[robertthebard]

It's not a hard position to maintain. The "average punter" (I still like that phrase) would have had no way to know. The guy that reads a couple of review sites prior to release wouldn't know either. Only dedicated gamers would spend the time to research it that deeply, which may be a strike against me being a dedicated gamer, since I didn't research it that deeply.

Another point to ponder is there was no way to predict what the overall affects would be, prior to release. So a lot of dedicated punters would know it had the copy protection, and wouldn't find out until after they installed it that they were going to be locked out of the game, based on the software environment. There is also no way to say what effects it would have on other software, as is what seems likely in my case.

Here we sit, almost a year after the pirated version hit the web the same day as the game hit the shelves, with ineffective third party software punishing the people that did the right thing. The publisher, being fully aware of the problem, simply ignoring it, and hoping the dissatisfied people will go away. People may be tired of hearing about the problems, but people are hearing about the problems because the problems persist. To me, that is the bigger issue than people posting about the problems.