[Soulcommander]

[Skybird]

[Soulcommander]

Neal

[Soulcommander]

[Murphy]

Stopped in to say "Good job Soulcommander".....Starforce is gone.

When they release a patch, I'll reinstall SHIII......I have a retail copy, I can post a photo if anyone likes.....

Some people will surly refuse to admit they were wrong, even though Starforce has a class action law suit pending, for their faulty, invasive, and dangerous programming....and UBI has a 5 million dollar law suit pending for even putting the program on their games and distributing it to the public, and even UBI has now rejected the Starforce program on their future games. I'd say this is 'proof' enough that Starforce is a very bad program, not good or healthy to install on anyones computer.

But all this will not convince the doubters to admit they were wrong......wise up Soulcommander, some people are NEVER going to be wrong .....it's always 'somebody else's fault'.....must be us 'pirates and hackers' who hate "all" CRP , not them or Starforce (who actually ARE the pirates and hackers), who are on the wrong side.....lol.....yea, right.

Fight on Soulcommander....people like you are the ones that give the rest of the people the great gains we occasionally make, the fight is simply harder due to the doubters, not impossible.....

[Silent Sentry]

First Hi to all I am new here, Just ordered SH3, I spent ten years on subs and I have started missing the life I had. I searched thru all the available sub sims and decided to go with SH3, I do not have the game yet so was just doing some reading on here and find this thread. So My question is when I get this game is it safe to use? As this forum shows tons play it but this Starforce thread has me thinking I will be loading a bomb into my computer. Any input would be great for a newcomer.

[Neal Stevens]

I've been playing SH3 and 2 other games with the Starforce copy protection and I've never had any problems. There are people who say they've experienced problems with their DVD writers, but there are also people violently opposed to copy protection who try to scare others from a great game. It's hard to tell if there are legitmate issues with SF, how many people have had problems due to having game copying software and how many legit players have experienced problems that were caused by SF, and not bad/wrong DVD media or other issues. You will never hear someone say "I pirate games and SF wrecked my DVD burner"... everyone who complains about SF is lily white. Maybe some are, who can say?

Like I said, I have not had any problems at all.

[Excalibur Bane]

I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for Ubisoft to release a patch to remove Starforce. It's not going to happen. They were too lazy to fix the installer of the last patch so it told you the correct version you were installing. You expect them to actually do something complicated? No, I don't think so. Heh.

[Gizzmoe]

[Godalmighty83]

[Gizzmoe]

[NeonSamurai]

I dont belive they got rid of the ring 0 permission part of starforce as that is one of the key parts to the program that prevents it being bypassed by other software.

Honestly i just wish the game companies would just learn once and for all that copy protection almost never does the job its suppost to. Ever since the advent of pc's there have been numerous attemps at "securing" the software from illegal duplication, and in Every Single Case every form of copy protection has been removed/bypassed/or breached. At best copy protection stops casual pirates from passing stuff to their friends. Anyone with an internet connection and 1/10th a brain can remove/bypass/etc virtualy all copy protection forms.

Using the "door lock" analogy. A more accurate rendition would be if you could go to the corner store, and pick up a skeleton key or lockpick which will open 99.9% of the doors in your neighborhood. Is it worth bothering trying to put locks on your door if most of the public can bypass them?

Copy protection has never worked, and will never work. Ever. Heck look at the console systems and the extent people went to make copies work, to the extent of physicaly modifing the hardware (soddering on a chip) just so they could use burned cd's in their xbox or playstation. It is utterly impossible to come up with a totaly unbipassable copy protection system. Even if part of the program requires a physical key, you just simply do an end run and remove that part of the code from the program.

Game companies like to point to pirates as lost sales and financial problems. Yet the vast majority of these pirates were never going to buy the game to begin with reguardless of what form of protection existed or not, they are a lost cause and a waste of money to worry about. Legit customers on the other hand dont want to deal with overly invasive protection schemes and the copy protection on a game is now becoming a deciding factor on purchasing the game.

Also often times the game fails not because of piracy but because the company is putting out a shoddy bug ridden game and then refuse to fix it. Well made games sell well, crappy releases and no support games dont. In my opinion the way alot of game companies act now is right on the line of being criminal. They punish and rip off their own customers, put out trash that never should have been released to begin with, then are excedingly rude to their customer base when they complain, refuse to do anything about it, and move on to their next piece of junk game. I personaly have probably wasted hundreds of dollars on games like that, and its gotten to the point where i wont even consider buying from certain companies any more (i wont list names but some of them are among the big boys of game publishig houses.)

As for starforce they are finished, not just because of all that has happened, and that most companies are now droping them like a bad habit, but because starforce itself has now been effectivly fully broken once and for all by one of the major pirate cracking groups (the same group who has done most of the major "starforce protected" releases in the last few months). This group even released an "SKD" of sorts on it. (I know this because as a "White hat" part of my job is keeping tabs on the various underground scenes). Except for a bunch of older titles when starforce was new (and that the top line crackers who disable the protection generaly dont go back and crack stuff beyond a certain age, patches/updates are the exception) most of the starforce games are cracked.

So to sum up, yes i think software companies have the right to protect their property, But i realy think they need to wake up and see whats realy going on. Protection schemes effectly dont work, never ever have, never ever will. The best they can hope for with these schemes is stoping the occasional person who is either computer illterate or just doesnt have access to the internet. Thats just the way it is. Hurting their own customers and causing them grief just in the vain attempt to try to stop the unstopable is plain dumb.


Disclaimer: these are entirely my own personal views, and do not reflect in any way on the views/opinions/belives/etc of subsim.com's site, staff, or in anything else in any way shape or form. If anyone wishes to rationaly discuss my views with me in a calm and relaxed manner feel free to do so either publicly or privately.

P.S. I do hope ubi does the right thing and releases a patch/installer for each of their starforce protected games. This would be very very easy for them to do (they just release the original that doesnt have the security imbedded in it.) and would go a long way to restoring alot of customer's faith in them.

[Neal Stevens]

[NeonSamurai]

I do lock my doors, but thats because there is no corner store i can go to to get the skeleton key i mentioned, or for the vast majority of other people. Passwords are different because to break them unless the person in question used something based on themselves (ie birthdays names etc) requires heavy duty processing as the password breaker goes through all the millions to billions to trillions of possibilities. But that realy only applies to encrypted stuff, software based passwords can be bypassed.

The truth is it has rarely worked, i remmeber back when pc's were in their infancy before copy protection, and copy protection laws, and your average computerstore had hundreds of disks for sale with pirated games.

One of the first forms of copy protection was the game asking stuff from the manual, which most people solved by simply photocopying the entire manual at work, then came laser holes and bad sectors on the disk, which was circumvented by special coping programs which could duplicate those things, even fake them.

After that they started trying to use serials, and disks that could not be copyied through even special programs at the time, thats when the crackers started apearing and the various piracy groups, such material was redily available provided you knew the right people via bbs.

Then the internet became publicly available and suddenly pirated material and methods of circumventing the protection schemes used was easily available to everyone. It wasnt just friends passing stuff to other friends anymore, but people passing this stuff to anyone and everyone. Since the internet especialy in the last 10 years it has become incredibly easy to obtain pirate software as long as you know where (and how) to look. Most pirate software is now available either the same day as the software is commercialy released, often times even before it hits store shelves. So obviously the protection schemes arnt working.

So back to my original statement, copy protection schemes just dont work, at best in today's time they prevent casual passing of software between friends and associates. They certainly dont stop internet based piracy, and barely even slow it down (the delay is often an hour to a day at best).



As for discussing the statistics of pirates, well its impossible to present solid figures as lets face it, pirates arnt about to take a survey on their illegal activities. In my own proffesional dealings with the various underground/illegal scenes, ive found the vast majority of these people who use pirated software are teenagers aged 12-24, usualy with low or no income who cant afford the games they play, which is why they pirate them. Some may pirate then later buy if they think the game is worth the money they have at their disposal, others wont buy as they dont see the point (ie i can get it for free why should i pay). These people are a write off for the software companies, even if they couldnt pirate the games they still would not be buying them.

Another group is the older adults that either do or dont have the money, but pirate because they dont want to spend their hard erned money, or figure again why bother when they can get it for free. This slice of the population is one of the smallest ones. Would they buy the software if they couldnt pirate it, possibly yes, possibly no, definatly not in the numbers of copies they would pirate vs what they would buy.

Yet another group is people who can afford games, do buy them, but also pirate copies to try out the full game first before sinking their hard erned cash into what could be a piece of trash. Why dont they just use demos? Well the sad truth is, the difference between a demo and full version can be night and day. You might have a crappy demo of a game, but the game itself is great, or you may have a killer demo, but the game itself is utter trash and the demo contained all the best parts to it. So instead they typicaly download the pirate copy, see how the game is, then either buy it, or delete it. I have a number of friends who do this. Is it illegal? yes it is, but i can understand why they do it after being riped off myself so many times. In my opinion these people dont realy harm the industry as they buy the quality games and discard the junk/ripoffs.

Now we get to the actual pirate groups themselves, the people who break and release these games. Most of these people are young adults (18+) to middle aged, all of them are heavily into computers, many even work in the industry itself. For them its a game, the various groups compete with each other to see who can release the next hot game first. They also have specific rules that the group must follow otherwise they risk tarnishing their group's name, and even getting pushed out of the scene. They dont do it for profit, and doing it actualy costs them money (from buying the games, server costs, etc etc). These are the people which cost the companies possible lost sales. With out them, piracy would drop sharply. But they are impossible to remove, they are among the worlds top experts in computers, security, hacking, cracking, etc. They often dont have any phyisical ties to each other and go to great lengths to conceal their real identities. Groups commonly form and disolve based on pressure from federal authorities trying to shut them down. The only ones who get caught are those who get sloppy and make mistakes, however most dont ever get caught.

Lastly we come to what i like to call the bottom feeders. These are the people who take pirated material broken by the above piracy group, burn it to a cd, then try to sell it either online or on the streets. They are the ones that try to make profit off pirated material by selling it to people who dont know how to access it for free online. They are difficult to track down, often involved with various criminal orginisations (russian mafia, etc), and on top of it if given the oppertunity will try to defraud those who do try to purchase from them. They are universialy hated by all other pirate types, particularly the release groups, who have been known to go after and tear apart the servers the bottom feeder's use via hacking.


Now out of those groups i mentioned, how many of them are likely to buy these games. How many sales does piracy realy cost the industry. Well we dont know, but it certainly isnt the number the industry likes to claim (which is 100% of pirated copies are lost sales). Myself i would probably ballpark it at around 20% or lower. Most pirates wouldnt buy even a 1/4 of what they pirated.



As for the difficulty in aquiring pirated material, if you know where and how to look. Its no more difficult then going to your local game store and picking up a copy. Sad but true, and that i could easily prove (No i will not show anyone here or anywhere else how to get pirated materials, dont even think of pming me about it).



As for copyright holder's rights yes i agree with you there 100%. Im not arguing for piracy in any way shape or form, i realy dont think that software protection schemes do their jobs. I dont mind non intrusive forms of it. But intrusive, potentialy damaging schemes i have zero tolerance for, they have the right to try to protect their investment, but they dont have the right to run roughshod over my or any other legitimate user's machine, and patience. They also do not have the right to insert any forms of spyware, or adware or other malicious code either.

There will never ever be a successfull non invasive (or even invasive) copy protection. Its utterly impossible and futile to work on, there is always a way to get around it. Even if it meens modifing the hardware to do so. All the game companies are doing is spending even more money on futility, and charging the price to us, the consumer. That is my point. Games dont need heavy duty protection schemes to be successfull, Galactic Civilisations II Dreadlords is just one recent example. Games succeed or fail not because of piracy, but because of how good the game is. Make top notch games and your company will do very well no matter what the pirates may do. Pirates arnt realy worth considering, they are a lost cause, and will never go away.

ps. Neal i respect your opinions, and everyone elses as long as they are presented in a friendly non argumentative tone, no need in my view to shut up

[Wim Libaers]