Oh, technology...
Oct. 13th, 2007 11:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
czeriThose of you who play are probably aware that EA released recently a new expansion pack for the Sims 2 called Bon Voyage. It's a pretty neat one, but it includes a major bug that will result in your game becoming unplayable sooner or later - it makes new NPCs breed whenever you enter a community lot, which will eventually overload the most powerful computer's processing power.
Bugs in games are nothing new, however, and as with previous expansions, EA soon released a patch that solves the problem. Unfortunately on some computers the patch doesn't install. So when I got an error message trying to open the patch, I decided to poke around the forums on the official site to see if there was any solution to my problem. There isn't (as of yet), but as I was browsing around a special subforum with the mysterious name "Securom discussion" caught my eye. Intrigued, I clicked on it and started to read, and my jaw soon hit the floor.
It turns out that EA has switched to a new anti-piracy protection called Securom without telling anyone. That in itself wouldn't be so bad (who actually reads the licence agreements when installing new programs anyway?), if not for the fact that Securom can kill computers. That's right, in the few threads I've read through, I've encountered two people reporting that after installing Bon Voyage their hard drives were fried. Other, more common complaints included optical drives, anti-virus programs and CD/DVD burning software being disabled; firewalls being turned off; printers and other external equipment no longer working; not being able to play video and music files, etc. There doesn't appear to be any pattern to whose computer might be affected - it happened to both laptops and PCs, Vista and XP, McAfee and Norton, and a multitude of various useful programs.
While there is a way to uninstall Securom, and re-formatting your hard drive solves whatever issues it caused, the kicker is that without Securom you cannot play any newer EA game (in the case of the sims, from H&M accessory pack onwards). What Securom failed to do, though, was actually stop piracy, because cracked versions of Bon Voyage were available a day after its release.
So here's the good part: In an effort to stop piracy EA made buying and installing their new games akin to playing Russian Roulette with your computer, thus ensuring that getting the pirated (and so Securom-free) versions of their games is now the safe option. Excuse me while I point and laugh.
Bugs in games are nothing new, however, and as with previous expansions, EA soon released a patch that solves the problem. Unfortunately on some computers the patch doesn't install. So when I got an error message trying to open the patch, I decided to poke around the forums on the official site to see if there was any solution to my problem. There isn't (as of yet), but as I was browsing around a special subforum with the mysterious name "Securom discussion" caught my eye. Intrigued, I clicked on it and started to read, and my jaw soon hit the floor.
It turns out that EA has switched to a new anti-piracy protection called Securom without telling anyone. That in itself wouldn't be so bad (who actually reads the licence agreements when installing new programs anyway?), if not for the fact that Securom can kill computers. That's right, in the few threads I've read through, I've encountered two people reporting that after installing Bon Voyage their hard drives were fried. Other, more common complaints included optical drives, anti-virus programs and CD/DVD burning software being disabled; firewalls being turned off; printers and other external equipment no longer working; not being able to play video and music files, etc. There doesn't appear to be any pattern to whose computer might be affected - it happened to both laptops and PCs, Vista and XP, McAfee and Norton, and a multitude of various useful programs.
While there is a way to uninstall Securom, and re-formatting your hard drive solves whatever issues it caused, the kicker is that without Securom you cannot play any newer EA game (in the case of the sims, from H&M accessory pack onwards). What Securom failed to do, though, was actually stop piracy, because cracked versions of Bon Voyage were available a day after its release.
So here's the good part: In an effort to stop piracy EA made buying and installing their new games akin to playing Russian Roulette with your computer, thus ensuring that getting the pirated (and so Securom-free) versions of their games is now the safe option. Excuse me while I point and laugh.
