Incentives to patch the game?

[Edi]

Jourdelune said:
Anyway, my feelings about that dependency of a game manual:

It is mean to put away any people copying the game and playing it without paying for it.

It's like a cd protection system, but without using it.

"Meant to put away" or "Mean to put away"? A fairly big difference between the meanings there. I presume you meant the first option. I don't understand the CD protection comment, since the Dom3 CDs themselves don't have copy protection that I know of.

Jourdelune said:
And some people on this forum, prefer to don't take chance about piracy and refer to the manual the noob on their forum, hurting the general grow of the community.

We've had our share of pirates here and most often they get caught because they ask obvious questions that would have been answered by reading the manual. Manual referrals generally are not mean-spirited here, though sometimes you do get people snapping at you. Especially for obvious things.

Jourdelune said:
When players are put on a negative mold because the dev try to reduce the piracy, it's simply don't make it. Surely, you got less pirate, but you got less players that would have been interested by the game. The negative mold here is go read your manual.

As you said, Dom3 is a niche game. It's not going to get significantly more (in the sense you're talking about) players even with pirates, and pirates also happen to use bandwidth and other resources that somebody (in this case Shrapnel) must pay for if they come to the forums. There's another word for pirate, and that's "parasite". It's a fact of life that people will resent those who just try to sponge off and since most of the pirates who have been caught here have been caught precisely because of the manual or obvious lack of one, "go read the manual" is not in fact a negative answer. Just skimming it can give you a lot of info.

This does not mean that I have something against you. In fact, now that I look back on the thread, I can understand why you felt that way, but the comment about snarling "RTFM" was meant more generally rather than at you specifically. I admit that is not quite clear from the context. Apologies for that.

Jourdelune said:
In Vanguard it was go back to WOW. Those too are niche market game with negative mold to protect something that don't need to be protect. Protection restrict expansions...

Vanguard is irrelevant here. Krisoffer also gave a fairly good direction as to where the game is going. Dom3 expansions are going to happen along with patches (such as 3.10, which added enough content to be an expansion on its own). The protection scheme on Dom3 does not have any problems restricting adding content to the game. It does make life hard for those pirate Dom3.

Jourdelune said:
Galactic Civilization 4 got the same CD-Key restriction by patches but with 0 cd protection software. (same probs, I cannot update it from home, and worse, I need to update it with the computer the game is installed on) So, when I had bought the game and I had no way to patch my game at home, without internet... what I had think about that game? I had been cheated. I had paid for a buggy games that I cannot update because I don't got internet.

What's the relevance here to Dominions 3? This rant in a Dom3 context puzzles me, since updating Dom3 does not require an active internet connection during the process. The patches are simple executable files.

As for the evil plot, I have no experience of GalCiv, but from the sound of it, the patching issue is done differently from Dom3, so is not relevant here. It is a fact of life that the gaming market is mainly aimed at first world countries where internet connections are common and game design decisions can reflect that. It is usually also said on the box if a connection is required rather than just recommended. With Dom3, it is not even required for anything, since patches can be downloaded elsewhere and transported.