Friday 2 March 2012

I am BatSecuROM

This has been a fairly leisurely week, given that NF finished on Sunday and Uni lectures do not begin for me until Tuesday night next week.

I spent some time going through android development tutorials, had another karate class on Tuesday and made the first of my lists. I have gone through my Steam, Desura, GOG and even my ubisoft and telltale accounts to record all of the games that I own that have some kind of relevant completion status and recorded it.

It was a fairly lengthy process and I was pleased when it was done. The plan is to maintain this list, adding and moving around games as I either complete or abandon them, including some notes as I do so along with more substantial posts here. The current priority game (marked in bold) is Batman: Arkham City, as there are a couple of posts on Shamus Young's blog I want to read that I have reason to believe are a little spoileriffic regarding this title. This is only likely to last until next Thursday when I pick up Mass Effect 3.

That said I haven't been playing as much Batman as I would like because of the DRM that it uses. Warner Bros decided that the DRM provided by GFWL and in my case also Steam was simply insufficient for their needs, they also needed SecuROM. Not something I approve of but also not a DRM that has caused problems for me in the past.

However, now it has requested to activate 4 times on my PC, each time using up one of the "This title can be activated on only 5 machines" uses. I find this particularly strange given that I have made no hardware changes to my machine and licence specifically gives two limits, one on PCs and one on activations. There is no activation revocation tool for it either, unlike Arkham Asylum.

After the 4th activation I decided I had had enough and contacted Warner Bros support to ask them 1) Why is this happening and 2) Can I get the limit increased/removed or have all my existing activations revoked so I would be able to start again. They responded fairly quickly and said this is a SecuROM issue, please contact SecuROM support.

I then contact SecuROM support with the same questions and they take a fair bit longer. They finally replied this morning with a short response saying unfortunately we cannot raise the limit, with matters regarding this we have been asked to refer you to the publisher support. Which is a bit frustrating given the circumstances. I have responded by providing them with the initial email and response from Warner Bros and requested that even if they cannot raise the limit they can answer the question regarding why it would request extra activations and revoke my current activations.

Now to wait a few more days I guess. I can't play much at the moment anyway since this weekend I am in Mudgee, a place to which Batman is ill-suited.

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