Neverwinter Nights Forum News (Nov. 22, 05)

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Here are today's Neverwinter Nights forum highlights, collected by NWVault. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.

Stanley Woo, Quality Assurance

1 copy 2 computers?
Because the intarweb and computer networks don't recognize "household" as a distinct location, we require that each computer must have a separate copy of the game in order for them to play together.

A LAN could be as small as two people in a single room or larger than 40 computers in a single computer lab or internet cafe. The game doesn't make the distinction, nor can it identify whether the two players are spouses, siblings, family, friends, or complete strangers.

 

Well, the reason for multiple comps with the same copy would probably be to play together (I assume this because I don't have time to read the posts linked to, only the snippets). For such, Starcraft (makes you wonder what this game doesn't have) already solved that issue: spawn installs. Those installs only had the multiplayer component and could only connect to games where the computer with the original disc was connected to in lan, not over the net. They also limited it to 3 spawns per disc connected.

 

IIRC it worked similarly in Age of Empires, where you could have a multiplayer game with more players than CDs.

That's a crappy explanation. Games don't recognise if they are being copied or taken serial numbers from and yet still piracy is illegal. Therefore, there should be no problem legally recognising household. Who cares if the game can't recognise it? What are we going to hear next? That your right to have a backup copy is less important than preventing the game (which you have bought legally) from being copied by other people from a CD just like yours somewhere else on the planet? Scratch one of your CDs and buy the whole game anew, a distributor's dream.

The most crappy part is the one about internet cafes. If they were to cheat on game licenses, they could as well download the whole thing off a warez server. If you want to prevent them, you need to check their computers. Otherwise, if you choose to rely on the law and the courts (sue if you find illegal copies), you could allow one copy per household as well as you can demand one copy per computer now.

 

I actually don't see the problem. Like I said, you can limit the number of persons per cd per LAN. They actually already do it. They just need to put it at more than one. Besides, spawns never have full functionality, so, it's not as if the computer has a complete copy. And on top of that, a spawn can only connect through LAN (not internet) to games hosted by a computer using the full software with the original disc. This doesn't prevent the game from disallowing multiple full copies with same cdkey on the network.