Blizzard Patches No-CD Support Into Warcraft III

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."

StarCraft

[owlman17]

Not just WarCraft, also SC1 (Original and BW) patch version 1.15.2

- patch 1.15.2
    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".

Great with WINE

[ArcherB]

The benefit to No-CD patches is that it makes it so much easier to play games under WINE on Linux. While I never had an issue with War3, other newer games give me grief such as Supreme Commander and C&C3. Both of these require a No-CD hack to run as neither will recognize the DVD sitting in the drive. (Yes, I do have the CD mapped to WINE D: drive) Removing the CD-In-The-Drive requirement would really take many of the barriers to playing these games under WINE and would open up that 1% of the market that are Linux users!

Good

[MBCook]

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.

Re:Please please please be a trend

[king-manic]

It will only (maybe) become a pattern in games where you have to pay to play. Why does Blizzard care if you buy the game for $15 if they're getting their $15/mo from you?

WOW was always no CD. Warcraft 3 isn't WOW. This implemented this on a $40 1 shot game with no reoccurring charges to access bnet.

Re:Honestly, who cares?

[peragrin]

Gaming on OSX (enjoy the laugh for the moment) has one advantage very few of the CD checkers check the actual hardware only the mount point for required data. I can create a disk image of the cd in question and mount that before playing. It does take up some storage space but generally you only need one disc in particular in a multi disc set.

Re:Never really understood the CD check

[TheThiefMaster]

You obviously haven't played any recent games this way.

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.

Re:CD checks for online games

[nuzak]

> Not only must you have a internet connection just to play the single-player game

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.

Re:Please please please be a trend

[nexex]

UT III has never required it.

Re:CD checks for online games

[KDR_11k]

Steam allows you to unregister a key and sell it to someone else but you have to pay Valve to do that.

Re:Honestly, who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.alcohol-soft.com/ [alcohol-soft.com]
(And I'm sure there are Free solutions out there that do the same thing, I just prefer this setup as it's what I'm used too)

1) install Alcohol 120
2) create a 'fake' "cd-rom"
3) "Rip" Reader Rabbit to an ISO on sons Hard Drive
4) "Mount/Insert" the "ISO/CD" on your new "CD-Rom". Set A120 to Auto-Remount (reloads "CD" on computer reboot)
5) Put Reader Rabbit CD back in its safe case, never to be touched again.
6) repeat process for any other program that 'requires' CD.
7) ...
8) PROFIT!!!