What are you playing now?

[Deadly_Nightshade]

Did Mass Effect have a DRM that screwed with the game?!

 

Yes, the DRM would sometimes trigger the "tags" that caused the bugs even if you had a legal, un-cracked version (I can personally attest to this as I have encountered the error on the Steam version of Mass Effect PC). Now, there were some early "fixed" .exe files that were affected as well - but those were fixed within a day or so of the issue coming to light and, even then, not everyone had issues.

[Monte Carlo]

Neverwinter Nights 2: Storm of Zehir - Just reached Chapter 2, good game surprised it has not more love here since you basically can play the game how you want without being railroaded in how you decide to take the game on. Real fun an excellent remembrance of the pnp days of old. Obsidian

 

Seconded, my party are just about to hit level 14 and are cutting about the Sword Coast making more loot than you could shake a stick at. The randomness, lack of balance, mindless combat and ability to make uber-items easily are all, for me, massive pluses.

 

To be fair, on the Sword Coast some of the encounters have more thought put into them than ones you find in more allegedly deep RPGs. The Port Llast quest is a good example.

 

Lastly, in a shocking development, of all my attempts at this game my best, most effective and fun to play party so far has been the most vanilla:

 

Human CG Rgr 3 / Rog 8

Moon NG Elf Wiz 13

Dwarf LG Cleric 13

Grey Orc Ftr 10 / Fzd Brkr 2

 

I've levelled up Lastri the Halfling Swashbuckler at the adventurer's guild too. She's pretty good, those flank bonuses are very useful and watching large creatures try to hit her is hilarious.

 

Cheers

MC

[Guest Slinky]

Did Mass Effect have a DRM that screwed with the game?! I played the pirate version on PC because I had already bought it for the 360, but I never noticed anything

No. Just the online activation.

 

( you cant seriously expect people to pay for the same game twice, I say I did the right thing )

Yeah, I guess you are right atleast on some level. But why did you pirated it for PC if you already had it on 360? It's the same game, just different contollers?

[Hell Kitty]

I say I did the right thing

 

By pirating a game? Of course not.

[Guest Slinky]

Yes, the DRM would sometimes trigger the "tags" that caused the bugs even if you had a legal, un-cracked version (I can personally attest to this as I have encountered the error on the Steam version of Mass Effect PC). Now, there were some early "fixed" .exe files that were affected as well - but those were fixed within a day or so of the issue coming to light and, even then, not everyone had issues.

Huh? I didn't know about this.

[Deadly_Nightshade]

It's the same game, just different contollers?

 

It had a number of changes to adapt it for the PC.

 

 

EDIT: I removed the redundant information.

Edited September 13, 2009 by Deadly_Nightshade

[Deadly_Nightshade]

Huh? I didn't know about this.

 

It's not been publicized much but Mass Effect had them - in fact most modern SecuROM games have something similar. For instance I know that Mirror's Edge and Dead Space had similar systems that both defeated round one cracks -for about a day or less- and those who were unlucky enough to have a game that decided to trigger the DRM.

[Guest Slinky]

It's the same game, just different contollers?

It had a number of changes to adapt it for the PC.

Yes, but I wouldn't call it different game if the UI and decryption is little different.

 

It's not been publicized much but Mass Effect had them - in fact most modern SecuROM games have something similar. For instance I know that Mirror's Edge and Dead Space had similar systems that both defeated round one cracks -for about a day or less- and those who were unlucky enough to have a game that decided to trigger the DRM.

Huh. Well that sucks. I had no idea. Can you provide any proof of this? If you can, my opinion on securom is going to change.

[Hurlshort]

I say I did the right thing

 

By pirating a game? Of course not.

 

Yeah, no, you are still a thief.

 

I recently traded in my 360 for a PS3, but I really wanted to keep playing Saint's Row 2. I guess I could have stolen the game off the store shelf, but I decided to buy it instead. You know, because that isn't illegal, and it also supports the developer whose product I enjoyed enough to play more than once.

[Morgoth]

The Kaft, who supposedly wants to become a game dev, steals a game!

 

Blasphemy!

[Maria Caliban]

Did Mass Effect have a DRM that screwed with the game?! I played the pirate version on PC because I had already bought it for the 360, but I never noticed anything

 

I think it was just a bad crack.

Edited September 13, 2009 by Maria Caliban

[Enoch]

Hmm... The updated Civ4 AI is a bit trickier than it used to be. Mansa planted one of those limited-space backfill cities up against my border. I figured it was always be a runt, stunted by my cultural influence and likely to be a good starting point for an eventual conquest. Then, with the free Great Artist he got for being the first to discover Music, he "culture bombed" the city (the instant +5000 culture power of the GA). In the past, I had only seen the AI use a culture bomb if it were pushing for the cultural victory conditions. Now some of my cities, including the second one I founded, are giving up territory to that little burg.

 

That "eventual conquest" just got a lot more imminent...

[mkreku]

The Kaft, who supposedly wants to become a game dev, steals a game!

 

Blasphemy!

Ok, then imagine this. He has a modded Xbox 360. Mass Effect came out for the Xbox before the PC. But he claims he paid for the Xbox 360 version (which is almost twice as expensive as the PC version in Sweden)?

 

How many people here actually believe he all of a sudden paid for a game? Raise your hand!

 

/tumbleweed

[Purkake]

Are you like the official forum Gestapo or something?

 

Too bad we don't have custom tags here

[RPGmasterBoo]

Empty moralizing leads to nowhere and anyone who says they never played a pirated game or used a pirated program is most likely lying. The only people who don't use them are the clueless users who use their pc for watching movies and playing solitaire.

[Hurlshort]

Empty moralizing leads to nowhere and anyone who says they never played a pirated game or used a pirated program is most likely lying. The only people who don't use them are the clueless users who use their pc for watching movies and playing solitaire.

 

Wow. So basically you are calling the people who don't rip off developers ignorant? You've got it backwards.

 

When I was young and dumb I though only about myself. In High School I went to a FTP sites and downloaded games. When I grew up I realized that not only is it morally wrong, it is also counter productive, because I'm hurting an industry that I enjoy.

 

There is no justification for piracy. You do not need games to survive, so if you can't afford it, you go without. It is immature and selfish to pirate, accept that.

[Majek]

Even they have pirated OS, they just don't know it. :D

[RPGmasterBoo]

Empty moralizing leads to nowhere and anyone who says they never played a pirated game or used a pirated program is most likely lying. The only people who don't use them are the clueless users who use their pc for watching movies and playing solitaire.

 

Wow. So basically you are calling the people who don't rip off developers ignorant? You've got it backwards.

 

When I was young and dumb I though only about myself. In High School I went to a FTP sites and downloaded games. When I grew up I realized that not only is it morally wrong, it is also counter productive, because I'm hurting an industry that I enjoy.

 

There is no justification for piracy. You do not need games to survive, so if you can't afford it, you go without. It is immature and selfish to pirate, accept that.

 

How very convenient that you stopped pirating games at the point when essentially you have the least amount of time to devote to them.

 

The industry has been growing since forever, piracy doesn't hurt it one bit. If it did it would have collapsed long ago. Piracy is nothing more than a bogeyman for the corporate people who cant stand not getting that 5% more profit. When you give me one developer that went bankrupt over piracy and not over releasing a string of crap games, I'll agree with your point.

Edited September 13, 2009 by RPGmasterBoo

[Nepenthe]

How very convenient that you stopped pirating games when essentially you have the least amount of time to devote to them.

 

The industry has been growing since forever, piracy doesn't hurt it one bit. If it did it would have collapsed long ago.

 

Bull****. It warps the whole price structure of the business.

 

But it's no surprise, criminals are able to create fantastic constructions to validate their crimes, it's particularly easy when it's 'victimless' like copyright violation (or you can rationalise it into being victimless, like our amigo did here).

[Hurlshort]

RPGMasterBoo, did you happen to notice this is a game developer's message board? You might not want to defending piracy here, it's like arguing for counterfeiting money while in line at the bank.

[Deadly_Nightshade]

Can you provide any proof of this?

 

Here's some quotes, that's all I can give you for now as the forum does not like members posting certain information, such as the cracking groups' names, and thus linking directly might cause a problem.

 

From a Mirror's Edge crackfix NFO:

"A [secuROM] trigger causing the gameplay to slow down during the fourth level, resulted in an unplayable game. This crackfix resolves the problem."

 

The initial releases of the first Mirror's Edge crack were plagued as was, as stated below, some non-pirating users.

 

From a gaming blog that covers Mirror's Edge issues:

"Several people have reported running into random gameplay slowdowns. For example in some locations Faith will begin to move very slowly so that jumping, crouching or performing certain other actions become impossible (i.e. - on a rooftop in Chapter 4 and near the fence in Chapter 3). This looks very much like a SecuROM trigger."

 

From a Mass Effect crackfix NFO:

"...This crack works 100%! Doors open, game sequences between flights to other systems, you can get aboard your ship with no problems, and so on and so forth..."

 

Most, if not all, of the issues described above were SecuROM triggers and most have affected non-cracked games - although, seeing as the majority are easy to fix, many people just think that it's a "normal" bug. Now this has led to some issues, as described by another poster, when members of the BioWare forums think they have found a pirate in their midst but really, in fact, only have an innocent who was rather unlucky - with the ironic part being that the often were posting in a part of the board that only registered members could access, in other words they had already proved that they had a legal, legitimate copy.

 

 

From another Mass Effect crackfix NFO:

"This is a working crack for the game. This fixes the galaxy map hanging issue, as well as the end-game crash. Both [EDITED] and [EDITED] versions have been nuked."

 

As above, this was a re-release due to triggers that were included. In fact, this is the very error that my Steam version had until I uninstalled it an reinstalled it (if you require confirmation that I do in fact own both a DVD and Steam version Gorth has seen evidence of this and can back this up).

[Purkake]

I like where this is going.

 

The internet is (mostly) anonymous, each one of us could be whatever, blaming each other and then defending yourselves holds no meaning or purpose.

[Guest Slinky]

As above, this was a re-release due to triggers that were included. In fact, this is the very error that my Steam version had until I uninstalled it an reinstalled it (if you require confirmation that I do in fact own both a DVD and Steam version Gorth has seen evidence of this and can back this up).

This was the only knowledge I needed. So there is hidden triggers and they could affect legal copys. That's just great. I'm not going to start boycott securom, nor pirate games that use them, but I sure as hell am not going to defend securom anymore.

Edited September 13, 2009 by Slinky

[Hurlshort]

The internet isn't any more anonymous than the real world. You can make the personal choice to be a good person in both spheres. It has plenty of meaning to the individual, and it shines through to others.

 

Maybe we should move this top WoT. Should we take a poll on whether piracy is ok or not?

[Purkake]

The internet isn't any more anonymous than the real world. You can make the personal choice to be a good person in both spheres. It has plenty of meaning to the individual, and it shines through to others.

 

Maybe we should move this top WoT. Should we take a poll on whether piracy is ok or not?

 

What I'm saying is that it is easy to create whatever persona for yourself. You can't really prove anything so accusing people is empty and meaningless.

 

How about a poll about whether murder is ok or not? What good would a poll do?