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I bought Medieval II Total War Gold retail after having the Vanilla on Steam (wanted a boxed collection). Got home installed the game and then when I tried to run the game it locked me out... I tried reinstalling 6 or so times with no luck and couldn't play the game I paid for. I did a little research on the little securom message I got and found the problem was thanks to it. I tryed a crack only to find out my install was somehow corrupted and I couldn't play it anyways...
After that I am not buying any game with securom, activations, games for windows live, and starforce. Not letting a company telling me what I can and can't do when I am well within my rights to play and even copy the game I PAID FOR.
Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones
A couple of months ago I suddenly experienced a sudden strike of nostalgia that made me want play PoP:TTT again on my brand new Acer Predator, just to see how it was on max details.
The game worked fine on my old windows XP computer and there were no patches out, so i assumed there were no compatibility problems.
I install the game, launch it and it crashes my PC, causing it to restart. Too bad, i think, maybe it's not compatible, and i plan to uninstall it as soon as my computer boots up.
When it loads back up, i'm welcomed by the fucking Blue Screen of Death, which says that my windows files are corrupted!
Well thanks a whole bunch Ubisoft!
Luckily i had a restore point i was able to use, or else i would have had to install windows from scratch.
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Grog: Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones
A couple of months ago I suddenly experienced a sudden strike of nostalgia that made me want play PoP:TTT again on my brand new Acer Predator, just to see how it was on max details.
The game worked fine on my old windows XP computer and there were no patches out, so i assumed there were no compatibility problems.
I install the game, launch it and it crashes my PC, causing it to restart. Too bad, i think, maybe it's not compatible, and i plan to uninstall it as soon as my computer boots up.
When it loads back up, i'm welcomed by the fucking Blue Screen of Death, which says that my windows files are corrupted!
Well thanks a whole bunch Ubisoft!
Luckily i had a restore point i was able to use, or else i would have had to install windows from scratch.

That's when you go into Safe Mode and uninstall the offending program. That happened to me on my WIn7 upgrade installation. Turns out it did not like an older .sys file from an anti spyware program. Once I uninstalled it and reinstalled the updated version the problem went away...
My wife bought the Fighter's Stronghold DLC for Oblivion (let's stick to the subject of the thread here please) for her XP machine. I couldn't even buy it because of the security wrapper used by whoever runs the Oblvionstore won't work in Vista.
She tried to install the DLC several times, but the installation always failed. After doing some research, she did a "clean boot" of her system (so as not to upset the security wrapper) and was able to get the installation to proceed. It was then that the program informed her that she had exhausted her activation limit. This was the first we had seen about any limit.
Months later, I read about a universal extractor. I bought the DLC for my machine and pulled the files directly out of the wrapper. They don't need to be installed, just copied into the directory anyway.
Is there anyone as fucking awesome as I am who has NEVER been burned by DRM?
Steam, StarForce, Games For Windows Live, Direct2Drive... I'm just impervious.
Although I did once buy a box copy of Painkiller: Black Edition that came with no CD key inside. I emailed the company with photos of my receipts, box, and discs but they never responded. So I resorted to a serial keygen but was deprived of online multiplayer.
What do you DRM haters have to say to that?
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fuNGoo: Is there anyone as fucking awesome as I am who has NEVER been burned by DRM?
Steam, StarForce, Games For Windows Live, Direct2Drive... I'm just impervious.
Although I did once buy a box copy of Painkiller: Black Edition that came with no CD key inside. I emailed the company with photos of my receipts, box, and discs but they never responded. So I resorted to a serial keygen but was deprived of online multiplayer.
What do you DRM haters have to say to that?

Looks like you got burned by the serial number DRM because you couldn't play in MP?
Oh lets see, the ones I can remember straigt up are:
Starforce
Scrapland deciding I no longer had an original disc.
Still life mucking up audio ripping and burning
SecuROM
Refusing to work with ProcessExplorer (an official MS tool)
Cusom Stuff
Various games no longer working since there are no DOS drivers for the optical device or its not device D.
Post edited February 17, 2009 by jema
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fuNGoo: Is there anyone as fucking awesome as I am who has NEVER been burned by DRM?
Steam, StarForce, Games For Windows Live, Direct2Drive... I'm just impervious.
Although I did once buy a box copy of Painkiller: Black Edition that came with no CD key inside. I emailed the company with photos of my receipts, box, and discs but they never responded. So I resorted to a serial keygen but was deprived of online multiplayer.
What do you DRM haters have to say to that?

We say dont feed the retarded... excuse me... "mentally challenged" troll.
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JudasIscariot: Looks like you got burned by the serial number DRM because you couldn't play in MP?

Well, that doesn't count since the OP specifically was requesting issues unrelated to CD swapping or entering in serials. I assumed he was meaning DRM issues because of third party software or digital delivery channels. My point was that any method of protecting digital medium has its own flaws and limitations.
But I'm just a little sick of hearing people and their exaggerations of the limitations that DRM schemes place on their enjoyment of entertainment media. It's kind of like saying, "Hey, I pay my taxes and I'm an honest person, so I should be able to enter in a public building at all hours of the day without being stopped." People have a reasonable right to be suspicious if you walk in and out of city hall all day.
In a perfect world, we could expect people to have complete freedom to do as they please with software they've acquired and expect that they'll purchases licenses for each copy they install on a computer. But that's not going to happen, and believe it or not, the gaming industry exists for making money.
I'm really curious on what the people that complain so much have as a solution to how companies can protect their products through other means.
I've had minimal issues with DRM myself, occasional problems with OFP where FADE would trigger for no reason, a handful of disc checks failing for no reason (all solved by cracks), one windows activation I had to ring up about (I'd reinstalled the same OS 3 times in one day because I was experimenting with install options)
A friend of mine is currently having problems with the TAGES protection in X3 The Terran Conflict, his DVD drive has started being randomly deactivated & requires a reboot to fix. It may well be a problem wih the physical drive but the timing would be quite a coincidence
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fuNGoo: But I'm just a little sick of hearing people and their exaggerations of the limitations that DRM schemes place on their enjoyment of entertainment media. It's kind of like saying, "Hey, I pay my taxes and I'm an honest person, so I should be able to enter in a public building at all hours of the day without being stopped." People have a reasonable right to be suspicious if you walk in and out of city hall all day.

Thats not really the best comparison, the city hall is owned by people other than yourself and is a place of business where confidential information is stored
Post edited February 17, 2009 by Aliasalpha
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Aliasalpha: Thats not really the best comparison, the city hall is owned by people other than yourself and is a place of business where confidential information is stored

Well say... the public library. My point being that despite what people may think, I don't really consider the digital works that are distributed to consumers to be owned by the consumer. They have the right to use the software according to whatever the license they've purchased says. I guess people are complaining about the extent of the limitations that licenses have been imposing upon the consumer recently.
Personally, I'm just saying that it's not as bad as people are crying about. On the other hand, it's important that people push back so companies won't impose ever stricter and intrusive restrictions. However, making every other thread complaining about DRM is probably not the most intelligible or effective way of making your complaints heard to the people making the decisions.
Or maybe it is...
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fuNGoo: Well say... the public library. My point being that despite what people may think, I don't really consider the digital works that are distributed to consumers to be owned by the consumer. They have the right to use the software according to whatever the license they've purchased says. I guess people are complaining about the extent of the limitations that licenses have been imposing upon the consumer recently.

And I don't buy a license/rent the digital products I buy. I buy a product like any other physical item I can buy and do what ever I want with it (besides distribtuing copies of it). I'll wipe my ass with their license and eulas as they are not explained to me with my laywyer present at time of the purchase and I sign no contract. At time of purchase the seller forfeits all right except selling/distribution of copies to me. Period.
I had a DVD-RW drive die under suspicious circumstances, and while I don't know for certain whether DRM is to blame, given the bits of evidence I've collected it is the most likely culprit. To elaborate:
In fall of 2005 I purchased a new computer, complete with a Lightscribe DVD-RW drive. Since I did a fair amount of artwork (not as much nowadays, for various reasons), I thought it'd be neat to make backup discs with custom art, and with a child on the way writing DVDs seemed like the ideal method for sharing digital photos with relatives down the road. Once the computer arrived, I transferred a good chunk of my old computer's contents over the home network to the new machine, and installed a couple of my games -- Neverwinter Nights and RollerCoaster Tycoon (the original, not 2 or 3), to be specific. My husband purchased and installed Age of Empires 3, since his own computer was too old to run it. Everything was great...for a little while.
Then the drive started failing to recognize discs. It wouldn't show them blank, it would show NOTHING in the drive. And the drive itself became far less responsive, refusing to open. This steadily worsened over time, until it finally died for good about a year later. Just outside of warranty, too.
Then I found out about SecuRom, Starforce, and other malign DRM programs. My husband said that the details of my drive's decline definitely sounded like it was being fubared by cranky DRM -- and the most likely culprits were NWN and AoE3.
I've found out AoE3 has SmartE on it, but preliminary searches don't yield any information about problems caused by it. I think Neverwinter Nights -- and the SecuRom protection on it -- killed my drive*.
So congratulations, DRM. You destroyed the hardware of a then-23 year old mom who used her drive for -- *gasp!* -- backup of self-created content. And would have used it to share collections of pictures of her family with relatives, if it wasn't for your meddling. Give yourself a gold star, you should feel so proud.
I did replace the Lightscribe drive with another. So far, no problems, but so far I have also avoided running those games. All my gaming nowadays is console, handheld, or DRM-free PC. After all, next time it might not be my Lightscribe drive that gets ruined. As they say...once bitten, twice ready and waiting with a flamethrower.
___
*I know the protection has since been patched out, but it was still there in 2005.
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Petrell: And I don't buy a license/rent the digital products I buy. I buy a product like any other physical item I can buy and do what ever I want with it (besides distribtuing copies of it). I'll wipe my ass with their license and eulas as they are not explained to me with my laywyer present at time of the purchase and I sign no contract. At time of purchase the seller forfeits all right except selling/distribution of copies to me. Period.

That's right, you can do whatever you want with it. That's also why the sellers can do whatever they want with their product when sell it.
I think people just focus way too much these issues instead of just being smart and circumventing the restrictions through less than ethical means if you care so much. Like I've said, if it doesn't interfere with my enjoyment of the media then it's all good. So far, I think DRM hasn't had a major impact to the entertainment value of most products I've chosen to purchase.
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fuNGoo: My point being that despite what people may think, I don't really consider the digital works that are distributed to consumers to be owned by the consumer. They have the right to use the software according to whatever the license they've purchased says. I guess people are complaining about the extent of the limitations that licenses have been imposing upon the consumer recently.

Actually, FuNGoo, I agree with you. The software, under law, does not belong to me.
But I still like having a disc because I don't want anyone else to control my continued access.
And I simply refuse to purchase software that contains DRM that I consider unreasonable. I don't crack it or pirate games. Sure, I might not have an actual problem with my machine because of a certain game, but I simply do without rather than support a business model that I find repugnant. And I don't miss those games. There are many more I still have to play.