Alright, now we are getting somewhere :)  EA has heard our outcries against the 10 day validation and has removed it for offline play!  Congratulations, guys for joining in the fight.  Why we didn’t get it removed entirely, we will no longer have to worry about our games to cease working.

EA released a statement saying that Spore’s will now allow for offline play and will only requiring validation on a patch or game content update. 

Q: If the game isn’t going to require an authentication every 10 days, will it ever require re-authentication?

A: Only if the player chooses to download new game content.

BioWare Responds to Copy Protection Outcry, Removes 10-day SecuROM Check for the Troops

I’m joining forces with TerraSpore to try to stomp out SecuROM for making its way into Spore (and probably The Sims 3 as well) and would like to hear your voice.  We’ve setup a special email for Maxis which forwards our against to many of their staff members and would like to hear your opinions on this subject.

Originally posted by ManagerJosh

I’m pretty peeved at this mandatory requirement to check in with EA every ten days just to play Spore. It’s absurd. It is silly. It is plain stupid.

Let’s consider the potential scenarios here:

1. There are users out there who want to play Spore but simply don’t have internet access. In this day and age, I know it’s surprising, however there’s still a decent size population. Plus there was a promise that you could play Spore without being online.
2. What if you’re on holiday/vacation? Are you simply gonna play Spore for the first ten days and then have the game suddenly die out on you? Or go to a country where internet is heavily filtered and they block these data from being sent to and from the server?
3. Let’s not forget that we’re depending on EA’s servers here to validate our game. Let’s say the demand overwhelms the servers and we’ve seen this happen too with previous games. People had to validate their titles (I believe just once) but people decided to validate all at the same time that validation servers came crashing to their knees. End result: People paid $50.00 for coasters. Imagine having to renew every ten days and the sheer volume of requests it is processing to validate the games. It isn’t just Spore they are validating here too; they are also validating mass effect users.

This is sheer stupidity and it’s time we speak out. I want everyone to be heard here and let’s get an emails going here to say something about this. It’s arrogant on EA’s part to think we’d put up with this. I’m not and I encourage everyone else not to as well.

I can not give out an email address of Maxis or EA employees as a respect to them, however I’ve setup an email address here at TerraSpore for you to send your complaints and to speak out about this.

The email login has been sent to Maxis and EA for them to view at their leisure.

Send your complaints to maxis <at> terraspore.com

Speak out! Be Heard!

And here are the points from me

Originally posted by Judhudson

More points:

1. I still play SimCity, SimTower, and SimCity 2000. Those games are over a decade old. Are we to expect these servers to still exist when Spore becomes this old?
2. Validating every 10 days, why so? Are those same people who purchase the game plan to suddenly switch to a pirated copy?
3. Technically, EA is now in control of our games now. We are expected to shell out $50 for a product we won’t even control ourselves. With this 10 day rule, we will be told whether we can continue playing or not.
4. I don’t want SecuROM on my PC, PERIOD….It should be a choice, not forced on us.
5. Pirates will find a way to bypass this and in the end, will have better copies than the ones who purchase the games. I don’t understand this. They say those who are mad at this issue are the ones who are going to pirate the games. You can’t be more wrong, because the ones who really decide to pirate won’t even have this problem, as it will already be hacked, leaving only us legit consumers SOL.
6. Like mentioned above, there are still those without internet connection. Some people live in Rural areas and either are connected via using a work PC, library, or relative/friend. You are hurting those people.
7. Say I go on vacation. I’m on the 9th day out of 10 and leave somewhere for 2 weeks with no connection. I take my laptop with me which has Spore installed. So the next day, I’m prompted that I cannot play. Basically, I won’t be able to access my game for those 2 weeks.

I could go on and on with more points. This whole idea is a mess. Honestly, I don’t believe you are the ones to blame, Maxis. This whole fault is probably the idea of a big-wig EA employee.

If this is true, I will NOT tolerate it. I don’t want to be told when I can play my game, and a crack is released which gets rid of SecuROM, I will be supporting it. This might hurt my chances of ever going to visit EA/Maxis headquarters but I will not be stepped on.

 Let your voice be heard, send your email to fight SecuROM to Maxis@TerraSpore.com.  Let them know we will not stand for this!  Otherwise, prepare for SecuROM to be included in other upcoming EA games.