I'd think a good idea to way to keep the hackers away is to calculate a checksum for the exe, and if it fails, remove a cruicial item from the game which can only been encountered later in the game. The hacker thinks that he got it broken, but when the poor pirates run the game, they can never complete it...

Starforce stank majorly. Rootkits == bad. Oh, and copright infringement == stealing in my opinion

I was referring to the act of paying for a pirated copy, not the StarForce 'virus'.

Like how?

As to WiseGuy's comments, is the shareware industry overpriced? I always thought $5 for a shareware game (unless it's really something special) would be more a realistic price.

Did you know that despite having no copy protection at all (aside from a simple DVD check that was immediately cracked), Oblivion is one of the best selling PC games of all time?

Well if that's the reason, then how come when in Tribes 2 they added copy protection, they game went on to sell over a million copies?

In any case you admit there is a DVD check. So it did have copy protection. So what is your point? Tribes didn't even have that.

Also I had another look. Xbox 360 Sales outsold their PC counterpart of Oblivion 2:1. The Xbox 360 has fairly efficient copy protection I'd say wouldn't you? So basically what you've managed to prove is the copy protected game sells better, excellent job. I couldn't have found a better example :p

Er.. right. Ok.

Can I ask exactly what you have been smoking? Becase I want a couple of hectograms of it.
One is a goddamned rootkit that installs itself behind the user's back, with no option to uninstall it (the uninstaller that exists now (which doesn't ship with the "product", BTW) wasn't there from the beginning - and even it doesn't remove all traces of it. Not to mention that it can't restore a drive fucked by Starforce). The other is a legitimate driver that's completely upfront on what it does, and can be happily uninstalled or deactivated.

Strange. Because it sounded just like you just spent two straw menny paragraphs doing just that.

Oh, and three words: Galactic Civilizations II. Did quite well. Shipped with absolutely no copy protection whatsoever - a fact that was announced ahead of time.

Really, so when you buy a copy protected game it doesn't say anywhere on the box "this game has copy protection that may interfere with some cd/dvd software" or the like? I'm sure it does, hardly behind you back.

And no it's not a "rootkit" what does it do that's so "rootkit"? It installs ring 0 drivers just as daemon tools, admittedly you might not like it's behavior as much as the latter, but it doesn't appear out of nowhere. And you also admit there is a removal tool, if it was available at launch or not is a moot point, you can remove it.

Also if it's so behind your back how come I've never had it installed on my machine? Second question, have you installed Starforce on your machine and had it break something?

Also yes you can fix a drive thats been so called "fucked by" it doesn't break the drive, windows does. I've had alcohol actually do the same effect that Starforce does, interestingly enough. Admittedly it's not easy for the average user, but keep in mind Windows XP changes the drives settings, not Starforce.

I've had identical behavior from my DVD drive and I can fix it easily as I've had it revert to non DMA access numerous times, and I don't have Starforce on my machine.

Well if you've been following the thread the game had been linked to several posts back, and the relation between them and Starforce.

Do you know how most of those people heard of the game? Starforce by pointing a link to their torrent gave them better promotion then any amount of marketing they could have done. In fact the day AFTER the torrent link was posted they announced that there was a sudden increase in demand.

I know some people who played it for a week or two, but really just bought it to piss off Starforce. And it was hardly a top selling game,

Starforce should go into marketing, offer to point to a torrent of a companies choice for a million. It would be very profitable for both sides.

I didn't say I'd pay the pirate for the game itself. I'd pay for the work done cracking the game.
I may then buy the game itself once the copy protection has ben removed from the legal version.

As for the tribes game, I don't think lack of copy protection is the reason it didn't sell well. They just blame it because they sucked at marketing, and maybe the game wasn't worth the money?

What makes it a "rootkit" and what makes it different from the Daemon Tools driver is that Starforce is designed to do copyright protection, which is achieved by allowing ring 3 (user) code to get ring 0 (kernel) privileges through SF. Which means that code using the Starforce interface can do anything it likes to the system.

First question: perhaps you didn't install any non-pirated game that was copy-protected with Starforce? Ain't rocket science.

Second question: I have. It was Freedom Force vs The Third Reich which I have won in a contest. After installing it, two things happenned: my virtual DVD drives stopped working at all, and if that wasn't annoying enough, my DVD started recognizing some DVD discs as CD-RW. Not fun. After uninstalling the game and removing Starforce, the latter problem subsided, while the former stayed. Reinstalling Daemon Tools made everything work again. The game was fun though, so I played a pirated version despite owning a perfectly legal one.

Which is very different from buying a cracked game. With a cracked game, removing the copy protection from your copy wouldn't be as much of an issue, if you don't distribute it.

If they sucked at marketing why was everyone playing it? If the game wasn't worth the money why was everyone playing it?

The game was extremely popular. This is rampant piracy, more people playing the game online then there were copies sold. Marketing had nothing to do with is since everyone was playing, and why would the game not be worth paying for if you are playing it all the time?

Second, the sequel was more or less the same game sold extremely well. It just added better graphics and copy protection. Since the graphics more or less had to do with the time it was released, I highly doubt that was the reason for the drastic jump in sales.

So basically Starforce is a rootkit because you don't like what it does. Great argument. (The ring 0 from 3 seems to be more of an expliot then an intentional feature. So the coders who write the software suck. There have been viruses that have taken advantage of Nortan Antivirus to do the same I'm sure, is Norton a Rootkit? Let's sue them too!)

I know for a fact all Ubisoft games here (Rainbow 6, Splinter Cell) tell you on the box that it's going to interfere with your virtual drives or what not and may not run on some cd/dvd drives.

As does daemon tools. Heck it even hides from Rootkit Detector.

So what did it break?

Actually I like to argue. Debates are no fun when everyone is on the same side

If you'd like, can some give me the name of a cheap game($5) that comes with high level Starforce protection? I'll install it on my machine and post a log of the results. We'll see what happens.