Protect us from Evil

[{White_Knight}]

This is a call to boycot any new games or publishers that opt for using the Starforce 3 encryption on their new products. For those of you that havent heard of Starforce 3 it works by checking the DVD/CD at startup and during the lifetime of your game can check the security credentials at anytime during gameplay. This insidious system will through you out of the game completely if the security does not match up even though it let you in initially.

For those of us who play games at work this is the real bug bear, you can't run it from a backup disk even if you have an original copy at home, you cannot create a disk image on your work machine using the original disk, and currently it cannot be broken using a no-cd patch.

Protection systems like this are designed to protect the intellectual property rights of developers which is fine but systems like Starforce 3 appear to be designed to cause as much frustration and misery to the gamer as possible. This over-the-top security system does at one level combat piracy but it also makes it more of challenge, a greater temptation to try and break it. Surely companies who make Firewall, Antivirus Software need for example hacking to continue so they can exist ? In the same way as arms dealers need wars to sell guns.

Don't get me wrong I am not justifing or legitimising piracy I just think that protection systems on software need to be far more transparent and less intrusive. DVD and CD checks are a major annoyance and pain it is illogical to expect that each
gamer with 20 or 30 games installed on their PC has to swap back and forth DVD/CD's from one drive. Until the industry finds a way that lets users run games from the HDD legitimately gamers will be going back to backup cd sites.

[Hasse]

I'm in but there is just one prob. How do I know witch games that use Starforce 3

[KamisoriX]

when you install the game.
I got no problem with SF3, and all games with it ran fine so far. but i still don't get any SF3 ga,es anymore because, like STEAM, you have to install an external prg on your PC that does nothing to the game and constantly wants connection to the i net, for what purpose ever. SF3 is actually a reason why warezing makes its point. you can buy the game and have a unwanted prg on your sys that gives alot of folks mad probs to sys crashdown or you dl it and have no SF3 and no trouble at all.