Originally Posted by TheSkudDestroyer

Or, you could at least buy it then crack it.

That way you support the gaming industry (even in this DRM case) and still get a DRM free game in the end. Just go to the store, buy the game, but install a pirated copy.

A few things...

Why should I, in this case, reward EA for doing this. Buying the game is giving them another sale, and bringing up thier revenues all the same, no matter if I don't even install it and use a downloaded and cracked version. Buying the game is telling them that it was alright that they screwed me over, feel free to do it again on any subsequent games. And as was just recently linked in the other SPORE thread, that is happening (oh boy, we gave you 2 extra activations. we're keeping everything else. Our market analyst says thats fair!").Additionally, I'l have to wait for a new cracked version (if at all) whenever they patch the game, and as this is EA we're talking about, that could be every month. Enough customers boycotted Ubisoft's games and brought up enough class action lawsuits about STARFORCE (another DRM copy protection scheme that had deleterious effects on windows and the hardware itself, causing anything from complete failure of disk drives due to the way it worked to bluescreens) that the company finally saw no profit in continuing to pump out games with that copy protection in them.

This is similar to when i bought XIII, that contained a buggy version of STARFORCE. The game would install and start, but would be unplayable: the game would constantly ask for the original Disc 1 upon loading the first level, and refuse to recognize that the Disc 1 I inserted was legitimate, even though I needed to insert Disc 1 to START the game, but it wouldn't recognize it was legit after loading level 1. In the end, I had to run a cleaner to remove STARFORCE, check that it was fully gone in my registry, and download a cracked exe to play a game I legitimately bought.

About activations, etc..
About 2 months ago I purchased Rise of Legends, the last in the Rise of Nations series of games. This game came out quarter 4 2006 or so. After I installed it, I went to play it. Everything went well, except I was unable to find patches anywhere. The first RoN had an autopatcher if you wanted it to, so i started the autopatcher... which froze for about a minute. Then returned with a fatal error, that it was unable to find the servers. I thought it was my settings, so i did it again while the router was DMZ'd, still nothing. I go to try multiplayer, and.. it cannot find the authentication server. No news was on the official website, and it appeared to be dead a few months after the release. Furthermore, there was no patches to be found, the website said point blank that "Patches are not available for download. To update the game, use the "check for updates" button on the main menu".

I checked a RoN fansite and found out that at the end of July, Microsoft turned off the autopatcher servers. The downside to this was that you could no longer patch the game from release state. The other downside to this is that the game checks the patch servers to get the hash of the latest patch, and tell you if you're not running the latest version of the game. Without this step, multiplayer DOESN'T WORK, it kicks you out of the menu after failing. To update the game, I had to check a torrent site, find the EU patches, download a NA converter (and a missing patch for NA that EU didn't get) and install those, and to play multiplayer, i'l have to use a community portal and use Hamachi while hosting a LAN game.

What are my assurances that the activation servers will still be up a year, two years, 3 years from now? If they aren't, I'l be unable to play the game I bought legally anyway. It'l be a 50 dollar coaster.