New and Awesome Levels of Anti-Piracy Measures

[bayonetbrant]

http://www.cracked.com/article_20482_5-hilarious-ways-game-designers-are-messing-with-pirates.html

#5 is pretty funny, but #1 is the best ever.    >:D  O0

[gameleaper]

very plucky of them :)

[Nefaro]

That's funny stuff.  The "Fade" type anti-piracy stuff has been around for awhile.

But they can also occasionally cause false positives. 

Silent Hunter 4 had Fade style anti-piracy code that would make your crew members faces all distorted and freaky looking (and perhaps some other graphical craziness) for pirated or tampered installs.  Unfortunately the publisher/devs ended up accusing some of their own paying customers of being filthy pirates, when their copies started getting these false positives.  After mistakenly insulting their customers on their support forums, having been shown proof of ownership enough times to prove it to them, they completely removed it in a later update. 

[Yskonyn]

That reminds me of the old Settlers games where new trees would never grow enough to be cut down for wood.

[Tpek]

I remember Dominions 3 being the first game to actually implement such a thing.
Causing reviewers to give it much too negative feedback and anyone who complained about any sort of bugs on the Shrapnel Games forum immediately
got branded as a "Pirate".
(Though the first famous case of this was with Arkham Asylum, where Batman would refuse to glide and fall to his death with supposedly-pirated-versions)

[Nefaro]

I remember Dominions 3 being the first game to actually implement such a thing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FADE


It's been around longer than Bohemia Interactive's use of it in ARMA, IIRC.   There was some earlier DOS-age title(s) with "Fade" funkery on them which I have seen referenced.  Specifically one with a system called "Fade", whence the moniker came, but that's not mentioned in the woefully short wiki.