Starcraft II DRM

Due to the DRM now included in Starcraft II I will be boycotting it and any future Blizzard games until they smarten up. Also as information for those who may be unaware (I was until I e-mailed blizzard) that it is not just a one time activation online like they say. There is also a once every 30 day reactivation requirement meaning you must connect to battle.net at least once every 30 days in order to continueing playing. To me this is unacceptable and a complete disregard to our rights as peaple and gamers.

Again another game maker treating paying customers as criminals while the criminals are playing the game happily unrestricted. And yes the game was cracked by Reloaded the day of release.

Here is a quote from the e-mail with a blizz GM stating the 30 day reactivation.

"Greetings!

You would need to connect to the internet at least once every 30 days to re-authenticate your StarCraft II account in order to continue to player the game in offline mode, that is correct. StarCraft II requires an active internet connection to play. This is stated in the System Requirements on the retail box, as well as our online System Requirements. Without an active internet connection, you will not be able to log in to Battle.net to authenticate your copy of StarCraft II.

When in offline mode, you can save your games and those games will be saved locally on your computer. If you play while logged into battle.net, your autosave points in the campaign will be saved on our servers. When transfering to a new computer, there is always the option of simply moving the entire game folder to the new computer's Hard Drive in which case you won't lose your saved game.

We are committed to making StarCraft II as enjoyable as possible. We appreciate your feedback. I will forward your report to the appropriate people. While I cannot guarantee a response, I can assure you it will be read.

If you have any further technical questions or problems, please feel free to contact us at techsupport@blizzard.com

Farewell,

Game Master Aurilaquet
Customer Services
Blizzard Entertainment
www.blizzard.com/support"

I can not find this 30 day activation mentioned anywhere. To me this is deeply disturbing. Have they been hiding this information from us? I know many of the anti-DRM people that are pro Starcraft II would change there tune if they knew about the 30 day reactivation.

Just for fun I tried to install the game without an internet connection. Useing my buddies disc. The following is what happened the instant I clicked install from the autorun loader from the disc.

 

EA's still in business.

 

not a fan of DRM either, but since i'm buying SC2 for mostly online play, this isn't intrusive or disruptive for me. still, they should have a clear warning on the box that it requires an internet connection to install AND to re-authenticate every 30 days. i've gone months without playing games before (e.g. exam period) and i don't want to come back to my game and discover i can't play right away.

 

Exactly. Imagine you have it on your laptop and you take it with you somewhere that doesn't have open wifi access and you get the urge to play or show it off to your friends and uh-oh... its been longer then 30 days since you last logged in.

Seriously I don't know why theres not more people upset about this. The fact alone blizzard isnt open about the 30 day reactivation thing is disturbing enough to me.

 

Because it won't affect many people in the overall scheme of things. It is hard to get people motivated behind a cause just because something ****ty is going on. They generally need to be impacted in some way too. Add to that the fact you're talking about DRM on a video game, which would rank low on most peoples' list of things wrong with the world, and good luck trying to get anything more than the usual angry customer complaints you get with any product.

For the record I think copyright in general has run amuck and needs to be reigned in. It was appropriate pre-computers/internet/etc but in the modern technological age the game has changed.

 

There are plenty of people dissatisfied with DRM and the thing is about SC2 and why there isn't a huge uproar about it... no one knows!

The online activation is news to most people let alone the 30 day reactivation requirement. It's rediculous this has gone unknown to the customers buying the game!

The GM I was discussing with assures me that the development team has received my feedback. I am not sure how far it will go. I am trying to get this out there as much as possible so that people know. Hopefully Blizzard will rectify the situation. Bioshock got sort of a fix. It was little too late though I was too upset to care. I gave up on that game because of the DRM crap.

 

Probably because a lot of people don't know. I'm not sure if the 30-day reactivation thing is widely advertised.

 

It's not. I can't find reference to it at all anywhere. I only know about it through e-mails with GM's from Blizzard.

 

Don't quote the post right above yours please.

Honestly, I hate DRM. The constant internet connection in Assassin's Creed II put me off from buying it for quite some time. However, it's unfortunately a fact of life in PC gaming. You've got two choices. (A) Buy the game and deal with it or (B) Don't buy the game and deal with not having it.

 

DRM Broken?

I agree with you all, this is crazy for a company that says they hate DRM. That said, I have wifi at home and am okay with the 30 days rule. What I'm not okay with is that I can't seem to get authenticated for 30 days. I have to log in every time I load up the game on my computer (even with the disk in the drive) - which means I can't play when on the train or the plane or while away from home at all. That's broken DRM and I'm getting no where with SC support

 

For the first SC if you didn't log in once in a while your account got deleted.

 

Sorry, habbit.

And it is not a fact of life of PC Gaming. There are many developers/publishers that choose specifically (and advertise as such) that they dont use excessive DRM. Some use just a cd-check (Fallout 3 for example) and others dont use at all (World of Goo is one example). These games have sold extremely well despite not useing excessive DRM. If we keep pushing and spreading the knowledge then one day we could see DRM free gameing a reality.

Last year we won against DRM in music. No reason we cant keep pushing forward. This biggest obstacle now (in Blizzards case) is lack of informed people.

@nengard - Yours is the exact example I have been giving people! That is very upsetting to me that you can't play an awesome single player game from Blizzard while away from home. I used to love playing older RTS including starcraft on my laptop at school. DRM today (and now with Blizzard) prevent us from enjoying the gaves we love the way we want to. And when I talk to Blizz tech support about it they say its not DRM but rather a function of the fact SC2 is actually an MMORTS which is complete BS. Yes they have taken a differen't direction with the game but there is still a significant single player campaign that can and should be enjoyed offline. No reason at all for online activation for this and if they then do try and say it's for DRM purposes... the game was cracked and released within 3 hours of game release.

@bovineblitz - Yes your online account got deleted. That was battle.net, not SC. You could play the single player campaigns all you wanted offline without hinderence. And you still can, 12 years later. With SC2 the possibility is that you wont be able to pull out your copy and install it for some single player fun like you can now with SC. I refuse to waste my money on such garbage.

 

Since I was born 1990, I have pretty much grown up with the internet so I dont really know what things were like 'back in the day"

But this horrible outrageous behavior of blizzard.... doesnt seem like a very big deal to me to be honest. At worst I feel like this could be a minor annoyance if I were to be out somewhere with a computer but without internet access, but overall I cannot see myself getting into a riotous frenzy over something that seems so... inconsequential.

Music was different, it was expensive and the DRM made it a pain to share and whatnot. Here though, I can DL the game anywhere as long as I have my password and b.net ID which is convenient, I enjoy online play and have access to an internet connection almost everywhere I go (and when I go somewhere without internet, it is probably that way in design, like a vacation or a specific visit to say... my grandparents where I dont really NEED videogames.)

Anyway, thats just my thought on the subject, I dont know how things used to be pre-internet but if this is how they are without it then I cant really complain.

 

Or (C) You pirate the game and get to play it without intrusive DRM, which is really the biggest problem. The good thing about buying Blizzard games is that you get to play on their nice servers, also they make very good games so you want to support them, but in most cases you're really just paying to get some annoying copy-protection.

I've read this article that they do this because most of the sales happen the first weeks or even days and if the copy protection can even last until the release date they can really make a lot of money. Though when even Blizzard do this I've got this little theory it's not about saving money in the short run, it's really about easing people in to the fact (opinion, or whatever, law) that buying a game is really just buying a license to play it on your own computer.

I remember 10 years ago I never once considered I hadn't a bought a game to do whatever I wanted with it. Especially with a game like SC where you could play on many computers I just burned a couple of copies and had LANs with my friends. Now I think the game-companies want to shatter that this is morally right, then they need DRMs like this to constantly remind you that you don't own a license to do whatever you want with SC2.

 

The above is exactly true. DRM is to control the way we use our games. Blizzard is sugar coating it by saying you can play it on how ever many computers you want. What they wont come out and say is we dont want you distributing it and playing on lan's. Which seriously what's the big deal? Those people are going to pirate it anyway esspecially since they removed the lan function. People are just going to hack it and work around it so they can. They are not preventing anything.

They want you to tie your game (cd-key) to an account so you cant sell it. That is exactly what they are doing. The way they describe it is your not buying a game like you would have 10 years ago. You are buying a battle.net account in which to play the game on. They are trying to move to the computing cloud concept where the actual game data is stored on central servers.

I can sort of agree with some of what they are saying and the direction they are taking it... but the fact is there is a significant portion of Starcraft II that is single player and that part should not need online activation. I want to buy the game to play just that. I dont care about the battle.net crap. If I don't want to go online and tie my game to my battle.net account I should not have to.

For the record I like for the most part their new battle.net system where it ties everything together and to your own account (unlike before where the account would die off). It also prevents loseing cd-keys (I can't tell you how many times ive lost my diablo II cd-keys... and rebought the game...).

But it shouldn't be mandatory. The fact alone that it is an awesome service will make people want to buy the game legit. They do not need the mandatory activations. It serves zero purpose.

 

This is EXACTLY why DRM exists in the first place. Yes, DRM begats pirating, but pirating originally necessitated the need for DRM. It's a vicious cycle.

Because you don't. You own a license to play the game on Blizz approved servers. You do not own a distribution license with SC II.

 

Stopped readin there; too busy laughing.

You have the right to not buy their game.


Good luck with the boycott, I'll be on bnet with the other million people that bought the game.

 

Lol, this. Unless you were smart enough to open a new Battle.net account which doesn't include any of your personal information for StarCraft II, you're stuck with the game even if you don't like it. For those who won't ever be playing multi-player and bought it solely for the single player campaign, the price is quite steep considering you can't re-sell the game as you can't unlink it from your Bnet account.

The bad thing about the cloud model is eventually (probably sooner rather than later), Blizzard will probably try to introduce pay to play/subscription models ala-WoW or similar to how they have SC2 in other countries. Doing so right away would incite an outcry from the fanbase, particularly those who have grown up with the original SC and SC: BW which even featured spawn installs for multi-player LAN. That's probably the only reason why they didn't implement it in the US. However, if they can "train" people slowly to accept restrictions such as the ones currently in place, it'll be easier to wean them towards a subscription model. Right now, they can offer Battle.net for free but maintaining servers for something people pay for only once isn't a sustainable model, especially not if it takes you twelve years to release a sequel and when you're used to the kind of profit WoW enjoys. By interweaving Battle.net in nearly all aspects of SC2, they're making it indispensable to gamers so when they move to a subscription model, it'll be easier to get people to pay.

Of course, these are all conjectures on my part and I'm still enjoying playing StarCraft II. I can still live with the current restrictions and it's pretty rare that I won't have internet for 30 days. If and when Activision-Blizzard starts charging a monthly/hourly fee, though, I'm out of here.

 

Thats cool and all but what happens when u take a break from the game for a couple months, or go on a really long vacation?

 

I have a little thing called work which would prevent me from taking extremely long vacations. Most I can do is one month. Besides, a bigger hurdle for me if I did go on vacation would be my laptop is incapable of running SC2 decently. It does get awesome battery life (8+ hrs), though, and only weighs around 3 lbs.

However, I will definitely be writing to Blizzard about the lack of custom maps when playing offline.