I say we....
Say all the negative things about Tribes 2 and why, since its down for now, and almost everyone is probably bored.
I hated Tribes 2 because there wasn't enough freedom in the game.
i.e:
'They didn't give us the option to build our own vehicles, with our own ability to draw a vehicle accessory in 3ds max, or other programs, or able to have 2 chat boxes in game. 1 for the origional game chat, and one on the left hand side for the actual T2 Chat, so you can chat and play at the same time, but whilst being able to talk to your buddies if they don't want to play.'
But, I believe those options could of at least been added in the patches, if possible, it would greatly improve tribes 2, and the population.
I hated Tribes 2 because there wasn't enough freedom in the game.
i.e:
'They didn't give us the option to build our own vehicles, with our own ability to draw a vehicle accessory in 3ds max, or other programs, or able to have 2 chat boxes in game. 1 for the origional game chat, and one on the left hand side for the actual T2 Chat, so you can chat and play at the same time, but whilst being able to talk to your buddies if they don't want to play.'
But, I believe those options could of at least been added in the patches, if possible, it would greatly improve tribes 2, and the population.
Comments
As far as negative things though, the population really sweltered down after the boost with the release of T:V. What it really needs is for vivendi to work out some digital distribution so we can catch a whole pile of new players instead of just the odd random person who happens to pick up one of the prints in a bargain bin.
Well...
Nevermind.
The only thing I dont get is, How the heck do they get all of these keys? Just buying like 15 copies of the game or something?
But that was only for a VERY limited time
Consider a game that has a 30 character alphanumeric CD key (pretty typical). This allows 48873677980689257489322752273774603865660850176 possible combinations of letters and numbers. For a scale comparison, that is the number of atoms of iron in a solid iron sphere 1915.34 times the volume of the earth. Let's call this huge set "A".
Now, consider a the highly unrealistic goal of selling 100,000,000,000 games. Produce algorithm "M", to randomly consider a subset of "A", and produce a set of valid installation keys, called set "B".
Randomly choosing from set A and getting a value that is in the intersection between A and B is one in 48873677980689257489322752273774603865. If you could test 10,000,000 sequences per second (which could be possible on a modern machine), the sun would still have burned out 55.3 billion times over before you would get a valid combination on average. Of course... nobody brute forces these keys.
The single player check can be attacked in a much more simple manner by reverse engineering algorithm "M" through disassembly and executable analysis. So, if you are trying to get a key that works online, you are several dozen orders of magnitude closer to your objective.
However, online authentication does not accept all keys from set "B". It has a more specific algorithm (call it "N") than used to make set "B", which further reduces the available combinations to say... 100,000 keys. Since you do not have access to any representation of algorithm "N", other than through attempting to play online with a set "B" key, your only option is to brute force 100,000,000,000 keys to find the 100,000 valid. This gives you a 1 in 1,000,000 shot per key test.
The online verification oracles usually take a few seconds to verify your key. Imagine it takes 5 seconds to verify your key. How long does it take to find a key? About 58 days of continually testing keys. I imagine the verification oracle will recognize the brute force attempt before you test 50 keys.
The size of the sets are there for illustrative purposes. In real CD key schemes, set "B" will be substantially larger (covering perhaps 0.5% of the set "A" space, so about 20 orders of magnitude bigger), while set "C" is fairly realistic (maybe off by 1 order of magnitude).
I've heard stories of people getting random CD keys to work online, but I have never really seen it. I don't think it is probable considering how easy it is to make CD-key schemes essentially unbreakable in any practical time period. There may be a brain-dead programmer that really fucked up in creating algorithms "M" and "N" for a specific game, but I think that would have to be done intentionally for "B" and "C" to be close enough to be useful.
i get about 8 accounts so all of my friends could play and then i told someone who played meltdown 2 with me a lot and before I knew it he had told everyone else. eventually the page got shut down.