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Blizzard Patches No-CD Support Into Warcraft III
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Feb 07, 2008 11:33 AM
from the zug-zug-indeed dept.
from the zug-zug-indeed dept.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun notes that in Blizzard's never-ending quest for perfect balance, they've added a handy feature for still-dedicated Warcraft players. Players will no longer need to have the disc in the drive in order to conquer Azeroth. This kicks off a discussion by blogger Alec Meer about the role of copy protection and anti-piracy in PC gaming: "I don't need the Paint Shop Pro disc in my DVD drive whenever I want to butcher my holiday photos, after all. It was always doubly unnecessary for a game like W3, which also employs serial number checks if you want to play it online. Having the CD check as well seems like leaving a polite post-it note on the windscreen of a driver prone to double-parking. Don't bother. Just wheel-clamp the bastard. While there're still some reasons to be circumspect about online distribution systems, they do spell an end to miserably sorting through quivering towers of plastic discs or popup-heavy crack websites. This brave new world, in which the data already installed upon my hard drive is all that's required to play a game I've paid for, is one I know I want to live in."
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Was I the only one... (Score:2)
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I shall reinstall WC3 now. Half the reason I don't have it installed for the occasional game is because it needed a CD crack, and I get tired of having to track them down. (Though most of the games I play these days either have no disk (IE. Steam or Elicense), or have no protection (Stardock titles).
It's all very well bitching
Please please please be a trend (Score:5, Interesting)
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StarCraft (Score:5, Informative)
Feature Changes
- StarCraft and StarCraft: BroodWar no longer require the CD while playing the game. To play without the CD, please follow the following instructions:
Windows Users:
- Make sure you have "Hide extensions for known types" unchecked under Explorer Folder Options.
- If you own only StarCraft, copy "INSTALL.EXE" from the StarCraft CD to your StarCraft folder and rename it to "StarCraft.mpq".
- If you own StarCraft: Brood War, copy "INSTALL.EXE" from the StarCraft:Brood War CD to your StarCraft folder and rename it to "BroodWar.mpq".
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Patch notes (Score:4, Funny)
- The game no longer requires the CD to play.
Or as:
- The game no longer requires a no-CD crack to play.
Never really understood the CD check (Score:4, Insightful)
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I mean, why can't the "signature" of a CD being present just be emulated?
Some games do check for stuff like that - And it's sometimes a real PITA. I bought the latest C&C game a while back. It not only checks for the original media, it scans to see if you have any disc emulation running on your computer. I run DaemonTools all the time and find it enormously useful. So, when I tried to run the game, it would detect DaemonTools and refuse to run - Even with the original media in the drive. Even exiting wasn't enough - it would detect the driver. It took hours of time an
Re:Never really understood the CD check (Score:5, Informative)
One form of copy protection which is difficult to avoid involves modifying the disk to have two sectors with the same sector number. When seeking to that sector number from one direction, the drive will read one sector, when seeking from the other it will read the other (or something along those lines). This kind of disk can't be copied just by copying the files, because only one of the duplicate sectors will be copied. It can't even be got around by copying the entire disk to another, because CD-R and DVD-R (+/- and RW variants) all have the sector numbers pre-written.
However there hasn't yet been a form of copy protection that couldn't be circumvented by removing the copy-protection code from the executable.
Parent
CD checks for online games (Score:2)
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You need the connection to activate it. Once that's done, you can play offline as much as you damn well please.
Killing the resale market isn't so great though. But I'm still sick of having to keep track of a stack of lexan dongles.
Great with WINE (Score:5, Informative)
Good (Score:5, Informative)
They annoy me to no end. It was one thing to keep the disc in the drive back when the data had to be pulled off (I wouldn't want to install Wing Commander 4 and it's 6+ CDs on my hard drive back then). Recently, this has been driving me nuts though. Valve has done such a good job with Steam, that it makes the problem even more obvious.
I bought Sam & Max Season One in the retail box, and it uses copy protection. I use a Mac and the game isn't available for my platform, so I have to play the episodes in Windows. I can't use Parallels because the copy protection thinks I'm using a copied disc. I can't use a disc image for the same reason. I can't play it under OS X. I have to boot into Windows. That takes a long time to shutdown OS X, start Windows, start the game, check the CD, then get into it. It's an amazing pain.
Sam & Max is not an intensive game at all. Even with the lowered performance of 3D stuff in Parallels, it should work fine. I understand Half-Life 2 not running well (it likes a beefy system), but there is no good reason I shouldn't be able to play Sam & Max that way.
But I paid for the physical media, because I prefer that. And because of that, I get copy protection. I'm seriously considering not playing Season Two at this point.
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if only (Score:2, Insightful)
WCIII is almost 6 years old now, and still Blizzard looks for ways to improve the experience.
This dedication to strive for perfection is the sole reason I have every single game they released sitting on my shelf.
Alternatively, this is also the reason I have only one EA game sitting on that same shelf. I got fooled once, won't happen twice.
You c
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You could also argue that if WoW hadn't taken off, they'd be a much poorer brand without the resources to continue to tweak its niche game years after it was released. The question is, does success lead to dedication, or does dedication lead to success?
They had this dedication before WOW. Diablo ii, Starcraft, War 3, War 2 all had patches long after other companies would have abandoned them; and those patches were as often to fix play issues as to squash bugs introduced by the last patch. To put in perspective, each have had around 10 patches except war 2 while most games top out at 3 and for most games those 3 patches were to fix critical issues. I know it's bought my loyalty. If i spend $60 on a blizzard game I know I'll be playing it 5 years down the
BFD... (Score:2)
What brave new world (Score:2, Funny)
BF2's CD check made me quit the game (Score:2)
what really annoys me.... (Score:2)
I don't care if it take 15% of the load time I don't want my disk space wasted and have been able to setup games under Linux+wine with links so that the games pull the data of the CD instead and they work perfectly fine.
Steam/Battle.net (Score:4, Interesting)
That really sucked when you didn't actually buy the game. Because it didn't come with a manual, you just copied a floppy.
Not another car analogy... (Score:2)
This car analogy is about as effective as show chains strapped onto a steering wheel. A CD check (even with stored images & Daemon Tools) is a major PITA because it happens all the time during a normal operation, unlike the boot which happens only once in a while and only after a major screw up on your part.
Another reason (Score:2)
This is great news (Score:2)
Maybe I'm just old school, but I keep coming back to it (and Starcraft to a lesser extent) even though I played since the beta program.
This certainly is going to do nothing but encour
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It's almost as if (Score:2)
Stardock (Score:4, Insightful)
So long overdue, it's painful (Score:4, Interesting)
My copy of Temple of Elemental Evil worked fine for the orignal release, and the first patch. The second patch to come out wasn't compatable with DirectX 9.0c, so it was pointless. Applying the third patch to fix the second patch made my CD fail its check. So, the game worked out of the box, and through the first patch, but the 2nd/3rd patch broke my CD? You've got to be kidding me! And SecureROM analyzed my data, and said that it was because I had Daemon Tools installed. So, I uninstalled that, re-ran their program, and they said I must have a copy of an orignal CD. Since it's an Atari game that isn't being supported any longer, I can't get a new CD from the company.
Heck, my current copy of Hellgate: London acts up in single player mode (which requires the DVD to be in the drive. Multiplayer does not, as it should be.) Half the time I have to reboot my system, because SafeDisc doesn't recognize the DVD being in the drive. It spins, then stops and hangs. It's even told me that my OS isn't high enough, and I need to upgrade to Windows 98SE or 2000. I have XP installed. Some of that was the multi-language support, which can be clicked off, but the bottom line is, the copy protection makes the game sometimes unplayable without a reboot.
With the way today's games are, with the zero-day release always having a fatal bug (I believe intentionally) that requires a patch to be downloaded, there is no real need for this. Very few if any gamer systems aren't internet connected, so just make a simple verification check go out on the serial number, and let them play. No connection or a failure of that check, and no game.
It's one of the reasons I play MMOs so much, even though it is often solo. No copy protection to annoy me, no CD/DVD to keep track of, and less clutter in/on my desk.
Frequently patched out (Score:4, Insightful)
Last game I worked on, we had the CD-check already removed for the 1.1 patch (which itself was completed before the game even hit the shelves), and we released it in less than two weeks from the date the game appeared on the shelves.
The easy to circumvent things like this really are just there to discourage casual copying amongst average Joe's. While of course this and pretty much anything else can be gotten around, the people who do, know how to do, or would make the effort to do, these kinds of things are a subset of the larger market. So, studios/publishers will add in some of the basic old school protections as a kind of first order protection.
These kinds of things are kind of annoying, but the idea is to not have a Tribes 1 experience (zero, and I mean *zero*, copy protection of any kind: you could literally drag-and-drop the install folder into ICQ, so to speak, and send the whole thing to your buddy). It was sad to see the sales-vs-players numbers for Tribes 1: seventy thousand copies sold with 350,000 players online has got to bring a tear to the eye.
You can always get around this... (Score:3, Interesting)
Back when I played a bunch of games that had the "CD in the drive" requirement, I got a product called Virtual CD. It allows you to create a set of virtual CD drives on your system, and mount images of the CDs you need on those drives. (You have to create the images by copying the CDs or DVDs first, of course, and store them on your hard drive.) This meant I could take my laptop anywhere without lugging around a bunch of discs and fiddling with them every time I wanted to run one of these programs that insisted on seeing its installation CD before it started. It was a bit of a hassle to configure Virtual CD so that it would automatically mount the appropriate CD when you double clicked on an application, but once I set it up, it worked flawlessly.
These days, I don't run much software that has this requirement, so I haven't used Virtual CD (http://www.virtualcd-online.com/ [virtualcd-online.com]) for a couple of years. But I'd highly recommend it if you do have this need.
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MMOs caught on to this secret early on - when the value your game offers is mostly or completely through online play, you don't need a disk, you can do a much much better job checking accounts as they authenticate with your server.
And consoles are being released with built in HDs riv
Re:Honestly, who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
Requiring a CD may not be a big deal if you only ever play one or two games, but if you're like me and have a varied taste in games, and may play even 5 or 10 different games in a week, having to switch around CDs is a major pain.
Parent
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Re:Disks on OSX (Score:3, Interesting)
Disk Utility -> Create Disk Image -> mount image -> play game.
I am looking at a 631MB
It's taken far too long for the gaming
Re:Honestly, who cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Honestly, who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Blizzard cares, they are looking to put forward some goodwill out for the benefit of players, and are sooner realizing that unmitigated piracy is not as rampant as the accountants are claiming(at least in terms of damaging their bottom line). Considering that the major draw for games nowadays is the online play, it's relatively trivial to track down who is a legitimate player and who isn't.
Back in the day when online gaming was the novelty, companies were trying to lock down who can play their game or not.
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I just read on an rss feed that Steam just broke the 15 million users barrier, and I believe Blizzard is looking for a peice of that cake. And if Blizzard is looking to widen their audience with regards to their other products, they are going to need market penetration.
Hm...interesting...they should make an online version of Warcraft... give the game to people for free or very cheap for a month, and just charge them for online play...yeah, Steam is definitely on to something here....
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Not if you play on a Nintendo console. Wii games usually take a few seconds to load at startup and then rarely have noticeable load times after that.
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