{"id":4742,"date":"2009-08-28T17:24:49","date_gmt":"2009-08-28T21:24:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=4742"},"modified":"2010-05-12T08:44:35","modified_gmt":"2010-05-12T13:44:35","slug":"experienced-points-online-activation-is-a-ripoff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=4742","title":{"rendered":"Experienced Points: Online Activation Is a Ripoff"},"content":{"rendered":"

An entire column dedicated to making the case that online activation is a Bad Idea as a form of DRM<\/a>. I had to give my boilerplate “Steam is not the same as simple activation”, because if I didn’t do that it would instantly hijack the conversation and we’d be arguing over Steam the whole time. I mentioned that their system of auto-patching is pretty nice. Far better than Googling around, looking for a patch, trying to figure out if I have it, or need another one before this one, or if I need a special one for my region, and then shuffling off to FilePlanet and downloading 50MB worth of ads while waiting in line for my 5MB patch. <\/p>\n

Of course, as soon as I wrote that the auto-patch system came back to bite me, and an update to Garry’s mod broke the software. Since I had no idea there WAS an update, I wasted a lot of time trying to fix what I thought was a problem on my end. And because of the way the system works, there is no way to return to the previous version. My software is dead, and I just have to wait for someone else to fix it. Grr.<\/p>\n

You can turn off auto-patching on a per-game basis, although it’s on for all games by default. Some games need auto-patching. You need to keep Team Fortress 2 up to date, or you can’t play online. But single player games don’t have that problem. I probably need to go through all my games and set policies for each to keep this from happening. <\/p>\n

Man, I hope Garry gets it fixed soon. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An entire column dedicated to making the case that online activation is a Bad Idea as a form of DRM. I had to give my boilerplate “Steam is not the same as simple activation”, because if I didn’t do that it would instantly hijack the conversation and we’d be arguing over Steam the whole time. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weekly-column"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4742"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4742\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}