Between the give-aways at GoG and Humble Bundle, winning contests at Gaming On Linux, and people giving keys away in forums, I've gotten so many free games in the past 12-months that I'm finding it difficult to justify spending money on new games.

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Quoting: WendigoIn D3 you can't even assign any skill points and the spell system is meaningless since about any distribution of spells works. And if not just reset everything on the fly and try something new.

That, I think, is one of Diablo 3's greatest strengths, the extreme number of viable (but not necessarily optimal) builds per character and the ease with which you can experiment. I've had so many times where my build would be OK, but with a little thought and reassigning of skills, paragon points, and gear would suddenly becomes a DPS beast. I love the fact that I don't need to grind out a new character whenever I want to try something a little different. Diablo 2 patch 1.13 did resolve this issue to some extent by allowing limited respecs.

Quoting: WendigoIn D3 I am forced to use pets as tanks and do the damage myself. Playing as WD it took 3 of my hounds about 3 seconds to kill a single zombie.

Sounds like a less than optimal build. A couple seasons ago, I had a Witch Doctor who could literally stand still, and his pets would destroy everything in sight within seconds, including elite mobs. Made clearing high level rifts a breeze.

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Quoting: slaapliedjeThere is a Diablo 3, it just isn't good... like at all.

I disagree. Diablo 3 is an excellent game and very fun. It has so many gameplay and quality-of-life improvements that I have trouble going back to play the earlier games which feel so clunky in comparison.

At any rate, I'm pretty sure that reverse engineering software is illegal, or at least it violates license agreements (but could a pirate argue that he never agreed to any kind of license? Ha! Probably not.).

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Quoting: namikoPost-purchase authentication was the original purpose of DRM in its earliest forms. Fucking around with your game's digital access, gameplay capabilities, not to mention data scraping from your machine without telling you, the more egregious DRM stuff all came later. Even Wikipedia's definition of DRM is defined as "access control".

Apparently, even Nintendo Entertainment System cartridges would make you look up things in their manuals to prove you had bought a game; I remember DOS and Windows games did that too. It was all about access control. It's still about access control, authentication, today.

That was a common form of copy protection on Commodore 64 games, too. It was preferable to the other popular method that would intentionally write bad sectors to the floppy disk that would cause your drive head to rattle about which didn't prevent the software from eventually loading but was enough to stop most disk copy programs. Unfortunately, all that knocking about of the drive head could eventually cause misalignment which necessitated a trip to the local computer repair shop.

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Quoting: hummer010

Quoting: Mountain ManMost publishers only really care about hindering pirates for the first week or so since that's usually when a hot game will put up its best sales numbers, and people will be more likely to buy if they can't simply download for free.

This is the crux of the matter right here. Are the people who want to pirate a game really more likely to buy it if it's not available to pirate? Or are the people who buy the game in the first week or so the people who weren't going to pirate it anyways?

I don't know the answers, but my gut feeling says that the pirates don't readily become buyers just because it hasn't been pirated yet.

DRM rarely deters the hardcore warez crowd, but it does deter "casual" users, especially when services like Steam offer such an easy and convenient way to legally obtain software.

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Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: Mountain ManThis is where I fall on this debate: If people are worried about game preservation then the warez community already has us covered.

So your suggestion to preserve it is to use pirated versions? Isn't it itself an admission how messed up DRM is?

This is not the first time in this thread that you have misunderstood or misrepresented someone's point. You either need to work on your reading comprehension, or be more honest with the way you frame other people's opinions.

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Quoting: ImantsDoes DRM really prevents games from pirating? Or it just helps them not to be pirated after 5 hours or so but little bit longer?

It depends on the DRM. Some of it is a lot harder to crack than others, and sometimes developers put not so obvious "gotchas" in the code -- like making guns in an FPS do a quarter of the damage they're supposed to so that the game becomes impossibly difficult -- but no DRM is perfect. Most publishers only really care about hindering pirates for the first week or so since that's usually when a hot game will put up its best sales numbers, and people will be more likely to buy if they can't simply download for free.

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Quoting: johndoe

Quoting: Avehicle7887In my opinion there's the most important thing - Ownership.

Games that require Steam running to play are more of a longtime lease than something you actually own. I buy my games DRM-Free because I can play them anytime and anywhere without depending on any service.

What will you do with all your collected games in ten years when no Linux distro ships the old libs it needs to run?
Sure there are some great games that can be played/replayed many times. But these ones normally get remastered at some point of time.
I personally think it's a waste of time and resources to collect games for longer than "a long time lease".

This is where I fall on this debate: If people are worried about game preservation then the warez community already has us covered. For example, people who still have a working Commodore 64 and stack of floppy disks to play their favorite games from decades ago are likely few and far between, but hundreds of Commodore 64 games are available online and can be played with an emulator. Now I am generally opposed to piracy, so I find it ironic that a vast majority of these classic games would no longer exist if it wasn't for the warez community.

All this is to say that if your "lease" ever runs out on Steam then the games you paid for will still be available in one form or another.

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Quoting: GustyGhostGosh, I haven't bought a Feral game since... Warhammer? And on Warhammer they failed to make the online component cross platform even. I have since cleansed nasty DRM out of my life so bhttps://www.gamingonlinux.com/forum/topic/3262/post_id=15363ye bye Steam. Feral if you want me to buy your games you're going to have to loosen that death grip.

The lack of cross platform multiplayer has nothing to do with DRM and is entirely because of the fact that the Windows version uses proprietary math libraries that are not available for Linux or OSX, and without an identical math library in all versions, you will get sync issues in multiplayer. So blame Creative Assembly for that one.

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Quoting: Julius

Quoting: Mountain Man

Quoting: JuliusBoth endless ocean games should run fine with the Dolphin Emu on Linux ;)

The challenge in that case is to get Dolphin EMU running.

This is getting a bit off topic, but at least on Ubuntu the Dev. PPA works exellent. In my experience definitly one of the easier Emus to get running :)

I suppose I should look into it just to have an alternative to play my Wii games, but really, it's much easier to simply fire up my Wii U and play my Endless Ocean games that way.

Still, this game looks fantastic. I like that it's going to include more "gamey" elements like resource management and so on, but I hope it's unrestricted enough to allow for the relaxed, free-form play of Endless Ocean.

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