Starforce Serial Activation Key
Honestly, for me the Starforce DRM was a reason to stay away from DCS for a long time. There is nothing really good to say about Starforce, other than that it is not as bad as 10 years ago. Now mind you, DCS is worth the money and the eventual trouble you MIGHT find with DRM. When I first bought the A-10C, and was first time in my new shiny cockpit, all reservations about the DRM were forgotten.
Manual reactivation is similar to manual activation: go to the ProActive website and enter the Serial Number and the Hardware Code to the corresponding fields. After pressing 'Get Activation Key' you will obtain an Activation Key to reactivate and run your application. After completing #4, the StarForce activation key window will appear (Fig.2). Enter your Serial Number in the field at the bottom of the window.
And as example: I am having a problem with the MiG-21 Module & Activation right now, I wrote a email to Leather Neck Studios and had a response in a few hours.:) Just to clarify, this is the first activation trouble I am having in over 2 years of DCS nerdiness with all modules. Hi peterako - Info on the DRM - The DRM is used because DCS is sold outside of Steam (actually sold for years before it came here) and that it's an activation/deactivate tech that allows your machine to be offline, i.e. You can activate via emails rather than your machine having to have a net connection (important for some DCS customers). - The tech is called 'Proactive AAA', although it was the same company that previously made the controversial Starforce drivers.
This DRM doesn't use drivers or Ring0 or anything like that, and actually requires less permissions than running Steam. - You get 10 machine activation, with an activation given back once a month. You can also deactivate first before wiping your machine (say before a big hardware upgrade) to avoid 'losing' an activation. There's a FAQ here, plus a section in each quick start guide per module: Hope that helps! You get 10 activations, once the last one is used up it *should* regenerate once a month.
I lost 1 activation upgrading my PC 1 activation to a program/system bug that triggered false re-activations I should have ignored and 1 activation from each of the 4 modules I owned/rented (at that time) when my PC got a virus/system hook and I had to wipe my hard drive to be sure of removing it. I still have 7 activations left on the A-10C module which I've owned for 2 years. The DRM is the worst thing about DCSW and it kept me away from the product but it's one of the very few modern combat simulators still available/in development and so deserves support. You keep getting activations because you press CTRL or Shift keys while launching, that forces the activation window to come up. Spravka o srednespisochnoj chislennosti rabotnikov obrazec rb.
Simply click exit, instead of next. StarForce in the past had issues, but those were for those who were trying to hack it.
Really, StarForce ran a challenge to prove that by itself it doesn't cause problems, but only if you start messing with it. StarForce got a lot of flack for something it didn't do wrong. People are just unforgiving, and like to steal stuff, and StarForce prevented that, as it's a good DRM.
The StarForce in DCS is newest version with online activations, and doesn't have any of those issues, as well as it's not really crackable, as it authenticates the key with the server, and check on every login to multiplayer. It was never proven that it did damage anyones optical drive. I can make claims that steam erased my windows but until I can prove that it did its just a stupid statement from a possibly stupid person. I'm all for CDKEY (serial key) checks it has and remains to be the best way to stop people from pirating online video games, and its no wonder companies want to move to always online forms of DRM -- it actually works. Also define damage, damage as in broken hardware or damage as in the driver for your cdrom drive is not working anymore until you reinstall it or windows to fix the software issue. What DRM didn't say may cause cdrom issues if virtual drives are detected etc etc etc, was standard warning like careful hot, because some dofus spilled his coffee on his privates while in the drive through. Old starforce was not good don't get me wrong but it was one of the most effective of its time and for that it got targeted over other DRMs.