Topic: 2k games: Buy bioshock for each user on your computer

[MegaHz]

it seems 2k games is claiming that " you purchased the game, not your brother, so why should he be able to play for free?"

http://forums.2kgames.com/forums/showpost.php?p=191631&postcount=2347

[Zeus]

I'm sure that 2k Tech JT doesn't speak for the whole 2K games development team.  Note the disclaimer on the top of the post now. . .

The forum moderator quoted below is not a 2K employee and does not represent the views and opinions of 2K. The individual, "JT Tech 2K," works for an outside tech support group and is not an employee of 2K Games. The technician who posted this has been suspended while we conduct our investigation.

Thankfully . . .

[VE6JHC]

As soon as software licenses get unreasonable people will stop supporting that product. I think it is reasonable to expect that if the software is a valid version and it is installed on a single computer then who cares who is sitting at the keyboard...the software is only being used once.

[Zeus]

The stupid thing is 2K games will let you activate Bioshock on 5 different computers. . . or 5 different times on a single machine.  So you could actually give an activation to several people and it would still work. . . I'm not advocating "sharing" with other people, especially outside your family, but the statement about your brother shouldn't play is purely horse-feces.  The only thing I don't share with my family is my toothbrush and toilet-paper.

[techgeek]

So you could actually give an activation to several people and it would still work.

Well in a manner of speaking, no more than one person at a time could play since there is only one CD/DVD.  Unless of course you circumvent the CD check with a no-CD patch (not that that's legal or anything).  In which case you might as well download the whole game from a torrent, don't get me wrong, I don't condone that sort of thing.

This whole mess is f..ked.  This sort of copy protection only affects the people who buy the game.  The pirates had it cracked and available for download in 10 days.  They get to play the game without all the hassle.  They don't have to worry about the activation servers being down, they don't have to worry about how many activations they have left, and they don't have to worry about the "what if" scenario should 2K go out of business and they can't activate their game period.

Not to mention I have been watching their forums (2K technical forum), and it seems there are bigger problems than the DRM.  Many people have difficulty running the game for longer than 5 minutes before their computer BSOD's, or hard locks, crash to desktop, or plain refuses to start.  The FOV issue (for those that game with widescreens) really has some people pissed.  I can see from screenshots why their upset.  It's not just that you have bands at the top and bottom of your monitor, the view seems to be zoomed in (Warning Objects may be closer than they appear).

Of course there are the people that expected too much from the game, making all sorts of references to System Shock 1/2.  They're upset because there's nothing really groundbreaking or original.  Every game has some of this, and BioShock was so hyped that for these people nothing short of looking into the face of God would have appeased them.

So when I get back from work (just over a week left), I will keep a close eye on whether 2K/Irrational Games has a patch out to fix some of the technical problems.  Then I will buy it.  I don't like the DRM and the Fair Use Rights that seem to get eroded a little more each release, but I'm not prepared to make a political statement and not ever buy the game.  I want to play the game.  Just like voting, you have no right to b!tch about a game if you didn't buy it.  Sure, in some respect the publisher will get the message if no one buys the game, but that's not going to happen.  I am also pretty sure 2K knows how unpopular their DRM choice was, so my not buying the game to make some political statement isn't going to drive home the point anymore than it already has.

These are the views of techgeek and not necessarily representitive of the views of BCC Hardware or it's affiliates.

[Luvlyan]

With all these problems going on, you would expect the sales of Bioshock going down, or maybe the programmers to rethink what they did. Yet, a sequel to the game is coming it seems...

[Kilamon]

Half the fun of any game is multi player and if I buy a game like Civ4, I want to play multi player with my wife, who also enjoys playing. It's been the norm for most of these types of multi player games to only require the CD at start time and then you can move the CD to a new station. In fact, if I recall, Command & Conquer advocated doing this so that more people would play their game and, ultimately, if a visiting friend liked it, they would buy it. Computer-related industries like games and other software vendors are sleeping with their legal teams these days, however, and now you can barely copy an MP3 you ripped from a CD that you've purchased (overpriced already) to a mobile player, iPod or not.

And this guy on the forum is probably sleeping with an RIAA lawyer. 

[Luvlyan]

Half the fun of any game is multi player and if I buy a game like Civ4, I want to play multi player with my wife, who also enjoys playing. It's been the norm for most of these types of multi player games to only require the CD at start time and then you can move the CD to a new station. In fact, if I recall, Command & Conquer advocated doing this so that more people would play their game and, ultimately, if a visiting friend liked it, they would buy it.

Really? Wow... I did not know that. Very kind of companies such as those game publishers to allow such practice. I like how Monolith gave the multiplayer portion of FEAR freely to the public too.

[techgeek]

New's flash, apparently BioShock uses mouse acceleration (a big no no in an FPS) with no way to shut it off.  There are a few hacks to alleviate the problem, but most say that it doesn't completely do away with it.  The symptoms are a very fast twitchy mouse (next to unusable) in game, and a really slow mouse in menu's.  Many have come to the conclusion that BioShock is nothing more than a console port that happened to release at the same time as the console version.  Saying that the devs and beta testers probably used the XBox controller and didn't even test it with a keyboard and mouse.  All speculation aside, this is something that needs to get fixed before I buy it.  I can't abide any mouse acceleration, if the cursor/aimpoint doesn't come to exactly the same point when I move the mouse a consistent given distance, I'm not happy.

[Luvlyan]

New's flash, apparently BioShock uses mouse acceleration (a big no no in an FPS) with no way to shut it off.  There are a few hacks to alleviate the problem, but most say that it doesn't completely do away with it.  The symptoms are a very fast twitchy mouse (next to unusable) in game, and a really slow mouse in menu's.  Many have come to the conclusion that BioShock is nothing more than a console port that happened to release at the same time as the console version.  Saying that the devs and beta testers probably used the XBox controller and didn't even test it with a keyboard and mouse.  All speculation aside, this is something that needs to get fixed before I buy it.  I can't abide any mouse acceleration, if the cursor/aimpoint doesn't come to exactly the same point when I move the mouse a consistent given distance, I'm not happy.

Gosh, that sucks. You'd better go borrow an Xbox controller from a friend meanwhile

[Zeus]

Just out of curiosity, how many of you own and play Bioshock or are just ragging on it because you read somewhere that things suck?  Just curious...

[Luvlyan]

Just out of curiosity, how many of you own and play Bioshock or are just ragging on it because you read somewhere that things suck?  Just curious...

My friend does and I played a bit over his house. It seemed fine to me. 

[techgeek]

Just out of curiosity, how many of you own and play Bioshock or are just ragging on it because you read somewhere that things suck?

This isn't something I just read somewhere, this is off of their forums.  The things I posted are hundreds of people confirming that they are having the same problems.  The most grievious problems have 100+ pages of posts in them.  So this stuff isn't hearsay, it's fact.

As I said in an earlier post, I'm at work, I got to work a few days before the release.  I have been anticipating this game, and I will be getting it, but the problems have to be fixed first.  Thank goodness too, or I would be in the same boat as the posters on their forums who are having trouble.  2K has acknowledged the problems I have posted about here.  If you can help it, don't buy a broken product and then wait around for the publisher / developer to fix the problems.  If it takes long enough the price might have gone down by then.  Don't get me wrong, I don't care if I pay $60 bucks or $50 bucks, I just want a game that I don't have to shelve until they fixed all the bugs that they should have fixed before release.  To my knowledge 2K is working on a patch for the most bothersome bugs, but nothing has been released yet 1 month after release. 

Problems like the FOV situation, some unknown had a hack to fix the problem less than 1 week in.  Even the XBox 360 users using widescreen have the same problem, unfortunately for them they can't hack their game to work around it.  Some guy is even near getting the game to work on P.S. 2.0 cards (like the X800 series).  So lots of these limitations and bugs should be relatively easy for 2k to fix, but they are taking their time doing it.  I think their community would feel better if they released the fixes incrementally as they finish them, instead of releasing one huge monolithic patch.  At least this way they wouldn't take so much flak about appearing to be doing nothing.  Before someone flames me for the last statement, I know from a coding stand point, it's better to combine them to see if a code change fixing one creates a new problem for another bug fix, but from a PR standpoint it's better to look like your doing something.

I am not griefing on the game, most publishers are guilty of forcing devs to release buggy software.  In most cases the patch for most of the bugs is available before the game appears on the shelf though.  Of course there are some notable exceptions.  id software for one has an excellent reputation for releasing "clean" (by the rest of the industries standards) code, Valve is another that usually gets it right.  MicroSoft Games on the other hand seems to have taken a page out of MicroSoft's OS handbook.  Release product: ..... one year later release SP1.  Look at the mess Flight Simulator X was released in.