The anti-DRM thread

Justinus said:

It is clear you have an agenda.

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I know not getting broken or stolen software with missing networking code, such an agenda! Getting a complete local application and wanting basic consumer rights to functional game products is so horrifying. Like we used to get in the 90's and early 2000's before the mmo apocalypse where you all started buying broken applications eating the game industries propaganda so they could monopolize their own software products and get you to overpay for PC games while getting rid of game ownership.

If you actually believe any of that tripe you've written, you're the one who wouldn't pass CS101.

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Says the people who buy broken software, taken client-server exe's up the ass (violating basic computer security) and having eaten steam drm by the bucketfull allowing valve to spy on everyone and hear everything we say and do. If you really understand CS 101, then why does an unreal engine game lack basic multiplayer when we know it exists inside the engine? AKA why are earlier unreal engine games fully capable of local multiplayer hosting? Unreal 1, UT2003, UT2004, all unreal engine fps games, so why wouldn't transformers, an Unreal engine based fps NOT be able to have multiplayer embedded inside the exe like every other UT game pre-steam?

Suspicious no? A much better explanation is the fact people here are irrational blinded by their allegience to game industry propaganda and/or computer illiterate.

mnn33 said:

Or maybe you can't see that steam and mmo's are just client server C++ apps

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Same garbage, different day. You are completely ignorant of the complex custom backends that had to be made for games like Ultima Online, Everquest, and World of Warcraft. COMPLETELY ignorant. Take your bs elsewhere!

Also you're making the same tired arguments that the last guy made, claiming there was no limit on the number of online players based on Quake and some old Carmack interviews.

DrMrLordX said:

some old Carmack interviews.

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Any game can be made in side a game engine, aka we could take quake 2 engine and clone ultima online, everquest, guild wars 1, daoc and have them have local multiplayer. But that fact of computer science is lost on you.

A game engine is just a bunch of c code, so if there is a c application that can have no limit multiplayer that doesn't require user names and login accounts or giving up game ownerhsip, then guess what? The people who are buying c applications with those things don't understand basic facts about computers and are buying lemon products.

mnn33 said:

Any game can be made in side a game engine

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Wrong.

mnn33 said:

Any game can be made in side a game engine, aka we could take quake 2 engine and clone ultima online, everquest, guild wars 1, daoc and have them have local multiplayer. But that fact of computer science is lost on you.

A game engine is just a bunch of c code, so if there is a c application that can have no limit multiplayer that doesn't require user names and login accounts or giving up game ownerhsip, then guess what? The people who are buying c applications with those things don't understand basic facts about computers and are buying lemon products.

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Or they want games with large persistent worlds with large player bases, where there is some at least minimal effort to stop cheating, and a little security to protect my account. I played a lot of Quake and never saw a server that had 1000+ people on it.
The very fact that you think that World of Warcraft is anything like Quake tells me everything I need to know about your argument. You don't even have the first clue what you are talking about. Yes, all computer code eventually comes down to binary.
MMOs and the like gave people something new, a persistent graphical community, it was something many of us dreamed of and really wanted, but they needed a new way to monetize it to make it sustainable because servers running that many persistent connections is not cheap.

I used to run a popular MUD back in the day, it had about 300 users at it's max, was purely text based, and cost a small fortune to keep running every month. WoW is serving up considerably more data, to many many more people.

mnn33 said:

Or maybe you can't see that steam and mmo's are just client server C++ apps and we already had limitless mulitplayer games with quake 2. Who am I going to believe, john carmack or someone who wouldn't pass basic computer science 101?

John carmack "No limit to the # of players in a multiplayer world".

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To be clear, I have not watched the video yet, and I am taking it clearly based upon the quote that you provided. In regard to that quote, I am going to be rather blunt and state that it is not correct. Now, the video's thumbnail shows a younger Carmack, so it's quite possible that he was talking about something specific or maybe wasn't envisioning the massive worlds we have today. However, the main point is that just doesn't work.

Now... why doesn't it work? The problem comes down to the truth state of the world. To use a real world scenario, imagine if you had a pencil on a desk and there was someone sitting at the desk whose job was to denote all interactions that occurred with the pencil. If there was a single person in that area, interactions with the pencil would be fairly easy to denote. Now, imagine if there were 100 people in that area, and consider how much more difficult it could be to denote every single interaction with that pencil. A game world has to keep an idea of its truth state (the state of the world) and also be capable of conveying that truth to all participants as needed (usually deemed based upon proximity to the entity in question).

Also, keep in mind that each player is also an entity in the world, and their state needs to be conveyed to other players. So, every time you add a player, you're also adding another object whose truth state must be tracked and conveyed to all other players. So, every player represents an additional set of incoming data -- modifications to the truth data (e.g. their position or other entities) -- or outgoing data -- information about other entities.

Oh, and as a quick note, I assure you that I would have no problem passing a CS 101 class ...or at least I'd hope so given that I have a BS in CS and have been working in the field for over 15 years now.

Aikouka said:

To be clear, I have not watched the video yet, and I am taking it clearly based upon the quote that you provided. In regard to that quote, I am going to be rather blunt and state that it is not correct. Now, the video's thumbnail shows a younger Carmack, so it's quite possible that he was talking about something specific or maybe wasn't envisioning the massive worlds we have today. However, the main point is that just doesn't work.

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It is before quakecon '98, so that tells you the age of the video (over 24 years). He says that technology built into quake 2 provides "effectively no limit on the number of players that can be in a large multiplayer world" and then goes on to say he wouldn't be surprised if at quakecon '98, they have a server with 150 people on it.

At the time Carmack's idea of "effectively no limit" was 150 people. In a first person shooter with extremely little data to replicate for each player relative to an MMO with a vast complex world with hundreds or thousands of players, enemies/NPC's, items/objects in the world, etc. each with some to significantly more data to replicate than a player in quake 2.

I wonder if anyone here remembers Ashercon's Call and their infamous "portal storms":


The network overhead of having too many players in the same area was killing their servers and causing massive lag for players. They discouraged people congregating in the same area by randomly teleporting people out of cities (which is where most people tried to hang out) when populations became too concentrated.

Modern games use instancing to break people up into separate, identical or nearly-identical areas. Oddly the first game I saw use instancing (outside of, I guess, Diablo, if you think that counts) was Maple Story.

To bring this back around to DRM: despite what the new reg wants people to believe, MMORPGs did not make DRM any better or worse for anyone. MMORPGs have always been very straightforward about what they expect from you: monthly payments to play on their servers according to their rules. It's clearly stated in the software license that you have no explicit or implicit right to play the game after the company-hosted servers go down. It is not "Games as a Service" (GaaS) in the vein of, I dunno, The Division 2. I'm sure I posted this video before detailing why GaaS is often bad and potentially illegal, especially given the license terms attached to some GaaS titles (and laws pertaining to such):


If you watch the video, the presenter rightly identifies MMORPGs as being distinct from GaaS. The next time Denuvo ruins your day or the next time that a game you bought to play single player (and was licensed in essentially the same way as a single-player title) stops working because the always-on Internet requirement breaks from company servers going down, don't blame Everquest. It had nothing to do with it. At all.

Oh look, I'll post an anti-DRM thingy for once!


Gran Turismo 7 + always-on DRM = you lose. Sorry folks.

BFG10K said:

Apple plans hardware subscriptions:

You Might Not Own Your iPhone Soon

Owning Apple products could be a thing of the past.

www.cnet.com

Rockstar plans premium subscriptions:

Rockstar reveals GTA Online premium subscription

Starting March 29, GTA Online players on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles will be able to sign up to GTA+. For $5.99 a month, they'll receive...

www.techspot.com

This is the direction of the future, folks. It's the whole reason for DRM, "streaming", online accounts, "clients", and everything else that removes the concept of ownership. You'll have no rights and you'll continue paying to have no rights.

As an aside, I just found out HL2 and its expansions now have zero DRM. This is...a pleasant surprise.

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One would have to be a rube to do either of those things. Unfortunately, there are a lot of stupid people out there. This subscription everything is crap. I think I posted about the subscription treadmill. Then you have subscription heated seats in cars, subscription airbags, will we have subscription microwaves next?

Thunder 57 said:

One would have to be a rube to do either of those things. Unfortunately, there are a lot of stupid people out there. This subscription everything is crap. I think I posted about the subscription treadmill. Then you have subscription heated seats in cars, subscription airbags, will we have subscription microwaves next?

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Carriers (at least tmobile) have offered leasing plans for years to allow people to constantly upgrade on demand. It's not a new idea, and I'd wager it's never going to replace outright purchasing or ownership. It's going to be an option for those people that always have to upgrade to the latest thing at launch, and it may cost less (certainly will be more convenient) than purchasing and reselling/trading in every year for them.

For the rest of us that care about ownership or keep our phones longer than a year, I doubt we will be affected at all. It's just Apple taking another step to offer a service people already have available to them as a first party service.

Dont have anything from Apple, Rockstar and dont purchase anything anymore that requires new account and some new software in order to use another software. Steam is enough for me.

Igo69 said:

Steam is enough for me.

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Steam is okay and all, but if you really want to fight DRM, it's best to move as many of your purchases as possible to GoG. And be sure to examine what you are buying there, since individual publishers may attempt to do scummy things with their GoG versions anyway.

DrMrLordX said:

Steam is okay and all, but if you really want to fight DRM, it's best to move as many of your purchases as possible to GoG. And be sure to examine what you are buying there, since individual publishers may attempt to do scummy things with their GoG versions anyway.

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Already doing that. I haven't bought anything major from Steam in a long time

DrMrLordX said:

Oh look, I'll post an anti-DRM thingy for once!

Owners Of ‘Gran Turismo 7’ Locked Out Of Single Player Game When Online DRM Servers Go Down

When someone asks me what DRM is, my answer is very simple: it’s anti-piracy software that generally doesn’t stop pirates at all, and, instead, mostly only annoys legitimate buyers. Wel…

www.techdirt.com

Gran Turismo 7 + always-on DRM = you lose. Sorry folks.

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You don't seem that mmo's and always online drm are the same thing, you idiots don't get that every game is just a bunch of assembly and you certainly do not need to give up game ownership to have your vaunted "MMO's".

Here's another thing you jackasses missed:

The "portal storms" in asherons call is a result of dumb coding by forcing everyone onto the same server but that would never reach your pee, computer illiterate brain, which is a completely dumb idea, there were plenty of ways to deal with it but they wanted to steal RPG's from your computer illiterate asses, so yes "MMO's" did kill local app PC rpg's, and every "MMO" was literally just a regular rpg with multiplayer networking which were reworked so they didn't have to give us the games anymore.

Steam was a direct result of the success of UO in 97, but you morons will never get mmo's and drm are the same thing, the same morons that are using windows 10 with TPM chips in it to get rid of honest text based binaries and move us towards denuvo levels of redactedin our operating system thanks to you steam/mmo enabling jackasses.

The fact we have emulators for the "supposed super complicated networking back ends" proves all your idiotic thesises wrong. Any time you have an "MMO" operating outside the company at any time proves the networking code can be put back inside the executable and you can run the whole app locally.

Earth and beyond "MMO"


Need for speed world "MMO"


So there was no reason that "MMO's" can't work as complete local applications you own and control, and these emulated networking code back ends already prove your dumbass thesis wrong.

So no, mmo's gave birth to steam, to the client-server back ended everything apocalypse which is what microsoft and the entire industry was pushing towards since time immemorial to kill piracy.

Go have a look at the Ultima dev's and their comments on Killing U9's development (which was later restarted, but ultimately Ultima PC rpg's were finished after uo's success).


Which they now have a fair shot at doing with UEFI and trusted computing.

But let's here it from the original ultima online devs themselves, "Ultima 9 was literally cancelled" once EA's exec's saw the stupid money from generation idiot mmo mouthbreathers like yourselves.

So yes you are directly responsible for quake champions, fortnite, diablo 3's always online drm, etc. Because they are the same thing idiot moron - a client-server executable, which is what the industry desired since time immemorial to finally kill piracy.

Now we are forced to ltierally reverse engineer the networking code that used to come inside every PC game in the 90's.

There is no such thing as magical networking code, and you can sure as well program large # multiplayer games which do not require giving up game ownership nor a subscription fee, they wanted to monopolize all the big budget games so they could sell you even more shit. That's why we lost level editors and dedicated servers in the big budget PC game space, because now everyone wants that fortnite/overwatch mtx money that you mouthbreathers enabled by giving control of PC games to game companies.

That you mmo morons ushered in every evil you idiots complain about, not being able to see the basic fact:

If' I'm dumb enough to buy one client server program, what's to prevent microsoft, adobe, valve from back ending all future programs? That thought never occured to the mmo morons on this forum. That you all gave birth to steam in 1997, 98 and 1999 when you told the game industry you were morons. That's why immediatley over night every PC rpg was rebranded "MMO" to get you idiots to give up game ownership and overpay for something you should have paid only once for and owned outright, the whole thing was a con job.

I had to watch in horror has they killed all the RPG in development and converted them to client server apps we didn't own nor control.

None of you know much about the game industry or how it works, so yes. MMO's did kill local application PC games, dedicated servers, level editors.

All drm is just a fancy name for a networking back end to forcefully carve back ownership and take the files of the game hostage.

Not only that you morons are unaware of the big push from 1997 onwards to encrypt all future exe's and take control and ownership of PC's away from us permanently which was accelerated by locked down client-server back ended games like mmos, steam, and mobile games requiring user names and login accounts for AAA PC videogames didn't occur until around ~1997.



You hit the trifecta with that post.
Insults, profanity and inflammatory posting.


esquared
Anandtech Forum Director

mnn33 said:

You don't seem that mmo's

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Stuff it. I ain't buying your crap, take it somewhere else.

mnn33 said:

So there was no reason that "MMO's" can't work as complete local applications you own and control, and these emulated networking code back ends already prove your dumbass thesis wrong.

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This sentence alone tells me that you are one of those people that are so certain that you know what you are talking about that you are not willing to listen to those who actually know what they are talking about. Anytime you feel you are certain about something you should really question why you think so.

I've run MMO's. I've written code for single player and multiplayer standalone games. Yes, they are all just one and zeros, but really so is this post. The logistical requirements of each are not similar. You are trying to argue that I could have just written this post in Notepad and saved it to my desktop and it would have been the same as putting it up on this forum. Except it is not, because the point of this post is not to just have a bunch of letters in electronic form. It is to share them with an audience, and that requires some set or rules that we share, and enforcing those rules requires some set of DRM. This forum has a form of DRM in the way of moderators. Which is seems you just found out. DRM is required to maintain large scale digital societies. In things like MMOs they are the digital equivalent of laws.

MMOs as we once knew them are mostly dead anyway. Blaming them for the current "always on Internet connection" situation is foolish. It was mostly Diablo 2/battle.net that started that craze anyway. Or at least set the table for it.

I’m still not entirely sure what caused it, but I ran into a computer hang the other day. Upon rebooting (forcefully), I checked the mini-dump, and it stated that there was an issue with an Easy Anti-Cheat DLL. (There could have been more than just that though.) I’ve had the game (Lost Ark) crash to desktop before, and awkwardly, it seemed to be in a similar situation… I went to click on something.

I figured it was a bit interesting because I had never personally seen an issue that seemed to be directly caused by DRM.

I remember when multiple Rendering devices/protocols were offered and supported. This seems like an issue similar to Right to Repair. Obsolescence through Software should be Illegal.

BFG10K said:

Ubisoft deleted an account with games after a year of inactivity: https://www.techspot.com/news/92761-ubisoft-connect-user-account-deleted-inactivity-comply-gdpr.html

Ubisoft cares deeply about user privacy. Deeply, yo.

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Eek. Don't like the sound of that.

I have a few Ubisoft games (came free with some hardware purchases) and I don't think I've even logged in to Ubisoft for several years now (not sure I even remember how to do so). Still haven't got round to playing any of them.

BFG10K said:

New patch for RE7/RE2/RE3 just dropped, adding mandatory DX12/RT garbage. Mandatory, because it removes support for previously working configurations like DX11.

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That isn't DRM tho, that's just an app store being stupid by forcing you to update.

Also, why Capcom, why? It cost you good money to lock out people who already own the game.

I can promise you this would be an issue even if you had bought the game on discs, unless you were only playing it on an offline machine. Games have been autopatching since forever. You would have to reinstall from the original media and play it with networking disabled or firewall the updater. Huge pain in the ass. Nobody wants to have to do that.

Another reason why I like GoG cuz if you have an old version of a game downloaded, you don't have to update it. Though they will force you to update the latest patch version if you haven't already downloaded it. So it's not perfect but still. No need to autopatch. If you use GoG Galaxy it'll autopatch but . . . yeah don't gotta use that either.

Time to pour one out for the hard drive that I had kept all of my GOG and Humble DRM-free installers on.