I think the idea in the first post isn't that bad at all, but I also think it needs some tweaks. First of all, as long as some plays offline, nothing should happen. Any time this person wants to play online, a check should be done and if some tweaks/hacks etc. etc. are discovered, this person should be excluded for online play. This exclusion is for that moment and is rechecked every time this person tries to play online. If everything is fine the next time, the person can play, if not, exclusion stays on.

Having said that, I want to make another suggestion. Give every installation of LFS a unique code before it is downloaded and store those codes on the master server. Again, nothing will be done as long as people play offline. However, when they go online this code will be used to ban people from demo-servers if the misbehave. With the current system, banning someone is only working for just 1 minute, since they make a new name en reconnect to the server they have been banned from. Okay, their will always be people who start downloading the game again etc. etc. but I really think this is a good solution to make the demo-environment some more manageable.

Quote from Bob Smith :

The more complex and annyoing the system, the worse it is for the users. That is a bad thing. Any copy protection system can either be avoided or fooled, while I agree with them in principle, any developer spending lots of time making the system overly complex is a fool and wasting their time. Users wanting the full experience will buy, users who don't will play demo or crack, regardless of the system.

EXACTLY my thoughts. Look at Ubisoft - the poor user who buys the game must have a notwriteable CD/DVD drive and must enter the disk every time, but the one who just downloads and cracks doesn't have to think about these issues and these limitations are not holding them back..

Quote from AndroidXP :

Now if you put in these security measures nobody gains anything from it. A cracker will not just suddenly buy the game just because he can't crack it anymore, and everyone else who tries the demo just gets irked by the hoops they have to jump through. And I'm sure a lot of players would be really annoyed just by principle about LFS sending system relevant data around the world without asking. Pissing off legit players for the sake of protection always backfires.

agreed on all terms

additionally all you will achieve by this is draw in some scene crackers which micht actually see lfs as a challenge with any more complicated scheme ... as of now lfs has been more or less off their maps

maybe you should apply at microsoft they appear to be interested in your kind of ideas

Not to mention that there are always methods to bypass any of this 'encryption' in software these days. Unless you want LFS to be super lame and secure for unlocking, etc.... you are better off keeping the way it is, and making it stress free for both new and veteran users (internet or not), and not have Scawen waste his time.

Protection in games will just take LFS and its userbase in the wrong direction. Look how many people refused to buy GTR just because it had Starforce. And what, have people say "I'm not gonna download LFS because it installs ScavierCop on my PC!!!!!" ?? I'll find the Exit door if that day ever comes.....

Copy protection is there to serve one purpose.... annoy legitimate users, nothing else. The more stupid and OTT (like the OPs suggestion) increases the legit user's annoyance level, but does absolutely nothing to prevent it being cracked.



Regards,

Ian

Quote from Ian.H :

Copy protection is there to serve one purpose.... annoy legitimate users, nothing else.

in fact the only purpose is to provide something worth racing for

The bottom line is that irrelevant of how ingenius your anti-hacking system might be, there'd still be a way around it. A new hack would be released to (at a guess) run a player-hosted version of LFSW and reroute the app to check that location instead of the genuine site, and obviously that would permit the virtual connection. And that's just off the top of my head.

Crackers will always be around. LFS uses probably the most effective way of stopping them accessing the best parts already.

While reading this thread I had an amusing thought. If crackers are stuck with the useless AI, could the AI files be downloaded when LFSW detects a valid account rather than as a default part of the system? The files aren't very big, so even a dial-up user would be able to get them fairly quickly. That way crackers would be stuck with the retards, while genuine accounts would have automatically rewritten AI.
Again, not really a method to stop them, just to annoy them