🚀 go-pugleaf

On Mon, 08 Sep 2008 22:51:26 -0700, Tim Smith
<reply_in_group@mouse-potato.com> wrote:

>In article <94b9b5835db6b616cfdd9f7dd549cf0b@pseudo.borked.net>,
> DC <nobody@pseudo.borked.net> wrote:
>> 1Up.com http://atu.ca/647
>> 
>> If you take a look at Spore's listing on Amazon.com 
>> http://atu.ca/SPORE you may be surprised to notice that the 
>> game (as of this writing) has an abysmal user rating of one-
>> and-a-half stars. But that isn't necessarily an indictment 
>> of the game's quality -- out of 184 customer reviews, 159 
>> are one-star ratings, and just about all of them have one 
>> thing in common: pure, vile hatred of the game's digital 
>> rights management, or DRM (via Destructoid).
>
>Quite a few of them have something else in common: they are from people 
>who either have not written any amazon reviews before this, or are from 
>people that had one or two reviews a long time ago, plus a negative 
>Kindle review a year ago, and now this.
>
>I don't know how widespread that is, but there is definitely some kind 
>of organized attempt to rig the vote.
>
>This wouldn't be the first time.  There's some anti-DRM people 
>systematically tagging Kindle books with anti-DRM terms and slogans.
>
>It's not just anti-DRM people who try to manipulate Amazon.  When Ron 
>Paul's book came out, there was a call on a popular Paul website to go 
>give the book five stars, and links to that quickly circulated.  It very 
>quickly got several hundred 5 star reviews, and each of those was voted 
>as helpful by hundreds of people (yup...not only did the Paul flock 
>members have time to go to Amazon, make new accounts, and add 5 star 
>reviews, they had time to go vote up each other's reviews).  
>
>-- 
>--Tim Smith

Hey, Tim.

I have refused to buy EA's Mass Effect because it uses the same DRM as
Spore, akthough I would really like to buy the game. I have never
pirated any computer-games, so a torrent alternative is not a personal
option. In the case of Spore, it seems a universally awful game from
my personal view, but I can understand the DRM uproar from those who
would like to play the game. EA is in the process of acquiring Take
Two, so while thay are in that process, they might just consider
copying the Bioshock DRM scheme - 5 installations, each RECOVERABLE
whenever the game is uninstalled. Easily implemented in a patch to
Spore or Mass Effect. Bioshock originally had a far more stringent DRM
scheme, but (unlike EA so far) Take Two/2K Games listened to the
customers and migrated to the current DRM scheme after the first 2
patches - applicable to all copies of the game regardless of purchase
time.

John Lewis