Activations and why they suck
I understand the whole idea behind activations. Your a software company and you don’t want people to steal your product. You come up with a way that even if the baddies get your software they can’t use it. It makes sense on paper – like Communisim. In practice it doesn’t stop the baddies and only aggravates legitamte users – like me.
I had to rebuild my Mac and my game system this weekend because I ran out of space on my Mac and bought some new hard drives. I used the old hard drives out of the Mac to create a three drive stripe in my game system. This meant a total re-install of both the Mac and my game system.
Windows XP activation worked great – I guess it detected that the only thing that changed was the hard drive and activated over the internet just fine.
Adobe Photoshop CS2 on my Mac wouldn’t reactivate and I had to call a 1 800 number and plead my case. I was chastised for not deactivating the software first and thereby releasing my existing activation – what? Like I should know how your stupid system works? Well at least I was able to get it working again.
On my game system all the Ubisoft games refused to activate again: Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic and Might and Magic V. When the activation fails you get a nice message directing you to a website, support.ubisoft.com and to request manual activation. Of course when you get to the site there is nothing, nowhere mentioning manual activation. Not a single item in the knowledge base. I finally had to submit three different tickets for my three games. Now if I was a warez cow pirate I could be playing my games right now. So here I am an honest person that spent ~150 dollars on software that I can’t use until the company says I can.
I am sick and tired of being treated like a criminal.
P.S. Fuck You Ubisoft
