Requiring CD to play

I have been an avid PC game fan for a long time. Over the years, it has been come increasingly popular for game makers to require that the game CD/DVD be in the drive in order to be able to start/play the game. This, to me, is one of the stupidest things game makers have done and a while back I decided I was fed up with it. After all, my PC has a hard drive big enough to hold all the games I regularly play and much more.

It doesn't annoy me to use the CD to install the game; or even to have to enter a CD key once. However, after that is done, I should never have to touch the game CDs again - if I wanted to do that, I would have bought a gaming console :p . Swapping CDs every time I want to play each of the 5-10 games I regularly play is just not fun.

To this end, I decided a while back that I would buy no game which required me to use the CD while playing. Given that so many games require CDs, I gave in a little and decided to allow myself to buy games to which a no-CD crack is available.

I dislike it, but have decided to live with it. It's not so bad when you have more than one cd drive though.

I uh...find other ways to remove that problem...

I dislike it, swapping cd's is a pain.
I usually get a program like alcohol 52% (google it) to make some virtual cd's for my most used disks (Diablo II :) ). Much better solution than having to dig through for cracks, but Eats up hard drive like a whore though. Almost anything better than having to dig through my massive collection of coasters for the cd.

I cannot stand always swapping out cds all the time when playing games. I just decided to live with it.

It's really annoying, damages the CD, and makes little sense. I live it, almost daily. Swapping cd's seems almost like a national pastime. What really irked me recently was the new Patch for BF1942, now instead of just using the RtR cd for the game and mods (don't want my BF cd scratched) I have to use the BF cd, and if and I want to play RtR (yeah right) I have to switch the CD again just of an expansion, what a pain! I tried Clone-CD and similar programs but was never satified, and I can usually only find a few no-cd hacks that actually work.

Years ago I was hoping Hard drives would be big enough to hold the entire contents of a CD, soon enough this came true. I was like "WOW" now I can just install the game, like I did my floppy games, and not have to worry about messing up my CDs or loosing it. Now today, almost every game forces you to play with the CD, seems kinda backwards to me. Also, when I'm LAN gaming and everyone wants to play a different game it always takes at least 5-10 mintutes for everyone to locate their game CD under the pizza boxes and soda cans.

Come on guys, everyone here knows that 99% of the time this requirement is not due to hard drive space restrictions, unless you opt for a smaller installation of the program, it is done as a measure to help curb piracy. If they make it so you can't burn the CD, and then require you to have the disk in the drive to play, you reduce people pirating the game. This won't stop some one with enough determination to work around the burn proofing technology and locating/making no CD cracks, but on average, most people just won't go to the extent needed to get around this.

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Originally posted by Un4given
most people

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;) Seriously, I agree.

i know this sounds weird to most but i buy my games and i still use no cd cracks for it because i hate having to find my cd's :mad:

getting no cd cracks these days is as easy as going into google and typing the name of the game and adding "no cd crack" at the end of it...while this may stop the average user who thinks his celeron and geforce 4 mx is good...it still doesn't eliminate the majority of people who know that there's no cd cracks out there...I buy my games and all...but having the cd always in the drive when playing is not the answer...cd keys and authentication is a much more bigger hassle for others than no cd cracks...in one of the ut2k3 patches they took out the cd support thing and that's a step in the right direction...

or just going to the infamous filtered www.*************.com ;)

Frankly, I could care less if they want to curb piracy or not. I buy all my games legally and am annoyed that I have to use CDs when it is quite obvious that the game would run perfectly fine and load faster if running only off the hard drive. Ironically, the fact that no-cd cracks and virtual CD software exists means that anyone who wants to pirate the game will do it anyways; its those of us who paid for the software in the first place that get hosed.

I dont like disc swapping... I usually do a complete install but some games require the CD to be in the drive before it would execute. Its annoying but I learned to live with it :)

Well...I freaking HATE swapping CD's, my CD drive is a loud SOB, and when I boot up Morrowind, it takes FOREVER to get that stupid thing to wind down.

Anyway, why can't they bring back the 'code' wheel? anyone remember that form of copy protection? :) Or even getting so far into the game and having to input the third character of the fifth word of the 4th paragraph of page 124 of the manual? :)


Ahhh, the good ol' days..

Quote:

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Originally posted by Astros Fan
Well...I freaking HATE swapping CD's, my CD drive is a loud SOB, and when I boot up Morrowind, it takes FOREVER to get that stupid thing to wind down.

Anyway, why can't they bring back the 'code' wheel? anyone remember that form of copy protection? :) Or even getting so far into the game and having to input the third character of the fifth word of the 4th paragraph of page 124 of the manual? :)


Ahhh, the good ol' days..

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The problem I see with that is most games nowadays doesn't come with a printed manual.

Bastards!