X3 wrecked my system GGKTHNX mother****ing ********

I hate starforce. But I bought x3 anyway cause it looked so tempting. Long story short, I installed it, rebooted(have to for the "copy protection" to kick in) and immediately got a "select first boot up device" menu during boot up. you know it's going to be a GREAT night when a game you installed manages to **** with your bios.

Anyway, I played some of the game. It's been average so far. Pretty choppy, in it's unupdated form, and the FMVs suck. Well I tried to update it. The update exe didn't do anything,... aside from give me a BSOD. System crash 1: check

So I say screw it and forget about the game for a few hours. I open foobar to play some music. Uh oh here comes another BSOD memory dump. System crash 2: check

I uninstall the game cause this is really getting annoying. I clean out any registry crap I find etc etc. I start watching a flash vid someone linked to me. CPU usage spikes to 100%(flash vids normally are around 20-30% if it's a high quality one). ANOTHER BSOD. System Crash 3: check.

WTF WTF WTF. I normally only get a crash maybe once every few month,s and that's when I'm tinkering with system stuff I'm not supposed to, or am heavily ocing. In a period of a few hours I've had 3 system crashes and I wasn't even doing anything out of the ordinary.

Why can't we get a class action suit against Starforce? this is rediculous. I'm not joking when I say someone should go to their executives homes and blow their brains out. This is so unforigivable. I figured that starforce only messed up maybe 1 in 10 systems. And for the most part was a nuisance(and huge security liability) but wasn't going to make most people's comps go fubar. However, I got owned by starforce. Obviously I am ****ed right now.

I think I'm gonna go to bed now.

Sorry to hear that, I dont even know what starforce is. Well i know its security software, but what does it do.

It's a copy protection system. Ie: an easy way out for devs/publishers who don't want to actually spend time coming up with a way to combat game piracy.

It installs software into your system, that can affect things at a system level. It prevents you from running the game unless you actually have the physical disc in your drive, and it has to be the original disc that was used to install that copy on your computer.

It's been known to cause system instability, internal conflicts, andeven mess up certain drives. However, I never thought I'd get screwed over by it.

The creators of starforce claim the issues are a small minority, so basically they are saying "if you have issues, oh well deal with it."

Wow. And why is this allowed?

That's the question everyone asks. I can't think of any consumer who actually supports it, and afaik even a lot of devs dislike it. however, there's really nothing "we" can do to stop it.

Why did you install it in the first place? What exactly does it do for you?

It lets you play your game .

Thanks for the warning, I was contemplating buying XIII. No thank you.

Trombe said:

Why did you install it in the first place? What exactly does it do for you?

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You don't have a choice. Games that use Starforce automatically install it. It's not an option, you can't choose not to. The game doesn't run if you try to remove it.

Like I said, I hate starforce, but x3 looked like such a potentially great game, that I figured I'd take chance and buy it. I didn't expect that the starforce protection would mess up my system this badly. My old p3 compaq presario was more stable than my comp is right now.

That's a real bummer, personally i don't think this kind of software protection is helping against copyright infringement.
Apparently there is a tool to remove starforce, it's about a third the way down on this website i found after googling.
http://www.glop.org/starforce/

Stop buying games that have Starforce, problem solved. Even if you really want to play the game, maybe developers will wake up and realize that starforce is garbage. I refuse to buy games that have it.

Sorry though to hear about your situation, but I hope you've learned now too not support them. When security ends up limiting what kind of Optical Drives you can install the game on or if you remove starforce from your computer & it causes issues....Forget it. I hate the company with a passion because they pretend as if these kinds of things are not serious, yet no matter how much they improve it those groups are still bypassing it

The bad thing is that this game isn't really that great. It's unbelievably choppy and buggy right now. I too made a snap decision and bought it knowing it had starforce. Actually I wasn't going to buy it till I found my system already got starforce on it somehow. Now that I've got my system reformatted I havn't reinstalled it and probably won't.

How do you know if a game has SF?

I didn't know that GTR did until I tried to mount the game disc to an Alcohol virtual drive, I was surprised it didn't work. I wanted to do it because I hate using discs, and it takes FOREVER to validate the disc and it uses the whole system 100% until it does.

blah

They knew it did because word travels fast around here.

As for the driver itself, well, nobody should get to install a kernel-mode driver that's that buggy, if it really IS that buggy. If developers could find non-intrusive ways of doing copy protection (and believe you me, there are a BUNCH of non-intrusive methods, but they take a little more finesse) I think all of us would be a lot happier.

We shall see.

I too have been screwed over by StarForce, and if you don't think there is something you can do about, do some research. I've been searching for awhile, and am just waiting for the day a class action lawsuit is filed against that compnay, and I'll be in on it in a heatbeat!

It permently screwed up my DVD writer, and by god if I have to wait until hell freezes over and come back from the friggen dead I will, and they are gonna pay for it. What they are doing is illegal, and it's just a matter of time before they end up just like Sony did with their little backdoor trojan stunt.

I have quite the file of stuff on SF, and I also have proof backed up on my HDD and on CD's. I'm gonna look into whether that thing went f'ing with my BIOS, and they better hope it didn't.

I'm getting sick of seeing people having their computers getting f'd up by this crap. Damaging somebody's computer with malware is ILLEGAL.

First rule of programming is TEST YOUR CRAP! You don't send stuff out there for the world to use without testing it, and you don't go screwing with people's BIOS, and their security. It's not just illegal, it's unethical, and it's irresponsible.

Now I'm really mad!

Elif Tymes said:

It lets you play your game .

Thanks for the warning, I was contemplating buying XIII. No thank you.

Click to expand...

what!! XIII has that too?
i have that game installed weird stuff

If you want to know if you have it installed goto the device manager. Under View check show hiden and look through System and Non-Plug and Play devices. An entry should be in there.

I have XIII installed as well, and i haven't had a single BSOD... even when playing. It's not choppy either... even on the 6600GT AGP i was running a little while ago before i sold it, it was fantastic actually... i've stopped playing it since the story line didn't interest me that much.

I suggest running "hijack this" and posting the results, i'd assume it's a running process that could be causing the failures.



~ Gos

protection like that shouldnt be allowed imo yea i understand they want to stop copying but would they like it if i made a little game that was addictive like Dopewars and added a little something extra... NO! they wouldnt so why do they do it to us? It's totaly unfair and i suppose if you made a stong enough case you could take the to court for it!

I mean imagine you have two computers (most people do nowadays) and you installed it on your gaming rig or you son plays it at home and then comes to visit and install's it on your work computer and... BSOD ERROR! You've just lost all your work that youve spent the past 2hours on and forgot to save/carn't access becuase the file is corrupted!

I think it should be against the law and if a company installs software withour your knowlage then you should be able to sue them it's like... subseven, back orafice etc, etc

STOP THE UNKNOWN INSTALLS!!!!

For reference XIII and X3 are different games.