It has begun!

i've a better idea, rather than having the asteroids on a stable orbit, just add a tweak in pirated version that makes asteroids get out of their orbit randomly and fall everywhere, including on the pirate's base.

this way the games turns into an "avoid the asteroid shower" game rather than a RTS before pirates can really enyoy it :mrgreen:
or allow the AI to cheat when it's not an original copy, or whatever, many simple hidden traps are way more efficient that a huge and obvious iron door.


what they did for spyro is really at the pinnacle of evilness, i am in AWE :twisted:

you know, to even add those things, you need to know that it is in fact pirated.. Which means, some kind of DRM.

Naah.. Don't wanna

Just put a special version into the cracksites and bam it will spread like fire. Just like the Game Dev Tycoon guys.

yep, flooding the "piracy market" with tweaked versions is also a good idea

Technically releasing an other version on crack sites with some sort of DRM or something would also not mean that the game would actually have DRM, which should not annoy customers.

Though it would be effort placed into something that the customers do not even get really, and it would honestly not do that much.

Well currently the game is in alpha and is meant to be played on their servers only so I agree with the no drm but with the backlash and some people giving away the alpha I'd be ok with the drm until the finished product is ready.
Perhaps the commander sings the pirate song and gives every other legit alpha tester their location on the map. So they have to kill the commander to shut it up?
How long could you listen to this without wanting to kill the one responsible?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBH4g_ua5es
Would make me laugh and want to kill em

do it all :mrgreen:

Do you know how expensive it would be to host EVERY single game, especially considering the high requirements for hosting? Not only that but there are liabilities attached, such as stabilizing peak hours(server brownouts cost a LOT of customers), more tech support, player moderation, and supporting deep mods. I don't think Uber is a big enough company for all that.

Pirates are gonna pirate. It is a fact of the digital age. All you can do is offer something better than what they have, which honestly is what capitalism is all about.

We ran all of the servers for SMNC, we are well aware of the costs.

And if the hosting requirements for PA are anything like SMNC was, that might work. But SMNC is A) a shooter and B) has fixed world size. Neither of those things are true here. PA is slated to utilize more power than any game to date, with demands that SCALE as games progress. So I don't think you'll be hosting a dozen games per rig anymore!

Crowd sourcing the hosting makes far more sense for a game like this.

I don't mean to be rude, but you can't really speak to the cost requirements of server hosting for SMNC vs PA. To be honest, we can't really yet either as there's still several months of optimization work to be done on PA.

Either way it's moot as you failed to scroll down a few more posts to see neutrino's response that he was joking. We don't have plans to not release the server. We'll be hosting official servers as well as letting anyone who wants to host their own.

Speaking of 'Cracking' the game, I encountered someone online going by the name of 'DRM Annihilator' saying that he got into the game without paying, or being employed as a tester. Can anyone confirm whether he's telling the truth or not? It's been kinda bugging me, tbh.

It's plausible he's telling the truth in that we've given some keys away during live streams, so he would be playing without paying or being employed as a tester. It also depends on what he means by "in game". You can download it and get to the main menu pretty easily, but that's hardly the game.

Also, we have no explicit test team. Everyone on the team doubles as a tester.

He said specifically that he was messing with the code hoping to utilize the 'single player' function of the alpha, which I found weird because there isn't really one unless you count playing against three AI.

He was probably trolling, but I couldn't tell for sure.

So, yep, he probably "hacked the DRM" (ie: commented out a line of javascript) and is sitting in the main menu trying to figure out how to enable the "Single Player" button, which is probably another line of javascript to comment out. Not that it will do anything apart from make the button itself highlight.

Well, If I ever play another game against him I'll ask more about it. He wasn't exactly shy on discussing the topic.

But yeah, probably trolling me.