracker and upload garbage? How much validation on data can a client perform? Assuming they use a CD image, broken bytes here and there could cripple it. If that were possible, imagine how hard it would be to get SE:V off a torrent if every leagal owner was uploading junk data.

NullAshton · #2 August 14th, 2006, 12:27 PM

Steam does not block access to all your games. If you are caught cheating, your license for THAT GAME ONLY is banned from all VAC secured games. And it's very hard to set off the VAC anti-cheat system. At least from what I read, anyway.

Steam is nifty(for broadband users at least), in that you get automatic patches, and that the anti-cheat system that they use scares cheaters into not cheating. It's not as effective as they say, but the permanent ban serves to scare users into playing the game how it's meant to be played. Not to mention the authentication system hampers pirates that steal games, without invasive software such as Starforce. Just log into your account once, identify yourself as who you are, and then you can go play offline mode without the internet as long as you want.

Some of this stuff may be inaccurate, so feel free to point out inaccuracys. But in my experience, Steam runs flawlessly and gives you a lot of convienent features.

Renegade 13 · #3 August 14th, 2006, 02:16 PM

Quote:

NullAshton said:
anti-cheat system that they use scares cheaters into not cheating. It's not as effective as they say, but the permanent ban serves to scare users into playing the game how it's meant to be played. Not to mention the authentication system hampers pirates that steal games, without invasive software such as Starforce.

I don't see how Steam is any different than invasive software such as Starforce. It's just the implementation that is slightly different.

Raapys · #4 August 14th, 2006, 02:44 PM

I think Steam works alright as an *addition* to the hard-copy packages, but it should never become a replacement.

Fyron · #5 August 14th, 2006, 03:09 PM

Draxis said:
How much validation on data can a client perform?

Quite a lot, actually. The entire protocol is designed with perfect file transfers in mind, so each piece of the whole is validated with hash checks and such, as is the final copy.

You can't make a CD that will change how a CD image is created unless you use illegal (or at the least, highly immoral) rootkit garbage like Starforce that damages your CD drivers in such a way that it can prevent CD images from being made.

Draxis · #6 August 14th, 2006, 04:20 PM

From what I know of networking (which is not that much, did not do well in the subject at university) most networking protocols are designed to prevent *accidental* imperfections, but there are a lot of possible variations of a single block (say 256Kb) that would all pass the same validation hash. Assuming every single block of a torrent had an associated MD5, to sabotage the theft, you only need to send a differnt block but the block would hash out the same MD5. When the entire file was finished, it would almost certainly fail any check on it, but that is still a few hundred megs that has to be redownloaded, and would only take 1 dodgy block to break again.

Fyron · #7 August 14th, 2006, 04:54 PM

I don't think that will really work out too well in practice though... BT uses SHA1 hashing, not MD5. While an attack vector has been found for SHA1, it is not yet computationally feasible to create faked pieces of data that would let you disrupt a BT transfer. You can bet that as soon as viable methods for creating collisions in the SHA1 algorithm are found, the BT protocol will just switch to a newer algorithm that is not yet possible to break.

Sivran · #8 August 14th, 2006, 05:09 PM

I don't think Draxis knows too much about hashing.

Collisions (ie, two differing blocks of data that produce the same hash) are so supremely rare that a big deal was made of it in the crypto community when someone managed to find a way to make MD5 collide. The method was impractical, of course, and IIRC, only a few bytes could be changed. This was with a small dataset. Creating collisions out of larger chunks would be infinitely more difficult.

Now, out of OT mode...

If SE5 would only be sold on Steam, I would not buy it. In fact, I'm going to wait for the first reports from the community-- if SE5 has any crap in it, I won't buy it. If it's not portable as SE4 is, I will think twice but it's not a game breaker.

Draxis · #9 August 14th, 2006, 05:29 PM

Your right Sivran, I'm out of touch, I used to play around with that stuff a lot though

I never looked at the SHA1 but after a little reading it has me interested. Hate having to go to a job all day, I cant play with numbers!

frightlever · #10 August 14th, 2006, 08:34 PM

SE4 (and earlier) was probably pirated massively long before the deluxe(!) version. I seem to recall a Q&A with Aaron where he said as much.

Copy protection definitely stops games getting into the hands of casual pirates. I'm a bit more sceptical whether it actually encourages sales. I think people willing to pay will pay and those who can't, or won't, won't pay no matter what. I don't buy the idea of a pirate furiously exhausting his options for ripping off a game and then as a final resort reluctantly trudging to the game store with a bunch of grubby bank notes in his hands and a tear in his eye.

The Boycott Starforce (never had a problem with Starforce) proved that harsh copy-protection discouraged people from buying games. Stardock had a top-selling game (at Walmart!) with no copy protection.

I would say it's a cert that come what may SE5 will have copy protection, either through Steam or through a CD-in-drive disk checker. I couldn't tell you where my SE4 disk is (bought for about a $80.00 off a specialist import shop in the UK! Best value for money ever.) so I'll miss just starting up a game whenever I want but I suppose that's progress.

Getting back to the original reason behind the thread though - I'm still not convinced that these real time land battles and wotnot are going to do the released game any favours. As a straight 2D turn based war game SE4 fit into a comfortable, if no longer mainstream, sterotype. A reviewer seeing a lacklustre attempt at a RTS is going to tear it a new one in the review.

Look at the RTS battles in Space Rangers - pretty much universally put down by reviewers (though forgiven because of the strength of that game as a whole) and from what I've seen the SR RTS battles look a lot better than the SE5 ones. If they played like Warhammer 40K Dawn Of War then fair enough...