Easy on the DRM pretty please?

[The_J]

@CivGame what kind of copy protection will civ5 use? anything that involves being online all the time will be the death of the game...

@dr_jekyll832 we haven't talked about those details yet - but don't worry, I'll let you know everything when it's finalized.

I'm not sure, if this is good...but when nothing is finished, they'll maybe listen to the community.

 

[frekk]

Online all the time? Yeah ... that's the one thing that will absolutely prevent me from buying the game at all.

First of all, my provider - actually, practically all Canadian ISPs - have instituted bandwidth caps with ridiculous fees for overage. I will not waste bandwidth unnecessarily, on a single player game. Sad, but there it is.

Secondly, I always go offline to play games so that I can shut down my firewall and anti-virus stuff, along with alot of the services and processes needed to be online. This nets me some pretty hefty savings on cpu and memory usage, and really boosts performance - the difference in things like turn times is very noticeable.

So any sort of online DRM and I'm out. Bad reviews etc won't stop me, I'll have to see for myself anyway 'cause it is civ after all, but online DRM is going to not only slow my game down and make it less playable but will also cost me money/bandwidth whenever I play. The big attraction of civ is that I pay a one-time cost and get hundreds, maybe thousands of hours of entertainment out of it. Online DRM would utterly destroy that value scheme, for me at least.

 

[Lord Lord]

If they stay with a dongle key they should just stick to a cd check - switching to eSata or USB doesn't change the nature of it. Whether your dongle is a CD or an eSata/USB drive does not really make much of a difference.

eSATA drives require external power, which is a minor added hassle compared to a plain USB dongle (my eSATA flash drive takes power via an USB port). Dongles don't make noise and are much more durable than optical media. A dongle distribution could have some added functionality of being able to store saved games, patches and mods so you could make a portable game that was always fully updated and ready to resume your last game!

 

[ori]

eSATA drives require external power, which is a minor added hassle compared to a plain USB dongle (my eSATA flash drive takes power via an USB port). Dongles don't make noise and are much more durable than optical media. A dongle distribution could have some added functionality of being able to store saved games, patches and mods so you could make a portable game that was always fully updated and ready to resume your last game!

personally I have seen more usb drives fried than cd/dvd made permanently unusable
Frankly, I do not care either way - but I do not really find any technique of forcing a user to insert/connect any piece of hardware (I include a cd/dvd in this definition of hardware for the sake of argument) into their computer more or less of a hassle than another. Of course USB connected balls and chains would at least allow most netbooks to run it - even those that now not even have any cd/dvd drive along - though I envision complaints because of power surges and the like destroying the game...

 

[Lord Lord]

All of my USB dongles work and some of them have seen a lot of abuse. I got a 1GB dongle that has been 3 years on my key chain and has been through the washing machine once. I use it to boot from and run memtest86 and other diagnostics for friends. Awesome piece of hardware. USB drives fried? How the hell do you manage that?! They are indestructible!

 

[Red Adept]

eSATA drives require external power, which is a minor added hassle compared to a plain USB dongle (my eSATA flash drive takes power via an USB port). Dongles don't make noise and are much more durable than optical media. A dongle distribution could have some added functionality of being able to store saved games, patches and mods so you could make a portable game that was always fully updated and ready to resume your last game!

True portability indeed, using any computer you have at hand...and of course if the current progression of computing systems continues, we'll have CivV running on netbooks or other slim portables without CD/DVD drives.

 

[PieceOfMind]

At least two USB drives of mine I have nearly accidentally destroyed when something (perhaps me) has bumped into them sticking out of the computer. Both of them looked deformed now and it wouldn't have taken much more force to render them completely broken. At least a CD/DVD is actually in the computer when it gets used.
There are ways around this like making the dongle one of those neat ones that are seriously less than 1cm long when protruding out of the computer.
But the durability of a USB when being tossed around in a bag or being splashed with water etc. is irrelevant. They will always have that real problem of getting broken while plugged into a computer. I find this a much bigger problem with laptops by the way, especially when porting them around while the USB thingie is plugged in.

My 2.

 

[Akka]

'Added Value' is infinitely better than any kind of authentication system. Piracy cannot be overcome no matter how much tech gadgetry one throws at it which leaves behaviourism.

StarCraft2/Diablo3 will probably be the most pirated games in history and Blizzard knows it so they have expended a ton of work into the 'legitimate' experience by make BattleNet something that is desirable in its own right .. beyond merely acting as a match-making platform.

I'm afraid you use a very, very bad example here.
If anything, the frenzy with which Blizzard forces B.net down out throat is one of the main reasons I really do NOT plan to buy these two games.
The intrusive and outright oppressive "you can't play in LAN, you can't play solo unless you're connected" is something that represents the WORST of the DRM.