Quote Originally Posted by Raz View Post
What issues can arise from StarForce copy protection? I'm rather unfamiliar with it and after reading the wikipedia article, I'm still somewhat clueless.
It simply says "instability", "crashes" and difficulty in its removal. It doesn't tell much more than that, though. Any further info?
It's basically the worst copy protection scheme I've ever encountered in my 20+ years of PC gaming, and that's saying a lot.

It causes tons and tons of stability issues, and outright breaks a lot of older games from about 1998-2005ish that use older versions of Securom (and lots of other copy protection mechanisms) due to the way it inserts itself into your driver and kernel stack. The most infamous one, which I experienced directly, is that due to how it forces your optical drives to operate (PIO mode I think) which is an ancient, ancient slow setting, it can cause them to wear out hundreds of times faster and die. In hindsight, I thought it only killed one, but now that I think about it it actually killed two dvd drives in my old PC. I tried everything, from manually realligning the lasers to cleaning them out, you name it, but they were dead. To put this in perspective, those are the ONLY two optical drives I've ever had die on me, and I've gone through a LOT of them, hell when I was cleaning out my "history of computing" parts bins I found the very first CD drive ever ever bought 17 year ago, and it still worked like a champ. Optical drives are hard to kill and last ages.

I'd recommend googling "Starforce Sucks" for the biggest anti-starforce site and a list of games that use it, I avoid them like the plague. The other thing to keep in mind is that for every guy like me who's had tons of problems with it, you'll find paid shills spreading "Oh you're full of nonsense that's extremely rare" FUD right alongside the discussions and complaints. Unfortunately a lot of the LOMAC diehard fans fall into this category, so beware when spelunking into forums for those games.