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Pretty surprising that they would allow network play without a valid, paid account.

by sho 18y ago

swombat 18y ago
Yes - that shows an astonishing lack of business sense. I was going to chime in that the smart thing to do when your business model ("build standalone software and sell it") isn't worthwhile anymore is to adapt that business model ("build networked software and require a paid, verified licence for networked functionality"), rather than to rant about piracy. But in this case, they did build a networked application/game - but they forgot to actually charge for the networked part! That's pretty silly tbh. Unless the networked activity is bringing you additional revenues, you should charge for access to it. Ideally, what you want to do is build a product where the networked portion of it is so essential that very few will bother cracking the software and running it standalone. A good example of that would be WoW - some people have cracked it to run on homebrew servers, but they're by far the minority. Most dutifully pay their monthly licence. When your business model becomes obsolete because of changing technology, you should adapt, not fight it. What's true for the music industry is also true for the software industry, I'm afraid.
- magv 18y ago
  > A good example of that would be WoW - some people have cracked it to run on homebrew servers, but they're by far the minority. I don't know what the global numbers are, but it's the opposite in my vicinity: there's a number of local WoW servers and most local networks have clients with patches for them. Only a few players ever tried the official server, majority uses the local ones. Same thing with Lineage, Ultima and others. This doesn't however invalidates your main point: those players are not likely to pay for the official server, even if there would be no local ones (I blame bandwidth costs and difficulties in money transactions). Anyway, the fact remains: there's a lot of people playing the local servers.
  - eru 18y ago
    Where are you?
    - sho 18y ago
      Sounds like South Korea to me, happens a lot there.
    - magv 18y ago
      Ukraine. I guess the situation is the same in any region where providers are small region-based ones: that, and high bandwidth cost for external access spawns strong local communities, with lots of services from chats and forums to huge file sharing storages, game servers, etc.
jrp 18y ago
From the comments: "Haven't they ever heard of a CD key?"
Goronmon 18y ago
They don't. The updates require you to have a valid account with Impulse and the updates are what point you to the correct servers. The problem was that with Gamestop breaking the street date, people were playing with legitimate and pirated copies of the game before Stardock was ready to support the rush of people playing. The issues were compounded by various not-so-great decisions like having the game try to connect to the servers and check for updates whenever it is booted up. So, you had thousands of pirated copies hammering the servers trying to login, causing problems for the legit owners.
- sho 18y ago
  "you had thousands of pirated copies hammering the servers trying to login, causing problems" A few thousand failed login attempts caused problems? Sounds like they need a new systems administrator/DBA. A well configured authentication system should be able to easily say "no" to practically unlimited numbers of login attempts. "High value target" production systems often decline many thousands of invalid auth attempts per minute. Unless the client is unbelievably badly coded (ie keep trying to login every second, indefinitely), that's not even the beginning of a good explanation.
  - Goronmon 18y ago
    I did say among other things, and one of the issues was that things were still running on the beta servers initially, which were not configured for the load they had come Monday through Tuesday. I am trying to mention this from memory, so I may have the specifics wrong. Edit: Again, this all stems from Gamestop breaking the street date, and not by only a day or two either but the Friday prior.
    - sho 18y ago
      Fair enough, sorry for sounding like I was jumping down your throat! Ha, I can imagine how it went down now. "Yes boss, we'll bring the production servers online over the weekend, all ready for the launch on Monday" ..

Pretty surprising that they would allow network play without a valid, paid account.

by sho 18y ago

Pretty surprising that they would allow network play without a valid, paid account.

Yes - that shows an astonishing lack of business sense. I was going to chime in that the smart thing to do when your business model ("build standalone software and sell it") isn't worthwhile anymore is to adapt that business model ("build networked software and require a paid, verified licence for networked functionality"), rather than to rant about piracy. But in this case, they did build a networked application/game - but they forgot to actually charge for the networked part! That's pretty silly tbh. Unless the networked activity is bringing you additional revenues, you should charge for access to it. Ideally, what you want to do is build a product where the networked portion of it is so essential that very few will bother cracking the software and running it standalone. A good example of that would be WoW - some people have cracked it to run on homebrew servers, but they're by far the minority. Most dutifully pay their monthly licence. When your business model becomes obsolete because of changing technology, you should adapt, not fight it. What's true for the music industry is also true for the software industry, I'm afraid.

magv 18y ago
> A good example of that would be WoW - some people have cracked it to run on homebrew servers, but they're by far the minority. I don't know what the global numbers are, but it's the opposite in my vicinity: there's a number of local WoW servers and most local networks have clients with patches for them. Only a few players ever tried the official server, majority uses the local ones. Same thing with Lineage, Ultima and others. This doesn't however invalidates your main point: those players are not likely to pay for the official server, even if there would be no local ones (I blame bandwidth costs and difficulties in money transactions). Anyway, the fact remains: there's a lot of people playing the local servers.
- eru 18y ago
  Where are you?
  - sho 18y ago
    Sounds like South Korea to me, happens a lot there.
  - magv 18y ago
    Ukraine. I guess the situation is the same in any region where providers are small region-based ones: that, and high bandwidth cost for external access spawns strong local communities, with lots of services from chats and forums to huge file sharing storages, game servers, etc.

jrp 18y ago

From the comments: "Haven't they ever heard of a CD key?"

Goronmon 18y ago

They don't. The updates require you to have a valid account with Impulse and the updates are what point you to the correct servers. The problem was that with Gamestop breaking the street date, people were playing with legitimate and pirated copies of the game before Stardock was ready to support the rush of people playing. The issues were compounded by various not-so-great decisions like having the game try to connect to the servers and check for updates whenever it is booted up. So, you had thousands of pirated copies hammering the servers trying to login, causing problems for the legit owners.

sho 18y ago
"you had thousands of pirated copies hammering the servers trying to login, causing problems" A few thousand failed login attempts caused problems? Sounds like they need a new systems administrator/DBA. A well configured authentication system should be able to easily say "no" to practically unlimited numbers of login attempts. "High value target" production systems often decline many thousands of invalid auth attempts per minute. Unless the client is unbelievably badly coded (ie keep trying to login every second, indefinitely), that's not even the beginning of a good explanation.
- Goronmon 18y ago
  I did say among other things, and one of the issues was that things were still running on the beta servers initially, which were not configured for the load they had come Monday through Tuesday. I am trying to mention this from memory, so I may have the specifics wrong. Edit: Again, this all stems from Gamestop breaking the street date, and not by only a day or two either but the Friday prior.
  - sho 18y ago
    Fair enough, sorry for sounding like I was jumping down your throat! Ha, I can imagine how it went down now. "Yes boss, we'll bring the production servers online over the weekend, all ready for the launch on Monday" ..