Many months ago, I dusted off my copy of Sins of a Solar Empire. At that time, there were a lot of good mods coming out, the company had promised to fix their 2 gig memory foolishness, and they even had a post on their page saying that they had optimizations in the works for a patch. As it was a outfit with a US address, and not a Russian or Czech company, I was willing to give it another chance. I played a little, then decided to order both the expansions. They seemed like solid improvements, so I played a little more. Then out came the beta version of the patch, and I decided to test it to see if they had really solved the memory issue. I went on to Impulse to DL the beta, and the site informed me that I couldn't, because my expansions weren't registered. Strange, since they should have been on activation of the downloads. Then Impulse told me that the game keys were no good, and that I bought a DL version of the original game. This was curious, since I've got the dusty CD case and the documentation with the correct key on it sitting right here. I decided that it might simply be that something wasn't installed correctly, so the next logical step was to reinstall the expansions. So I uninstalled them and then went online to DL them again and reinstall, but at that point, my purchased DLs didn't show up at all. Nothing except my receipts and the deductions from my bank account indicate that they were ever purchased. Impulse cannot find any record of the purchase, and one of the receipts (not moved out of its folder and locked in time) indicates that the serial number is safely stored on Impulse. I cannot download the game again, as records of my purchase cannot be found. The information I request regarding my purchase refers me to Impulse, instead of doing anything useful. Really? The next logical step was to look around the web for similar incidents; I found legions of similar issues. I also visited the forum, and read numerous complaints by people who have had similar experiences (I don't think it's much of a stretch to assume that even more have been deleted, because they really, really reflect badly on Stardock, as well as others). Still, I filed a technical support request and received a ticket, and will wait and see. I suspect I will be waiting a long time, judging by the dates of the incidents and the "unresolved" status of many of the individuals posting in various places around the web. So let me say this for the official record: there is a problem with the exchange of information between Stardock's record keeping and Impulse. Using a service like Impulse was unnecessary and as manifestly foolish as limiting the game memory to 2 gigs. There is ample evidence that this continues to be a problem of which you are aware, and of which you are not addressing in a timely fashion. Please correct this situation before other customers are affected.
Using a service like Impulse was unnecessary and as manifestly foolish as limiting the game memory to 2 gigs.
You have a legitimate complaint, but I have issue with this. The reason they are willing to patch the game so often is that they can be sure only their customers are receiving them via Impulse, and the 2gig limit is a computing issue that effects every 32 bit piece of software. Supreme Commander for example had to deal with it as well.
As for your games disappearing, you might want to post this in the technical section, where SD guys might see it faster.
I'll second that.
The main purpose to selecting that form of release is to circumvent consumer laws providing for archive copies of properly licensed software and to collect and maintain personal information and gaming habits. These systems are hard to maintain, and even harder to secure. An excellent example of a company that has had its share of issues regarding both would be Steam. There are other, better solutions that require less complexity, involve less risk of loss of data, and are more secure; all of which still provide a reasonable degree of copy protection. With digital downloads, you already have all the information you need to provide the paying customers with notification of and authorization for direct updates. Other companies have chosen to execute updates using the game interface itself and a secure server. In all cases, however, the more electronic layers a company places between itself and its customers, the more chances there are for something to go wrong, which is exactly what happened. THAT is why I posted that it is a problem, and that is why I called it a foolish choice. There are other reasons as well, which I'm sure will occur to you after some reflection.
Supreme Commander is a horrible example. It was a hastily coded, borrowed concept, class "C" rated piece of garbage. Innovative companies came up with work around ideas for the 2 gig issue. Games like Homeworld avoided the issue entirely through optimization. Others, such as the Flashpoint and Arma series, exploited the massive amounts of memory that were already being wired into graphics cards. Sins of a Solar Empire is the only 32 bit application I have ever owned which suffered from this issue. Stardock is not the first company to rely on a rather foolish premise. Remember when Bill Gates said that no one would ever need more than 4K of RAM? I do. That was short-sighted too, wasn't it? In any event, the choice to dump at 2 gigs has long since been made. The choice to establish Impulse is far more recent, and falls along the same lines.
There are other reasons as well, which I'm sure will occur to you after some reflection
I have reflected on such things quite a bit, and a condescending tone will get you no where.
I highly enjoyed Supreme Commander, but if you are determined to hate it that's up to you. Anyways as we speak Stardock has released a beta patch for diplomacy that greatly optimizes the engine (they claim it should rarely go above 1.3 gigs now), so this problem should soon be corrected.
From what I can tell, Stardock is a stand-up company that doesn't want its customers to suffer from having to put up with nasty DRM. Just get in touch with them and I'm sure they'll try to help you solve your problem. In fact you can type-chat with them live on IRC. Go to irc.stardock.com channel #stardock during the day (North American time).
There's an archive option in Impulse specifically for creating a backup...
Not to mention, Impulse itself makes your original disk the backup by negating the need to ever use it. There's no cd check, and you can install over the net any time you want to.
You may have a valid complaint here, but the rest of your beef is gross ignorance on the issues at hand.
Said archive option also allows you to keep old versions of your games, particularly good to play mods that are built for older versions, but have become invalidated by updates.
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