this<\/a>.<\/p>\nEA’s answer to this problem – BUY MORE GAMES!!!\u00a0 No seriously, that was what they said – when you are out of activations you are out of luck.<\/p>\n
I mean, we figured it would be just like Bioshock after 2k relented on the activation limit and …um …<\/p>\n
Oh, wait, what ABOUT Bioshock?\u00a0 What would happen if you were to uninstall your retail box version of Bioshock?\u00a0 Nothing – you wouldn’t get any activations back.\u00a0 Remember the uproar last year about this?\u00a0 Perhaps not, as the gaming media is no different than the mainstream media in that it has the short-term memory of a three month old puppy.\u00a0 2k Games released a ‘Revoke Tool’ that would allow you to remove the activation from a given computer … something that was supposed to happen automatically as it did with the Steam version.<\/p>\n
So people have started calling for EA \/ Bioware to release something similar for Mass Effect.\u00a0 And I sure hope they do, because as it stands they have sunk to a new low in terms of user-hostile behavior.\u00a0 People are asking questions and getting pointed towards ‘no activation cracks’ – and who can blame them?\u00a0 I have Mass Effect installed on a Windows XP system that I plan to upgrade to Vista very soon – but I have no desire to lose my second activation yet.\u00a0 So what should I do – wait or grab a crack?\u00a0 For me it is a rhetorical question, as I oppose this sort of crack and refuse to support this community.\u00a0 But for others …<\/p>\n
The console vs. PC question always comes up regarding DRM and piracy, which got me thinking: I personally know more than a couple of people who have gone through three or more XBOX360’s due to the system having quality standards worse than a Yugo<\/span> the sporadic and isolated hardware failures typical of this sort of advanced technology and caused mostly by user error.\u00a0 Anyway, imagine that you had bought Mass Effect for the XBOX360 and played some before you got the RROD.\u00a0 Then you played at a friend’s house while MS worked on yours, then you played more on your returned system.\u00a0 Then you have a group of friends meeting up at someone’s house who also has an X360 and you figured ‘great opportunity to share this game’.\u00a0 Sorry – you start it up and find you can no longer play the game as you’ve used up your activations.\u00a0 That is the same nonsense that PC gamers are dealing with now.<\/p>\nI hope that EA \/ Bioware does release some sort of ‘revoke tool’, but even if they do it will still be susceptible to hard disk failures just like Bioshock.\u00a0 The bigger issue is that the software doesn’t refund an activation as many consumers believe – and as Bioshock was supposed to.\u00a0 It isn’t clear that Mass Effect was ever supposed to refund activations, and if not that is an even scarier prospect.\u00a0 This isn’t a ‘GoPhone’ that I want to worry about refilling.\u00a0 I could easily use all three installs today – I have one install now, I could upgrade to Vista and use a second, and I could create a new user profile on my PC and install it there for the third.\u00a0 Then when I uninstalled all of these and wanted to put it on my other gaming laptop I’d be out of luck.<\/p>\n
Buy another copy!\u00a0 EA would tell me.<\/p>\n
Not likely, I say.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Thought it was over?\u00a0 Think again!\u00a0 I remember getting my first personal copy of Mark of the Unicorn’s Performer software in 1986 at the dawn of the MIDI revolution.\u00a0 The software (based on 3.5″ disks, of course) had an interesting ‘authorization’ system that would copy a hidden file to your hard disk that would allow […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1026"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1026\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/05\/masseffect_pc_box.jpg\")
Thought it was over?\u00a0 Think again!\u00a0 I remember getting my first personal copy of Mark of the Unicorn’s Performer software in 1986 at the dawn of the MIDI revolution.\u00a0 The software (based on 3.5″ disks, of course) had an interesting ‘authorization’ system that would copy a hidden file to your hard disk that would allow you to run the program.\u00a0 Your license came with two ‘authorizations’, which meant you could either use the second to run another copy of the program or as a backup.\u00a0 If you got a new computer or larger hard disk (this was the days of 20-40MB storage), you would simply run the program to de-authorize your hard disk, then when you were done with whatever upgrades you were doing you would re-authorize again.\u00a0 For many years I used that system without a problem.\u00a0 My understanding was that was pretty much how Mass Effect was supposed to work.\u00a0 My understanding was wrong.<\/p>\n