News EA to loosen Spore install restrictions

Well said. And it something that could end being a never ending downward spiral. More people pirate because of bad DRM, publishers increase DRM usage/restrictions in retaliation, then more people pirate, then more DRM. Until someone wakes up and realizes that DRM is damaging the PC gaming market or finds the holy grail of DRM which doesn't impinge on the user (Steam is close, but not perfect).

 

So now you can de-authorise your pc to get the activation back, do you have to have access to the pc to do this? If so then what happens if your system goes belly up and you have to reformat and reinstall your OS? does that count as a completely new system with no way to remove the activation taken up by it previously?

 

Quite.

Until it's in the EULA, it's vaporware.

The circumstances under which this would happen include EA going bust. No liquidator is going to spend company money making good on that promise unless he or she is absolutely, unavoidably, irrevocably hidebound to do so. These tools need to be precreated so that the cost of deploying them is negligible.

P

 

What really irks me is that it so clearly doesn't work. People in my dorm had a cracked copy of the game before it was released. The only effect of the DRM is that it pisses off customers, and the fact that it's pissed of 1% of your customers after just one week is not a good omen.

 

EA promesis a fix to their DRM bug, in the next few months. Yeah, um, someone released that fix, like 3 weeks ago, it is called SPORECrackFIX on the Pirate Bay. Why not just use that to fix your game right now, since, well quite a few people are already doing it after all so your method is only lowing the reviews for your game preventing others like it from being developed and the genre perfected.

 

You must not have seen the Amazon reviews. It's fallen victim to an anti-DRM campaign; rightly so, if you ask me. I think it's affecting sales quite a bit. Crysis:Warhead too.

 

Greetings!

That one is twistedly funny since not even Crytek staff know what DRM Warhead is using:
http://www.crymod.com/thread.php?postid=349888#post349888

 

the mere mention of the word "DRM" on the game (be it multiple installs, only 3 installs, only 1 pc install) have already made people pirate the game (even if they eventually remove it completely in the end, it will still hurt game sales alot) if only game developers learn to just let DRM go away... if a game is really that good, a large percentage of people will still buy the game. they are like forcing people to buy their game be it crappy or crappier

 

I gave up on DRM a long time ago. I used to buy about $300 worth of games a year, no more. Now, thanks in large part to EA, I'm a Pirate... You DRM-activation software developers lost a very good customer.

Sorry.

 

I've now been officially burned by EA's DRM...

looks like i used up a few activations getting the game to work, as there's supposedly 5 install activations now, have installed it on my laptop and desktop (and only on the laptop at all due to it taking a full day to get it working on the desktop due to the EA download manager buggering things up)

i thought to my myself "i've only used 2/5 installs, i'll put it on my brothers PC so he can play it when i'm not" but no, it informs me i've reached the activation limit already...

so it seems the various re-installs it took to get it working on my pc used an install quota each time, meaning it labelling me as a pirate for buying the game and trying to get it working...

anyway, downloaded the cracked .exe and all is well again, horay again for pirates having the vastly superior product whilst paying customers get penalised...

Thats it now... Never again am i buying an EA game on the PC unless they change their ways...
It's not worth it. I've now been shafted too many times by EA for having the audacity to pay for their products...

 

Huh, guess that's why a crack isn't out yet. I expect that'll change in a day or so.

Anyways, I just wrote the following to EA. I'm done with DRM, from all publishers. The little time I have to play games will be spent playing, not fighting an activation scheme.

 

LOL I found this really funny, I'd be supised if there wasn't at least 1 of EVERY pirated game torrent that had a virus in it.

 

Its a pretty poor state of affairs when they have to try to scare n00bs into not downloading a copy by using the magic 'virus' word.
Wasn't interested in Spore much anyway tbh but I'll be getting RA3 for damn sure.
Whether I pay for it or not is down to EA's choice of DRM tbh.

 

Firehed has the right idea. The best way to try to make change is to be vocal. Write to EA... email them. If enough people do so, maybe EA will start to listen to their customer base and make changes. Clearly they are doing that already to an extent, albeit not enough. They've up-ed the number of activations and claim that an upcoming patch will allow de-authentication, but to me that is not enough. DRM is just pissing us legit customers off. I think we should all write to EA and express our displeasure.

 

It's a pain to do. The only contact link I found was buried in a members-only support area. But by all means, feel free to use what I wrote as a template or whatever if you'd like to write them yourself.

It also helps to actually do what you say as well. If you send that off and then go buy their games anyways (or steal from drm-free publishers too) then it's just a waste of bandwidth.

 

If someone posts up the address to email EA at, I'm sure plenty of us on here would write them some choice words.
Maybe Bit could create a petition that we could all sign and they could contact EA directly with all our weight behind them?

 

one word: Stardock

EA needs to treat its customers... well as customers and not as MadMax outlaws.

Enjoy the Show, wait until they kill Red Alert, which has a huge following.

I wonder if people ever bothered to goto their offices and picket, nothing like an old school hippy protest to scare the execs.

Yours in Rainbow Tie-die Plasma,
Star*Dagger

 

Agree , Customers should be treated as Customers and not Criminals, seriously, if the anti piracy measurement works better to prevent customers from using legal copies than pirates from using illegal copies something is wrong.

Kill red alert? they would have to try pretty damn hard to kill it and seeing how there have been almost no games released people wont even be able to use the no money excuse like last year when several top titles where released within a short time.

Noone tries to scare exces anymore, they all do what the execs want in fear of their job being moved to china.

 

Stardock pwn.

 

Greetings!

Spore official forums new policy regarding DRM:

Screenshot for posterity: