I've been Starforced!

:shock:

Look at what I found on my system -

I think it may have been installed with my X2 The Threat. I am not sure though.

There should be a notice given when ever this shit installs. like

“OH MY GOD WE’RE ABOUT TO INSTALL THIS ANTI-PIRACY STUFF ON YOUR PC YOU NEED IT KTHX!!!”

Until then - that shit’s like virus/spyware and will promplty be removed.

(hooray for MSPaint!)

you know, that guy’s like, um, wumpus, or something.

Fuck Starforce.

Or you could boycott it

Whoever runs that website should expand on the whole “why boycott starforce” thing. Personally, I’m not real clear on the problems it causes.

The problem, of course, is that since the copy-protection comes in the form of a device driver, the effects of Starforce vary greatly depending on the individual computer.

That means reports of the software using up inordinate amount of computing cycles, CD drive read-times lengthening, problems reading and writing CD-Rs, and device conflicts, particularly with external USB drives, that can cause serious corruption in some cases, all tend to be discounted by those lucky enough not to have encountered any noticeable problems.

Some such as Dave Long like to dismiss such complaints as nothing more than nonsense from whining game pirates, but most of us have encountered someone that has had a serious problem develop because of a faulty device driver written for a piece of hardware that we shouldn’t discount these complaints about a device driver written for a game that is designed to involve itself heavily in the I/O output of harddrives and CD/DVD drives.

Anyone who’s experienced problems with the VIA 4in1 drivers, particularly in the IDE-related portions, knows exactly what problems having game copy protection in the form of a device driver involved with all your I/O can have.

Time for a little anecdote.

A friend of mine has a Playstation 2, and for a long while that was all he gamed on, but a while ago he got hold of a used computer that was fast enough for some gaming. He really don’t know a lot about computers, and I’m the one he calls whenever there’s problems with it.

Then some months ago he bought his first game for the PC, “Cycling Manager 3”, since he is a bit of a cycling fan, and it didn’t take long from the moment he bought it, and until he called me, asking for help at getting it to run.

I didn’t know anything about Starforce at the time, but quickly suspected that it might be some kind of copy protection that was causing the trouble, since the game seemed to be unable to recognize the CD most of the time. I guess the problem must have been the relatively weird SCSI CD-drive my friend had in his comp. After making sure the game CD worked by installing it on my comp, my friend brought over his fathers external USB CD-drive, but for some reason (I guess I know the reason now), we couldn’t get the drive to work on his computer at all. Later he actually got hold of another CD-Rom from his father and we installed it in his comp, but then it started acting really weird, with all sort of weird device driver conflicts between his drives and HDs, that made his whole system so unstable, that in the end, I had to do a complete reinstall of his OS.

All in all we both wasted a whole lot of hours on his comp, ending up doing several reinstalls, before having to just forget about the SCSI CD-drive and leave that out completely. After that we finally managed to get the game to run, and the computer to behave, at the same time.

At that point his comment was, “I guess I’ll stick to the Playstation from now on, I’ll certainly never ever buy a game for the PC again”.

And who the hell can blame him?

In the end, it’s not pirates ruining PC gaming, it’s the invasive copy “protection.”

Greed kills the golden egg? Until the cycle goes 'round, anyhow.

The last thing I need is for my RCA Lyra Jukebox to get nuked because of some game’s copy protection. The 40GB MP3 player works as a USB harddrive and probably wouldn’t take well to interaction with starforce.

With, well, absolutely no proof, both my and my girlfriend’s Dell mp3 players have stopped working properly. It doesn’t seem like a hardware problem.

And yes, I have had Starforce games installed recently.

I’m 99% sure it hog-fucked my USB Drive, as I complained about in the other Starforce thread. I have no problem with copy protection per se, but when it destroys your peripherals, that is a serious freaking problem.

Thankfully I haven’t installed any Starforce games so far…do they hose iPods (I use a firewire cable, not USB) as badly as they seem to kill other devices?

It’s pretty random whether they hose anything, but they have the capacity to. Best bet is to stay far, far away.

These data-free anecdotes trump the “piracy is killing PC gaming” anecdotes!

Software pirates have never, to my knowledge, cost me over $100 in hardware failure.

These data-free anecdotes trump the “piracy is killing PC gaming” anecdotes![/quote]

My anecdote is larger than your anecdote! :wink: