EA in a nutshell. Funnily enough, I never had any problems with them.

Either way, I suggest that any purchaser of a game check up on their consumer rights. Where I live, if a product wouldn't play or install, I'd take it back to the shop or return to sender, and if it wasn't fixed in a month I'd get my money back. Didn't EA have something similar? Don't get me wrong, I understand one person's desires and I do respect them, but sometimes I think people go too far trying to play something. Surely, the person should just ask for a refund and hope that the next game he bought was better? But I guess, truly, you cannot spell fanatiscism without fan. That a game is released unfinished, perhaps even intentionally broken (if I read between the lines right?), that speaks for the company. A poor support service doesn't help. But let's not lose track of our humanity, trying to cram the latest piece of software into our boxes.

If it's not worth the trouble, don't put yourself in it. If a company doesn't care about it's customers, then don't care about the company. Whereas some might read a story about an evil company refusing to support it's product, I read a story about a rather daft man who wanted what he couldn't get.

Thxxx for the link to the Women Gamer's article. I particularly liked this part :

« EA has a reputation. They are a megalithic corporate entity with the bureaucratic structure that goes with it, as attested to not only by a myriad of ‘bad experience’ consumers over the years but also by those who have partaken of employment there. »

Recently, I did not purchase their SPORE game because of its very intrusive (and potentially ) form of DRM programme : an "advanced" form of SecuROM.

I knew that if I had any serious problem with Spore, EA Tech Support would be totally useless (and clueless) :

Recently, I experienced an issue with Impulse, and an officer of StarDock Tech Support (IamDean) saw my post, on the forum, and he took the intitiative of guiding me through some troubleshooting steps -- which resulted in fixing the issue. I never had to contact SD Tech Support : it came to me, on the forum !

EA Tech Support << and >> StarDock Tech Support are the total, polar opposites -- in terms of customer care & problem-solving efficiency.

My family owns 5 EA titles (still installed) : BFME 1, BFME 2 + WitchKing expansion, C&C 3 + expansion. But their copy-protection scheme is far less problematic than the one EA is using to "defend" Spore.

(What a "defense" : Spore, in September, has been illegally downloaded, by torrent, somewhere between ½ & ¾ million times !)

StarDock's Impulse, taking into account that it is a relatively new programme, is much more trustworthy than the EA Download Manager -- which does not come with any significant tech support !

I love the guy's quote from a recent conference and I say this as a "cabal leader". Gee I wonder if I qualify as a terrorist now...

"We chose a particularly aggressive form of DRM, which 99.8 percent of consumers would never notice, but that two-tenths of one percent got incredibly focused and formed an online PR cabal," he said. "We can eliminate piracy by essentially blocking the online service from the pirate." Riccitiello called it "the future of DRM," one we hope will be more adept at distinguishing between the consumers and the criminals." -John Riccitiello

Spartan, over on the Bioware Board people are going nuts over this particular statement and another one made by JR in which he states that 50% of the people who are condemming DRM must be pirates, where everyone knows that pirates don't give a flying fart about DRM coz they just crack or circumvent it and that's it.

Right now there is a second class action suit against EA underway (apart form the Spore one) for the installation of SecuRom in Mass Effect without the customer's  knowledge or consent.

A number of people have already stated they won't buy any Bioware products as long as they make use of EA DRM mechanisms, including myself.

Damn - I had a good lengthy post pertaining to Bioware and their 'new face' under EA, how I predict a near-future outflux of core developers from them, and how Bioware projects are now very low on my gaming radar, but my login expired! Damn it. Gotta remember to *ALWAYS* copy the body of my posts.

I honestly think DRM is less about piracy than it is about

1) Stopping the used game market.

2) Releasing terrible games based on hype, instead of people having the ability to play a game and then make an informed decision.

To elaborate on 2) - when a company releases a demo, it is often the best part of the game.  When they hype a title for months, a lot of thier money and prestige for the release comes from opening day.  If by opening day the word is all over the internet the game is terribad, they lose that $$$.  DRM is, to me, about companies wanting to make money while still releasing inferior games - not graphically inferior, but lacking in actual gameplay.

Yeah, I saw it.

And making them VPs IMO is nothing but a cheap trick. They'd bite the hand that feeds them if they'd oppose JR and the likes now. Let's just hope that one day they wake up to see that they can't be fed when their feeders don't have any money left to buy food due to not selling enough of their DRM infested crap. Though chances for that are going towards nil, I'd say.

Dunno, we'll see.

I checked the Sacred2 forums today. There isn't one single thread dicussing the pros and cons of SecuRom or DRM in general to find. Not even in the ones run on fan sites. And in the official one everyone who states he'd return the game coz e.g. in mid game of a legally activated copy he get's a message not to use illegal copies is instantaniously bashed. Looks like the fanboys have their heads stuck up the publishers arse too high to see the light of reality.

I was honestly considering registering only to start one and see what happens.

But you should mind.

*usingmasteryodavoice* You WILL be afraid ... *nods* you WILL be...

You cannot simply patch out a rootkit as is SecuRom. Granted, there is such a thing as a SecuRom removal tool on the SecuRom site to alledgedly help you get rid of it once you uninstalled the game it came with, but once you use it every other game installed that makes use of SecuRom won't run anymore, so go figure...

Funny thing. Put a rootkit on another person's PC as a private person and it's called a criminal act.

Put one on a PC as a game publisher and it's called DRM.