Starcraft 2 - worth buying?

[Kevin]

Anyone remember Sacred? You had to have the physical disc in the drive when you wanted to play (normal, no real complaints there besides I don't want to dig up the disc each time), but every single patch it would break the validation for different cd rom manufacturers and models. Every single patch a new round of legitimate users who wouldn't be able to play because it wouldn't recognize that they did in fact have the game in the drive. Apart from all the other bugs it had, that one made the game completely unacceptable. Once you get to the point where your customers can't use the game they bought because of the horrible anti-piracy (but the pirates can still play), it's gone too far.

Hah, how could I forget, I was glad I was mostly able to get around that crap for the legit copies we had, but I do remember having to fight with it most patches.

I did like how Stardock handled this issue for Galactic Civilizations II though. No copy protection on the media, but if you didn't register and validate you didn't get patches, and finding the patches elsewhere was difficult. The game was very fun and playable without them, but they added enough additional content to make it worthwhile, being registered was hassle free too. You also couldn't validate on the support forums without it, but you could still post and stuff. But they flat out said, they knew it would be pirated, they didn't want you to, but that was fine. They were also aware that they garnered new customers because of this too.

But it was refreshing to see a company say, yeah, it happens, but the effect is not huge, we trust the folks that are going to pay will pay and the folks that are going to pirate are going to pirate, why inconvenience our paying customers? The devs had to fight marketing pretty hard to get them to do this, as marketing wanted the copy protection and all the anti piracy stuff they could get. They were very public, even posting discussions from legal and stuff about it. Was refreshing.