Avatempest wrote...
NWN DM & Axe Murderer,
Neither of your comments is particularly helpful.
You both seem to be arguing that Bioware has no culpability for the CD Keys they stored. The simple fact is that both legally and ethically they do. By agreeing to store the keys on their website they in fact assumed responsibility for those keys. And before you argue that it was a “free service†think about free checking accounts at banks, you wouldn’t accept a bank “losing†your money just because you had a free account would you? It’s no different for Bioware. Now I don’t blame Bioware for this, I blame the lame a—hole hackers, but I do expect Bioware to make good on their obligations, and I have great faith that they will do the "right thing" on their own simply because that’s the kind of company Bioware has demonstrated themselves to be. And if doing the right thing isn’t enough then they could do it to protect future sales by keeping their customers happy. If I were Bioware I would make a patch to completely remove the need for cd keys for all of their NWN 1 products (all expansions, and all premium mods). The good will bought by giving away a product that is beyond its useful revenue life would be money well spent, not to mention being able to write off the “cost†as advertising.
Suggestion: Don't go into law. It will be an expensive and time-consuming adventure for you.
Bioware never provided a secure storage facility for CD-keys. If members decided to use it that way, that is their own doing but nothing legally binding was EVER stipulated in word, via insinuation or in writing. The fact there was no algorithm check done as the codes were entered is a give-away, and therefore no guarantee that even if emailed back they would actually be valid. And that suggests that it was nothing more than a convenience that could be gleaned by users if they wanted to skip the hunt for their own physical copy amongst their own records. So Bioware is in no way obligated to compensate for a lack of back-up measures of their clients. They furnished the codes when the discs were purchased and unless they were proved unusable and new ones were requested, that was the end of their liability to furnish working codes.
Whether it is a matter of Public Relations or not to assist their former clients (There is no longer any Bioware anymore, just a staff employed by EA, BTW) is a whole other issue. It seems all forms of inconvenience have been ignored by EA/Atari (or whoever is willing to step forward to claim the intellectual property called NWN) whether it concerns CD-keys, the maintenance of the master server or the vast member knowledge base that took years to amass.
So, those who "appear" to be hard-hearted in their responses are simply being pragmatic. They are providing, in their view, the path of least resistance to restoring some playability to the game, if that is truly a person's desire. Is it worth additional funds to procure the means to play it? That is an individual decision that each of may face. But they can wait around for some sort of mystical resolution to occur, another individual decision. The track record not good and getting worse with each passing week.
Corporations make economic decisions, not those based on sentimentality. What was once a more intimately sculptured business has been absorbed into the reality of revenues vs. expenditures. And NWN, apparently, is no longer an expenditure that their business can justify on the balance sheet. If one would wake-up and smell the coffee they'd recognize that gaming is catering more to kids than old farts now that they have uncovered the recipe to market games globally. Those kids, their potential future customers, could not care less about NWN. And we all know what facinates them in today's world, don't we?
