No-CD and No-Ad, updated at Suttree - Casual Games, Social Software

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A while back I briefly mentioned that the idiom of No-CD patches for games, where games that use a copy protection scheme of requiring the CD to be present in the drive whilst playing are often pirated with a No-CD patch attached. This makes the pirated version more user friendly than the valid, purchased one, a pattern that is very recognisable from music and film DRM.

Naturally, someone was going to take up the batton, and this article goes into the gory details of Massive’s ad protocol. The technical details are interesting, but I’m not surprised at the data collected and returned to Massive, even though the author is:

The most shocking part was next. The client contacted madserver to tell the advertisers how long the gamer spent with each advert in their view. This is mapped to the gamer id, so they know which player in the game saw the advert, and when, for how long, and from how far away (by virtue of the size attribute). Even the average viewing angle is passed back.

However, the article ends with a simple fix for disabling the ads, a No-Ad patch of course:

In order to prevent this ‘functionality’, the server can be prevented from being contacted by placing the following lines in either /etc/hosts on UNIX, or %WINDIR%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts on Windows.

127.0.0.1   madserver.net
127.0.0.1   ad.madserver.net
127.0.0.1   imp.madserver.net
127.0.0.1   media.madserver.net

Just a matter of time. Although, it’s one more nail in the coffin of PC games, as you can’t edit the hosts file on a console.

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Suttree.com: Casual Games, Social Software by Duncan Gough