I suppose that when they built the system and the infrastructure, they didn't take into account the pirates - only the paying customers. They had enough capacity to cater for however many paying customers they thought they'd have. Seems like a pretty reasonable - if a bit naive - assumption to make. Why support people who didn't pay for the product?

Of course, that didn't stop the system from being flooded in any case.

Ive been seeing this posted around a lot of places, but Im suspicious of it. The important point to note is that Gamestop broke the release schedule and was selling copies a week before the official release.

The stats of 120k vs 18k are from day one of the official release.

So the stats represent what happens when pirates and gamestop customers have a weeks head start on everyone else. It seems obvious to me that a week of downloads from the pirate community is going to look bad compared to a week of sales from Gamestop (Im not sure if it was all gamestop stores or just a handful) and a single days sales to the rest of the public.

Its only "heavily affected by piracy" if the ratio of pirates to legit players is the same in a few weeks. Until then I think all it proves is that pirates are getting their hands on games earlier than legal customers, which we already knew.

Actually, the issue wasn't piracy or DRM, per se. It was a network infrastructure that ran the validation/verification services on the same infrastructure as their gameplay services. It was a poor strategic decision, and it was quickly rectified once its consequences became apparent.

*yawn* Let's keep moving.

Quote: Original post by BeanDog
When he said there wouldn't be any DRM, I didn't expect that to mean that they wouldn't even check for unique product keys connecting to their servers. That kind of copy protection is a non-problem for the paying end-user, but would stop the problems they had here before they even started.

They DO check for the product key. The problem is that they're checking for patches BEFORE doing the check. Therefore pirated versions are unable to play online, but still hammer the server with requests.

Y.

Quote: Original post by Ysaneya
They DO check for the product key. The problem is that they're checking for patches BEFORE doing the check. Therefore pirated versions are unable to play online, but still hammer the server with requests.

Y.

Yeah, this was the problem. As I understand it, it's remedied now.

Just an additional note: Checking keys wouldn't have solved the problem since that traffic would have effectively resulted in the same situation.

What it comes down to (for those who obviously didn't read the link) is Sins wasn't as popular with pirates on launch, and as a result they underestimated the infrastructure they required and the server was DDOS'd by pirates. It was a simple mistake that was quickly corrected.

Gamespot slamming it with a 6.5 for a temporary launch problem is just the kind of bullshit I expect from a publication of their caliber.