Stupid censorship

[Elias_Maluco]

Another topic discussing the performance impact of Themida, the copy-protection system used in "M&B", was closed and deleted, with participants treatened to be banned.

So, lets just pretend Themida does not install drivers on your system without your knowledge and does not have any impact on the game's performance. Better yet, we should pretend that Themida doest not even exists. "Themida? What is this? It is food? It is a country on eastern Europe?".

You should place a big sticky warning (all in caps, of course) at the top of all forum sections saying:

"DO NOT MENTION THE WORD THEMIDA OR YOU WILL BE BANNED, YOU EVIL CRACKER!"

Also, dont forget to add that to the forum rules (all in caps, again, and in bold):

- DONT EVER, UNDER ANY CIRCUNSTANCES, FOR ANY REASON, EVEN MENTION THE WORD "THEMIDA".
Writing the "T" word in your posts will cause your thread to be locked and deleted, your account to be closed, your serial key to be revogued and a band of thugs will be sent to your home to murder you and all your familly and burn down your house. Thank you very much.


Ban me if you feel like it, this is really stupid.

 

[Hardclyff]

I agree that erasing posts will not erase the problem, only thing it will succeed in is making people even more pissed.

 

[Ordie]

Don't be an idiot. That only happens because whenever Themida comes to the conversation, people start talkign about cracking the game and evading its security, not because of the concept of Themida itself. If you want more info on it, there's always good ol' google.com

 

[Nairagorn]

Take your meds, kid. Deeeeeep breath. Feel better?

Nothing wrong with discussion, but when people start talking about how to bypass the system I will come down hard. I deleted the posts because I don't want people pm-deluging the person who said they knew how to get around the protection.

Be pissed. Anything close to discussing how to crack the game will be removed.

 

[Reinhart]

It's foolish, it's $12.00, you can't beat that. If you're so sad that you need to crack a $12.00 game made by an average joe and his wife, I pity you.

And he is right to lock / close threads discussing methods of bypassing the security.

 

[Elias_Maluco]

I always try do not be an idiot, but perhaps its just my nature.

Anyway, in the last deleted topic, last time I checked, there was no talking about cracking the game. I think someone mentioned that this Themida thing is not uncrackable, and thats probably true. Is that a reason to close a topic?

 

[Nairagorn]

Yes. In my opinion there were statments that were too close to leave intact. To avoid singleing anyone out, I nuked the thread(s).

 

[Elias_Maluco]

Avoid towns where the judge, sheriff and prosecutor all have the same last name.

 

[Hardclyff]

 

[Fluffy The Hamster]

edit : also i allways stay at 1 post

You have magical powers...

Since I have a high-end PC, I am above these foolish overcomings.

 

[Hardclyff]

Hey let's be fair. Without the protection there would be say 1/3 of sold copies they have now. It has it's flaws but it's apparently pretty good, so I think it should definitelly stay. That said, deleting threads will still not help solve problems for people who can't run the game smoothly (or not at all).

 

[sheek]

My thread got deleted again without any explanation.

I didn't say anything about cracking. We were talking about what Themida does and if the M&B Team could remove it.

You are way over-reacting Nairagorm.

This is stupid.

 

[sheek]

Why didn't you just delete Realsmasher's posts? Why did you delete my posts as well? I didn't say anything against the rules.

 

[thadivine]

they were talking about removing it AFTER people bought the game

 

[Elias_Maluco]

Since I have a high-end PC, I am above these foolish overcomings.

Good for you. Since I have a crapy PC that can barelly run "M&B" with texture detail at 50 and shadows, particles and dynamic lights turned off, Im worried about the performance impact of Themida.

I agree that, without good protection, "M&B" would have already been cracked, and that would really suck. But is Themida really uncrackable? I dont believe it. Just imagine if a big popular comercial game, like, "Doom 3" for example, were protected by Themida: I bet Themida would get cracked in less than a week. So, if someone really wants to crack it, and someone is good at it, someone will do it.

Is Themida effective? Yes, it is (but not unbeatable, of course). Is Themida afecting performance on low-end PCs? Yes, it seens so.

So, weighting pros and cons, its it worthy the trouble? I really dont know. I know I dont like it, not only becouse it afects performance, but also becouse its intrusive.

 

[Ordie]

Then, in that case, too bad for Doom3 and too good for M&B. Better protection is necessary. Probably if Doom3 loses 5000 sales it's not too much, probably a lesser hit on id than if M&B would lose 100.

Edit: And how exactly is it intrusive?

 

[Anonymous]

Edit: I am deleting the posts belonging to the guy who claims he cracked Mount&Blade. If you want to boast about your cracking exploits, go talk about it in your hacker forums. This is not the place. -Armagan

 

[Elias_Maluco]

Edit: And how exactly is it intrusive?

It installs a driver in your computer, just like Starforce. The driver is called "Oreans.sys" and once installed, will be loaded everytime you boot your windows. I dont know what it does or how it works, and I know for a fact that you can delete it and nothing seens to change. But I really dont like the idea of copy protection systems installing stuff on my PC. I dont know what this stuff does and how it can affect my computer, and I was never warned about it. That why I think its intrusive.

 

[Boris]

Surely there are better ways of handling keys then some copy protection that slows the game down though?
There are lots of games which work in a similar way to M&B and they work fine.
I'm not entirely sure how all this stuff works though surely there should be another way.

I doubt it is uncrackable. I agree that there just hasn't been a big effort to crack it because not all that many popular games use it.

 

[compfreak]

I don't know why you guys talk about intrusive copy-protection like it is unique to M&B. Pretty much by definition, all copy protection has to somehow intrude on your system to stop you from copying whatever it is protecting. It must prevent access to some functions of your hardware. So all copy-protection is intrusive, not just M&B's. I know many other common programs that have similar protection schemes, so there is no reason to ***** about the protection used by this one. If you don't want copy protection, then only buy boxed software or only download FOSS.