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."

Never really understood the CD check

[a whoabot]

I never really understood the CD check. I mean, why can't the "signature" of a CD being present just be emulated? And that's indeed what all the pirated game downloads come with. I don't think I've seen a game where you actually have to have to actual game CD in order to play it: an image of the disc could be mounted using some program and the game played thinking that it is the actual CD.

if only

[dtml-try MyNick]

If only other developers would spend about 10% of Blizzards amount of support to their games I'd be spending a shitload more money on purchasing new games.

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 could argue that this patch is long overdue, but the fact that they even spend some resources on it is something to be hailed.

Re:Honestly, who cares?

[eln]

I care. These days, a consumer can reasonably have a terabyte of storage on his PC. With that kind of storage, I should be able to have hundreds of games sitting on my hard drive waiting to be played on demand. However, because of this stupid "CD required" garbage, I have to maintain a stack of CDs that have no purpose other than to verify I actually bought the game (never mind that in most cases, I also have to enter a license key during the install phase anyway).

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.

Stardock

[Hemogoblin]

All of the Stardock [stardock.com] games have had this for awhile. Galatic Civilizations II was awesome, and apparently the new Sins of a Solar Empire [sinsofasolarempire.com] is awesome too. It's nice to not be treated like a criminal.

Re:Honestly, who cares?

[Tridus]

I care quite a lot when the game's check fails due to some weird SecuROM system that determines my drive isn't really a drive due to a bug.

Frequently patched out

[6350']

CD-check is just a really basic, broad-spectrum, anti-casual-pirating deal in most cases. It's become increasingly common to patch it out at some point in a game's lifecycle. You want to have it present during the bulk of your sales (ie, early on) but particularly with a game that has a significant online component (that is, vocal users), you also want to get rid of it sooner than later (of course, Blizzard is a special case, and mmo's are a different story).

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.

Massively multiplayer online cash cows

[tepples]

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.

You forgot a few words there: "you don't need a disk, you can do a much much better job emptying your customers' checking accounts as they authenticate with your server." ;-)