Dalai wrote:Great idea for Ubihole (patent pending
) - declare all users experiencing game crashes pirates with a lot of viruses and "wrong" interfering applications and stop wasting resources on patching.
As a somewhat unrelated side comment... when Titan Quest was designed, one of the starting quests upon leaving the cave had an anti-piracy security check attached. If you pirated the game and attempted to start that mission, the game would crash to the desktop as part of the intended security. This was a double edged sword, of course; the pirated versions came out before the game did, and the game was bombarded with complaints about bad programming and massive crashing without even being released yet. One of the producers of ILE came out and said, "Hey, that's a pirated copy, the crash was designed!" but it did little good. Also, Titan Quest = awesome game.
They're not the only company who did that, either. Something similar exists with Dominions 3, although instead of crashing, it makes the game unplayable by changing the game itself for pirates. Arkham Aslyum turns you into a pathetic Batman who can't use his cape. I personally really like this strategy of copy protection, since it's not hardware related, doesn't effect legit purchasers, and is relatively simple to prove. But... that's pure opinion, and I know there are valid and strong arguments against.
If you're interested:
http://www.cracked.com/article_19162_6- ... rates.html