It has begun!

Planetary Annihilation [50% Cracked] REQUIRES STEAM :lol:

Well since it isn't fully cracked now, it at least helps getting the game out there. xD Seems though to me that it isn't really 50%, but more like 10% since they apparently only got past the login screen for now and nothing else. :lol: Lots of work for the cracking people.

P.S. this post is in now way meant to endorse piracy, but is only meant as a jokingly mock of the battle of cracking and the stupid idea of the person who made that "50% crack", to call a UI workaround (around) the login screen a 50% of a crack.. which is very naive and.. well you can imagine. ^^

I'm astounded. To have got hold of the game in the first place requires an investment of at least $90 - a significant commitment.

Who would pay that much money just to fleece game devs? (Also, at this stage we're basically looking at an always-online DRM since no server files have been released - how do they think they're going to avoid that?)

Maybe they think it's a lie, like with SimCity. :lol:

Step 2: Outsource the server development to them

This.

Also, they are just setting up for when they do release server files. Why work on what you could have already had done by time they do release it? They got started early.

That is the way emulators work. I am not talking illegalities here, because they are legal. I am just saying, from playstation 1 all the way to xbox 360, they get started cracking software and hardware to make a pc ran emulator when it first comes out, so by time the correct stuff is released and legal spans fade, they have already finished most the emulator and just need to insert the last of the released stuff and bios's.

PS2 emulators were available pretty quickly because they started when it first released, and you were technically able to get a working one that ran PS2 discs on your computer back while the PS2 was still the current generation console, the technicality being that to be legal you had to dump a bios from a PS2 you had legally bought into your computer to use in the emulator, the PS2 bios isn't legal to download from others but is legal to dump from a machine you own.

Hey, some cracks for PC games are even legal. I have seen some made specifically to bypass requiring Disc 2 to even load the game, which is annoying to do all that swapping every time you want to run a game. All disc 2 does is run a movie, and the crack bypasses the movie load at the beginning of the game.

But the game will be DRM free so on december release so it would be for nothing
Only thing left would be the "CD key" which would only restrict it from online play.

Unless they just baiting unsuspecting free loaders in to downloading it with their extra shady additions (trojans, virus etc).

I would guess it would be something similar to this. I see no other reason for them to bother.

Leaving this open for the moment, though I'm curious how long you expect to stay here with a post that appears to be both endorsing and encouraging piracy.

I'm reading the OP slightly differently, however that's all predicated on the positioning of the 2 :lol:s and 1 xD in it. I think khazar1 might benefit from a careful edit of the first post to make their position obvious and unambiguous...

Haha don't worry boss, my intentions were and are very pure. Just a little bit of joking about that the cracking battle has begun and of course the fact that they call a login screen workaround a 50% crack(I mean really?).

So don't worry, I support the developers, else I wouldn't have pledged 90$ on PA and wouldn't have all those games on Steam.

This makes me not want to release the server. Would you guys get pissed?

I agree that what they have done currently isn't useful in and of itself. It is either bragging about programming skill, or prepping for servers to release.

In light of the second one, I am just glad someone posted a link so the devs can keep an eye on them and make sure they don't try some sort of server bypass scheme. Several games have bypassed servers, but we don't need people openly endorsing large communities of cracked servers, minecraft doesn't even need that which is why they have few enough as is. I am just glad people have 20x the work to update cracked servers for minecraft compared to just buy the damn game.

Mojang doesn't even have a problem, like Uber doesn't, because Mojang stated they have no intention of pinching every dime out of everyone or designing their game to do so at the cost of user friendliness. Honestly, the ability to crack their game just makes minecraft that much more sold, because people who would have never bought it before end up playing it first that way before buying it so they can very easily play the newest version on servers with no hassle.

Yes, we would. We really would.

The game is going to be cracked anyway, even if they had to reverse engineer the server to do so. But you would turn the modifiability down to almost zero since it is clear that advanced mods will hardly work without scripting, and you don't wanna have forkbombs and alike on your servers.

It was obvious from the beginning that the only thing you gonna be able to protect, is the Ubernet matchmaking service.

You could almost as well release the source once done and it wouldn't make much of a difference. Except for a cluttered mess of incompatible custom versions. So better stick with closed source for the core, to make sure all versions out there keep at least a common and compatible base.

That sounds like punishing the paying gamers, although I can see the reasoning if you believe that keeping control of the server would significantly hamper pirates.

Could you maybe release a dumbed down server that was lacking some features so that people could still play offline/lan?

And how significantly would that affect the modding community? I assume some of the more complex mods might want to change the server.

This is pretty much, just like my last post stated, the saving grace against cracked servers.

All cracked servers ever are, are unreliable unpopulated unadvertized sketchy easily incompatable versions which are difficult to work with anyway.

Which would allow people to barely play the game, see that it is good, and then to use the mods easier and get into a real database of games and matchmaking they would go ahead and buy the damn game.

Just like Minecraft, they would have to fiddle with it for hours per game and players they want to join otherwise. People are going to rather pay.

Anyway, I am actually in favor of holding servers till beta or later. No reason to hold it back, but no reason to have it out early either.

Just to be clear I was kidding. The goal is to make the value add of using our infrastructure outweigh pirating the game. It does kind of suck that it's a binary choice though.

This is what we, the imagination community have to say to that:
http://youtu.be/DVPnQ4C5uxY?t=21s

:lol:

Well the mod database, the finding games database, and the easily autoupdating without having to hassle with a few hours of computery work, would really be the value of the game.

And well worth it I would think.

This is the state as-is and it will be like that for quite a while, as long as there's no major change in computer, network and gaming technology. And it's up to the devs and the community/customers to decide for themselves what they want to do with that.

Holding server would be like Diablo 3 and Simcity 2013 again I'm sure the forum mods had fun with that. Lol huge anger from not being able to login on release day.

But yeah I trends to agree with offer a better product the the pirated versions