What´s the point of the new copy protection?

[Kamamura]

Turin - I am an example of a person who was persuaded to buy by this 3.06 copy protection. I don't care much about the money, but international payments here are a hassle, if you don't want to open a big hole into your account (credit card - I don't trust them). But 3.06 was such a hassle that I persuaded my friend to order it for me. So, this scheme might be considered to be somewhat successful, because it's defense in depth, and no cracker will bother to look for all the checks inside the code.

[Gandalf Parker]

The discussion needs to stay more on whether or not the copy protection should announce itself rather than act in a way that could be considered a bug by someone.

Discussion of whether or not copy protection is effective will close this thread.

[Velusion]

Kamamura said:
Turin - I am an example of a person who was persuaded to buy by this 3.06 copy protection. I don't care much about the money, but international payments here are a hassle, if you don't want to open a big hole into your account (credit card - I don't trust them). But 3.06 was such a hassle that I persuaded my friend to order it for me. So, this scheme might be considered to be somewhat successful, because it's defense in depth, and no cracker will bother to look for all the checks inside the code.

So are you saying you wouldn't have bought the game if - instead of crashing - it stopped working and told you that "you are using a bad cd-key"?

[Sombre]

To be honest the error message (by not specifying what the problem was) had me convinced that this was simply a buggy game with dodgy patches. Crash causing error messages in foreign languages generally have that effect on me.

However I looked it up on the 'net and found out what was up. I then patiently waited for my copy of dom3 to arrive (I live in a pretty out of the way corner of the earth) and afterwards it was all good. An error message saying 'bad cd key' would have caused me less of a headache and I think bugging a game is a godawful form of copy protection. Galactic Civilisations II had a good system (patches/support clearly marked as only for legit users)

Slightly edited with permission of the poster

[Gandalf Parker]

So someone that grabbed a bad key off the net might be led to think its a bad game and not join us here? heehee.
Somehow thats not bothering me.