Settlers 7 still plagued by DRM problems two weeks after launch

http://www.instantrimshot.com/

Dude, you forgot to put on your sunglasses.

He's too cool for sunglasses.

But his future's so bright... he's gotta wear shades.

Yeah, he's gotta wear shades.

Replying to myself, why not!

"our technical teams have made progress but we are not yet able to say that the issue is completely resolved"

I know how to solve it! I think everyone does! A patch that removes the DRM, is that so hard?

Hey, the pirated copies work better than the legal ones, right? Maybe that's the solution to all this. They want us to get haxz0red versions! They can't legally say it, but they're trying to tell us using hidden messages like this!

Hey man, as long as the pirates can't play right?!

right?

that's the point of making games right? to make sure pirates don't play them?

right?

I know I would be interested in buying the game if it weren't for the DRM. I'm not going to pirate it, but Ubisoft is still losing a potential sale because of it.

I've got one word for Ubisoft...

STEAM

I have this stupid "clips" or something software I got from a
MacHeist bundle. As far as I can tell, it gives me a clipboard
history. My cable modem decided to take a vacation for about 15 hours
the other day, and when I used my computer when I got home from work,
I got a message that Clips couldn't talk to the activation server..

I dismissed the box before I finished reading it, but that is BS.
Even a stupid clipboard history app wants to make my life miserable
and break when I'm not on the phone-homenet. Which is what the
internet is becoming btw, especially since Comcast is going to be
controlling which websites you're going to get now.

People generally don't have a problem with stuff until it affects them directly.

You forgot "and thousands of lost sales from people who will avoid impulse purchases of anything from Ubisoft in the future because they haven't bothered to see if the DRM situation has changed recently."

Well done, sirs.

So there's really no cracked version yet? I'm a bit surprised this DRM scheme actually 'worked' so well on that front.

Maybe the pirates can't figure out the crack because the DRM servers aren't working?

you are right... so ....check....yep jackass award of the year no doubt.....

sam:

it´s not impossible is just a good amount of work, i have a friend who used to be a cracker in the good old times of the commodore 64, he explained to me how things worked back then with the hardest protection that existed for the 64 the famous vmax! that was used with all the games of cinemaware, i don´t remember all the technical stuff, but more or less this is how it worked:
the whole information of the game was encrypted with vmax and it was virtually impossible to access it, the only moment when the information was decrypted was when the game loaded the information on memory, so in order to crack the game you had to play the full game, "grab" those pieces of code which were levels, stages, etc.when they were loaded on memory, save them and keep playing the game. this is the reason why if you get a rom of a game for the c64 ( which BTW is going to be a pirate version as those are the only ones who could be copied) you are going to see that the directory has a lot of small files (original vmax games didn´t showed any files in their directory) because those games were reconstructed, using all the pieces and building a custom loader. Of course there was a price to pay and that was that most of those games took ages to load, sometimes crackers added special loaders with turbo to make everything faster but it was never as fast as the original vmax game.
now back to this drm it works exactly the same, the game has to grab the missing info from the servers of ubi and i´m sure that this information is streamed to the computer so it doesn´t stays in the machine, now imagine that you had to play and finish ACII completely in order to get all the data that you need to make your cracked version to work, that takes time. but in this case i don´t think that crackers are really doing that, i think they are waiting until this game becomes obsolete and ubi decides to release it as a cheap deal in which case they are very unlikely to keep covering the cost of the servers so the game would be released full with a normal copy protection and then the crackers would get it.
of course that´s if ubi can keep the people happy with this garbage, because even though it worked for stopping piracy it also worked to stop the customers to buy this.

Bad Company 2 had great copy protection, allowing you to put the disk in every time or activate online once.

And you know what? Awesome, that sounds great to me. Win win. I get to play while not online, they get to know I bought it. Done. ::wipes hands::

I really do understand companies need to protect their property. That's a given. But I just can't wrap my head around the thought process that went into this mess. I mean come ON. Did NO one raise the issue the servers may crash? That they may get hacked? That they may have bad connections? That they may get overloaded? That all of these and other things could have added up to make their games unplayable BY PEOPLE WHO BOUGHT THEM? Jesus, so short-sighted and silly.

I haven't bought a UBI game in a while, and I don't intend to so long as this is how they're going to treat me for being honest.

Steam does not prevent piracy. Many games released by pirates groups are actually the steam copies.

The point isn't that Steam prevents piracy. The point is that Steam games are actually playable by the people who choose to pay for them.

What's the point of preventing pirates from playing if the people who actually pay you money can't play?

yes steam is not unbeatable (and this drm is not either, it´s going to take time but it´s going to fall sooner or later) but with steam more people is willing to pay for a game that is available all over the world, a game that you can ACTUALLY PLAY, and at a good price, with a service that has been fully tested by everybody ubi soft included, and a service that is MAKING MONEY, there are pirate versions of steam, true.... do you get money from steam?? true.... so is it better to have a DRM service with 0 pirate copies and 0 happy costumers????

Just drop the DRM. Problem solved. It's not that hard, really. People that were not involved in the original code can do it before a game is even released.

the reason is because that one actually works, joystick couldn´t get their copy of settlers 7 to work to get a picture.

Actually PC game sales are up slightly, I would guess that Ubisoft's sales are down though.