Beitrag von: Aura am September 29, 2013, 01:04:34 Nachmittag
Although gaming time wasn't the only reason for not playing The Walking Dead more often. Frustration was another reason.
Telltale Games, the developers of The Walking Dead, use an online DRM (digital rights management) system to combat piracy. I hate online DRM. With a fucking passion. And if I'd known that The Walking Dead used it, I would have never have bought it. Telltale Games has simply the worst possible implementation of online DRM possible. I've had no end of problems with the thing, and its never been because my internet was out. For sure, that's one issue with online DRM, that you can't play your games if a snowstorm knocks your internet offline, but that's never been my issue with Telltale Games.
My issue is that when their servers go down, you can't play the game. And their servers go down frequently. When I finished the first episode of the game, I wanted to continue. So I clicked the button to download the second episode. Their servers were down for over eight hours. When I want to play a game, especially a single-player game, it is annoying as hell when I'm unable to because of issues beyond my own hardware.
My second, and larger issue, is that if you update your profile on their website, the game is clueless to the change, and offers no remedy to update manually. I had updated my Telltale Games website password for some reason, but the game itself gave no method of syncing the change. So I was locked out of playing the game for three days, because the game told me I no longer had a license. It doesn't offer up an option of re-inputting a username and password, it just directs you to their website to purchase the game. Straight up stupid design.
My customer support email was equally genius:
I apologize for the inconvenience. We are currently looking into the cause of this issue to find a fix for it. Unfortunately, at this time there is no solution. It?s possible that deleting The Walking Dead registry keys will resolve this issue, but we cannot provide any information on how to do this, you may want to look online to find out how. Please note that by deleting registry keys it?s possible you can harm your install of Windows. We hope to find a solution that is more ideal as soon as we can.So maybe you can fix it by messing in the registry, but we can't tell you how, because secrets. Or something.
Thank you for your patience, and I apologize again for the inconvenience,
Customer Support
I was unable to find any help via Google, so I just started messing around with regedit.exe. Searched for all keys with the word "Telltale" and eventually came up with a solution on my own.
Find the registry entry for the folder HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Telltale Games, then delete the entire Launcher subfolder (this holds your username and password.) Restart The Walking Dead. Since the username and password keys no longer exist, the game prompts you to re-enter your username and password. Voila! You can play again.
Why the hell Telltale Games couldn't have just told me that, I have no idea. Bunch of tools working over there, obviously.
I was, at one time, interested in a couple of their other titles. Back to the Future and The Wolf Among Us. Not anymore. Fuck online DRM. And fuck terrible customer support. DRM does nothing but inconvenience actual paying customers. If Telltale Games thinks their not-so-nifty little system has actually stopped their games from being cracked and pirated, they are very wrong. All they're doing is pissing off the people who have given them money.
I was going to start talking about the game at this point. And I will. But I'll leave that for a separate post. Let's leave the angry here in this post. And actual praise for the game in another. The game developers and art people aren't responsible for stupid corporate policies. They designed a fun and intense game, outside of the inane DRM policies forced upon them.
(And you guys thought I was only hard on CCP Games? The level of stupid in Telltale Games far exceeds any of the cow patties that CCP Games occasionally steps into.)
Source: The Walking Dead ? Online DRM and Customer Support (http://)