No life in T Minus 10 days 17 hours

[ComplexNuber]

http://countdown.free-and-online.com/?timer=ogpsfl3112

Skyrim is finally on the horizon. I remember viewing a countdown when it was still over 60 days left. Feels surreal to be so close now! I just have to devise a plan to isolate myself from the rest of the world as best I can for when I finally get it. University grades come out a day before release, but I think I won't have to put up with any backlash since I averaged ~85-90.

Other than that, BF 3 is also out Anyone been playing? I ordered mine from the UK since it's half price from countries with sane game pricing. It should arrive about 2 days before Skyrim.

I have 2 jugs of water, a lock on the door and headphones prepared so far. I just need to find a food/snack that will keep me going and won't get messy around the PC. This will get hectic...

[Armory]

I'm excited as all hell too.

[Centaur]

Are you absolutely sure that you want to install and play BF3? In Germany lots of people are returning the game to retailers, because of the way EA's Origin.exe (which is part of the BF3 installation) behaves... it appears to monitor the behavior of other software running on your PC, and communicate to the EA server about this. In other words: it's behaving as Spyware.

For example the german gamers discovered that Origin.exe collects information about a bookkeeping program and software for mobile phones.

[Winterbay]

That sound sslightly like the copy protection scheme used by Darkfall which I uninstalled (a shame since I liked the gameplay) when my anti-virus started complaining that it was doing some really fishy stuff...

[ComplexNuber]

Ugh, yeah, that's the worst part of BF3. But I haven't seen much actual evidence that it does steal valuable information (it does look for what games you have installed on your PC when installing, but that's understandable IMO). That said I've heard of some sort of "Sandbox" software that isolates a program from accessing anything on your PC, to my understanding. It could be worth trying it. I hate Origin (to the point where I'm actually starting to like Steam...) and I hate EA but I've loved BF ever since I started going to a local LAN-host with some friends where we played BF1942 for hours on end.

I also hear the SP is abysmal since it gives 0 freedom and it's all linear, but that seems to be missing the point of buying a BF game.

[ComplexNuber]

That sound sslightly like the copy protection scheme used by Darkfall which I uninstalled (a shame since I liked the gameplay) when my anti-virus started complaining that it was doing some really fishy stuff...

Are you sure? Anti-Viruses tend to detect games as false positives. When I was using AVG I got warnings on about 10-20% of my games, saying that they were some sort of virus. So far Comodo seems to be doing a better job.

[Winterbay]

Are you sure? Anti-Viruses tend to detect games as false positives. When I was using AVG I got warnings on about 10-20% of my games, saying that they were some sort of virus. So far Comodo seems to be doing a better job.

It's the only game it's ever reacted to, and by anti-virus I actually mean spyware search program (in this case AdAware by Lavasoft). A quick google at the time indicated that it was not a false positive, but it could've been wrong I guess.

[Centaur]

Most Antivirus programs do a pretty good job eliminating false positives. Ofcourse there are incidents when a game (or other piece of software) is falsely recognized, but usually those are fixed within a week after the game's release.
I only ever had 1 false positive in my entire games collection (I'm using Avast antivirus and Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware), and that was fixed within 24 hours.

If you download 'illegal' copies of games, the cracks and keygens included in those will usually generate warnings... and a lot of those aren't even false positives. In the current generation of software, those cracks and keygens will often appear to work correctly, while also (without you noticing) installing a virus or spyware - of a form much more harmful than what EA's origin.exe does... ie. the type of software you get here can actually collect game accounts and passwords, website login info, online banking data, etc.

[ComplexNuber]

If you download 'illegal' copies of games, the cracks and keygens included in those will usually generate warnings... and a lot of those aren't even false positives. In the current generation of software, those cracks and keygens will often appear to work correctly

I have it happen with several steam games. I've had the impression that AVG is just rubbish. I used to get more alerts on steam games than those 'illegal' games (no idea what we're talking about here *shifty eyes*). However the ones that did get detected were definitely much less popular than the ones that didn't. Things like iBomber Defence, and I think Shining Force. Looking at my Steam library, me saying 10-20% was hyperbole, probably more like 3-5%. Maybe 5 or 6 games.

Anyway, I've heard that some AV companies mark certain pirated software as a virus even if there is none just to help prevent piracy. Come to think of it, I've heard plenty of shifty things about them, ie. That they pay people to create and spread viruses so people will need to use/buy their software.

[Centaur]

Yes, it's true that AV companies mark cracks and keygens as malware. And it used to be fairly safe to ignore those warnings. However, the current generation of trojan programmers knows about this convention as well, and they use that to their advantage to build in actual trojans or malware. Not too long ago, one of my friends ignored such a warning from his antivirus tool when running a keygen. He got the key he was looking for, and was able to unlock the software he wanted to use, but as a side effect, all his .exes were infected after the next system reboot... leaving him no other option than to reinstall his entire system.