What is the point of CD keys?

[0roo0roo]

Originally posted by: FFMCobalt

Originally posted by: 0roo0roo
and you have no idea how bad it used to be. games used to ask you to look up a word in a paragraph on a certain page of the manual to start the game each time. assumption being its a real pain to photocopy the manual. sometimes they had cardboard wheel decoders, or those see through color decoders etc to make photocopying impossible too.

Yeah, I DO know what that was like. Grr... I hated that. And if you lost the book or decoder wheel? You were fvcked!

yea, back in the floppy days.. copying a game was rather easy indeed. once cdrom games came out, copy protection dissapeared until burners came out.

i don't mind really, with cd keys and online gaming, i'd rather all the people i'm playing with are legit enuph @ssholes from that group already.

 

[McCarthy]

Hmm, I remember CD based games having copy protection before burners. CD-to-HD clone programs were around basically the day after CD games appeared, might have been a very short window though.

Never had a magic wheel game, though I did have to do "page 72, paragraph 3, word 5" with a few. Cool part about that was most just had a small set of words so you could memorize a few and avoid having to get the manual most of the time.

I want people to be legit too, I just don't want legit people jumping through hoops when it's not necessary.

 

[scauffiel]

I'm not sure if anyone mentioned it already or not (I did read through the thread fairly quickly); but why don't you just use a fine point permanent sharpie marker to write the CD-Key on the CD? That's what I do to all of my software in case I lose (or no longer want to keep) the CD cover, or manual, or whatever.

S.

 

[ViRGE]

Originally posted by: FFMCobalt
There is no key generator out there that actually generates a key (that I've ever seen --and I've seen quite a few). All it does is regurgitate a key that was stolen from the players that hit a server that is copying the keys to make the keygen. So when you "generate" a key, you're using someone else's valid online play CD key.

Even that's out of style now. Newer games use CD-key hashes(ala Unix crypt, MD5, SHA1, etc), so the key isn't in jeopardy. Tribes2 even went one step farther, and used unique player ID's.

 

[0roo0roo]

Originally posted by: McCarthy
Hmm, I remember CD based games having copy protection before burners. CD-to-HD clone programs were around basically the day after CD games appeared, might have been a very short window though.

Never had a magic wheel game, though I did have to do "page 72, paragraph 3, word 5" with a few. Cool part about that was most just had a small set of words so you could memorize a few and avoid having to get the manual most of the time.

I want people to be legit too, I just don't want legit people jumping through hoops when it's not necessary.

well for quite a while burners sucked, and were very very expensive. it would be easier to buy games then invest in a burner back then lol

 

[Staples]

It is the best method they have to stop people from using pirated games online. Hell if I know, there may be key gens for every game out there (I grew out of that stuff when I was a kid) but the only game I ever bough that said my CD key was in use every time I tried to play it online was Q3 which leads me to believe there was a key generator for that and everyone was using my key.

 

[draggoon01]

cd keys are the best method against piracy as has been mentioned, but only effective if online.

with the length of cd keys these days, the chance of a keygen randomly generated a working one is in more than millions.

and with cd checks, just use a program to emulate the disc. then you never need cd in drive and updates/patches work fine.

usb dongles are horrible idea. at any rate it's already been done as serial port dongle for 3d max or one of those professional graphics programs since they cost thousands. what ended up happening is a simple program was made to fake the dongle. and that was defeated. honest joe gets annoyed

adding more and more layers of protection is understandable, but bad in implementation. all it does is annoy and harm the paying customer. i believe software should have 1 check and that's it. anything above is pointless, since it only encourages cracks/piracy to avoid the annoyance.

good recent example is warcraft 3 expansion. they used new secu rom protection. problem is, even people with legit copies have had problems where they can't play it anymore. their cd drive isn't compatible with the protection. but sure enough it's possible to burn working copies of the cd and possible to emulate the cd on hard drive. so at most this ended up hurting paying customers. many won't know better, and leave pissed that they either had to buy a new cd drive, or can't play the game after the recent update.

and if your cd key somehow gets stolen, honest joe has to pay normally ~$10 to get a new one from game company. old cd key gets black listed. guy who pirated game simply finds another key, without paying of course. joe loses.

so again, having 1 check would be good, like cd key to deter casual joe from thinking about pirating. anything else is fluff.

only other feasible method would be to make the program partly hardware based. meaning not just check or storage, but hardware that works in conjunction with software or completely runs on hardware that's plugged in. msft has been considering using such an idea where there's another slot on motherboard of OS card. to update windows, you simply plug in newer windows 2004 OS card. this can't be emulated because OS functions are run off of the card itself. this would work best for software, but current structure of technology and industry would not be in favor of it.

unless there software runs off of specially made hardware, there is no way of protecting the data 100%. there can always be a way to emulate or fake whatever check is made.

What is the point of CD keys?

to annoy the paying customer. that's all protection ever does. and it wont' get better unless customers speak out like turbo tax last year.

 

[Chaotic42]

They should just print the CD key on the CD. Then you wouldn't lose it, unless you lost the CD, in which case you wouldn't be playing anyway.

I just write my CD Keys on the CD with a marker.

 

[Zebo]

I don't know anything about keygens but it bugs me to no end hearing the cd player spin up with it's aircraft engine type sound so I download NOCD hacks from places like megagames. I have almost totaly silent system with only one fan so it's really noticeable.

 

[WhiteKnight77]

While I do like games that don't check for the CD or even have a CD-key, I can live with either. I keep my games in their original jewel case and they are all in one place on my desk. My optical drives aren't really noisy so that doesn't bother me. When playing online, I don't use matchmaking services, so I don't have to worry about the CD-Key problems that plague some people.

If implemented properly all forms of security of software will work IMO. As was noted earlier, if people actually went out and paid for the games, publishers and developers would not have to take the steps they do. It's a shame that there are those who don't get it, but maybe one day they will.

No-CD cracks, while used mainly by pirates do serve a purpose, but that really is a lazy way out. Though most if not all of us don't read the EULA, are actually in non-compliance of that license when you use one. It does alter a core part of the software and that had to be accomplished by someone decompiling the exe to find out what made it tick so it could be defeated. I am not sure about other games, but with any Red Storm Entertainment game (RS/GR though there may be others) that is cracked can't be patched. That even goes for those who installed Vertigo's cheats for Rogue Spear. Patches look for the games .exe and if it can't see the right one, it shuts down.

Implementing a CD-key system can be difficult if the research isn't done proplerly before hand. UbiSoft messed up with it for Raven Shield (one of the many reasons why I haven't bought it yet and it still isn't worked out even after 3 patches and 6 months since the game was released.) Sierra has a good one and is pretty seamless from what I can tell the few times I played on their servers.

Until the consumer puts pressure on the pirates to buy their games instead of downloading them or just copying the disk from someone, we will have to put up with more and more layers of security to play games.

 

[thirtythree]

it works for games like diablo ii. unfortunately the last two digits of my lod cd key rubbed off. well .. fortunately I suppose.

 

[BD2003]

People will never stop pirating games. Its too easy for what you get out of it. Pirating a game takes 5 minutes and costs nothing. Buying a game requires you to go to the store, buy the game, deal with the cd key and the annoying ass cd checks. Consumers will not put pressure on the pirates, how could they possibly? The only pressure that could be applied is to the publishers. There is only one way I can think of that will stop most piracy dead in its tracks for a while while not inconveniencing the user so much, but I doubt its far from cost effective. That is to encrypt the key on the CD itself. This would require writing something extra to the discs that would typically be mass produced by stamping, and would take a while, because retail CDs arent burned.

But that would make it so you dont need a cd key (your specific cd contains the key itself), and since its encrypted might as well forget about a keygen. Then when the game starts up, just have it send a quick notice over the net to the publisher that the game has been started. From there on, no other PCs that were installed with the same key could play. For some reason I get the feeling that people would be cry about privacy for something like that, but I dont see the danger, unless youre a pirate. And then this would of course kill the need for a cd key. The reason they cant do this now with cd keys is because keygens can screw over legit users too easy.

You know, I dont remember ever having to crack my half life install. Ive always just been able to start it up without having the CD in the drive. And that game sold millions upon millions, mostly due to CS, which is online only, and requires a CD key. One of the reasons why I play so much damn CS so I dont have to fish for my warcraft CD. With online only games, wtf is the point of the cd check anyway?

 

[WinkOsmosis]

If you hate putting the CD in, just rip the disc to your hard drive and use a CD emulator.

 

[BD2003]

Waste of disk space that I shouldnt have to deal with.

 

[ViRGE]

Some people will just never be happy.