A few gamers who purchased Command and Conquer Red Alert 3 encountered a problem with their installs—EA had misprinted some of the serial numbers needed for activation. While the necessary code was 20 characters long, they’d only printed 19-character codes.
No biggie. The logical solution is that EA supplies customers with new codes, which they’re happy to do if you’re willing to photograph your serial and email it in. Otherwise, they’ve offered the public what must be one of the saddest “workarounds” in DRM history:
“There is currently a work around that may allow you to bypass this issue. Since you have the first 19 characters of the code already, you can basically try “guessing” the last character. To do this, simply enter your existing code, and then for the last character, try the letters A-Z, and then the numbers 0-9. You should eventually get the right combination, and be able to play the game.”
In other words, try all 36 possible combinations and you’ll get there soon enough. If you’ve been shorted the complete serial number, we’d recommend guessing all 1.33674945 × 10^31 combinations.
Reminds me of when I first went to university and decided to buy myself a copy of Sim City, which came with this obnoxious little card that you reference to get the right semiphores to activate the game. I hadn’t been there a week before someone gave me a new version of the game that had that “security feature” cracked…. talk about how to drive people into software piracy.
Serials sucks. It’s amazing that they’ve not figured out a better and more seamless way of dealing with piracy.
Some companies don’t want to retain their customers.
What a bunch of ass hats.
This isn’t a surprise. The short-sightedness of these people are astounding. Even worse, is that even if you /do/ get a new code, you can’t exactly have it reprinted and mailed to you, it’s just an e-mail.. easily lost.
The owners need to stop wuss’in around and go to The Pirate Bay and download the crack.
#5, Freyer,
Write it down on the box !!!
#6, Ah Yea,
Although I usually dislike suggesting an “illegal” solution, sometimes that is the answer.
What’s the big deal? An old game on the discount shelf. Sheeit, shouldn’t have paid for it in the first place. Usenet or Peer to Peer have many good copies of this game, most packaged with serial numbers and the security patch – (that’s how I played this game). Anywhoos – nowadays the game companies are finally getting smart. Making online aspects of the game more attractive so they can control piracy automatically from server – WBTW is the best anti-piracy system so far. I think in the future we’ll see much less dependence on SECUROM and the rest and much more control from online games that need online servers from which authenticity is more easily controlled.
Had to buy a Vista machine recently to replace my old PC. Out of twenty fairly new games only two worked.
“Although I usually dislike suggesting an “illegal” solution, sometimes that is the answer.”
I had this happen to me on my service contract for my computer. The people I had the service contract with would not deal with me without the last digit.
The people that sold me the computer ended up doing the work for free because even they could not resolve the problem with the service contract people.
go online and input the first 19 characters of the S/N into a search engine. It will do the rest!
A simple strategy to weed out to the REAL gamers. Its the pre-game game. A feature, not a bug. I’m surprised they don’t charge extra for the bonus..
I thought that guessing the last digit was part of the game.
Which was by far the most challenging part.
I can’t wait to play it a gain.