I had a pirated copy of WC3 available to me via a vulnerability in my school's AD setup which allowed me to access another student's directory where it was installed.

I would play it almost exclusively in a web design class I took. That class was where I learned HTML; that wasn't the focus of the class, not by a long shot, but it was the thing that captured my interest the most. I ignored everything else in that class in favor of the Wintermaul Tower Defense custom map.

Along the same lines I loved the Serious Sam solution to piracy. They let you play but spawned an invincible enemy occasionally to ruin the experience.

https://www.thesixthaxis.com/2011/12/08/how-to-get-rid-of-th...

C&C Generals had a thing where if you had multiple clients with the same CD key in a multiplayer game everything would be fine for a while, but 10 minutes into the game all the buildings of the people who duplciate keys would explode.

This happened a few times at LAN parties to my friends, some of whome gave each other the game by copying the install directory across. Took us a while to work out what the hell was happening.

Which is interesting because Starcraft had a specific "Spawn Install" so you could have two people play multiplayer from the same license.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spawn_installation

I wish this were more common. This is how games should be made and played, imo.

Don't really get the idea behind fighting cheating in SP games - you just destroy the game for yourself. In MP on the other hand you destroy it for others. Maybe some kind of telemetry + ML analysis could help here as the current methods seem to have holes in them that get found out eventually.

Piracy is not Cheating (or rather it is, but a different kind: cheating the developer out of his money):)

How buggy was it?

I remember in Settlers 2 or something (before Ubisoft ruined it) the iron smelter was producing pigs in pirated versions.

However, it wasn't extremely good at detecting them leading to pissed off legit players.

No idea, my first encounter with Serious Sam was a cheap Steam bundle so it never happened to me. They're really fun over the top games and hearing about that "feature" it made so much sense. The developers definitely prioritize fun over taking things seriously (no pun intended).

Oh I've played all the Serious Sams :) It's about the only modern 3d shooter series I can still stomach. Battlefield of Honor of Duty and derivatives take themselves too seriously and are too much for hypercompetitive dudebros.

This is a neat little reference to pig iron, probably the only kind of iron one could produce with a settlers style smelting operation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_iron

These sort of protections are fine until they trigger on legitimate installations. Red Alert 2 has a copy protection mechanism that destroyed all of your buildings a minute into the game, but it is notorious for triggering on legitimate installations of the game. I've seen it happen in the original release (even on a fresh Windows install when I was attempting to resolve this issue), The First Decade rerelease, and the Origin release.

The creator of Game Dev Tycoon, a game where you play as a small indie studio owner, created a patched version of the game and released it in piratebay. In this version after a while you would get an event that your latest game creation was cracked and uploaded to a pirate site and as a result your revenues would tank and you would go bankrupt.

EarthBound took a similar approach with it's anti-piracy measures if you work around the obvious ones. There are far, far more enemies to make the game less enjoyable. They also added random freezes when entering certain areas. If you managed got to the final boss despite everything else, it freezes and deletes your save.

Did they lose, or did they just have a lot of fun coming up with ways to mess with people?

They tried very hard to stop it. Eventually the lead developer of the WarForge (emulated server) effort was approached with a job offer from Blizzard.

One thing about Blizzard is they’re extremely litigious wrt to piracy and emulated servers. See WoW, etc..

Blizzard didnt lose the battle in terms of customer experience. Those people mostly played in servers like ggarena with low populations, kinda like WoW.

Custom games and ladder were usually clear, besides map hackers in custom games. Every few months things would be wack (remember the enemy workers are sheep hack?), but it was pretty fair

> Blizzard didnt lose the battle in terms of customer experience. Those people mostly played in servers like ggarena with low populations, kinda like WoW.

They most certainly did in this case. This was for the private beta of WC3, not the fully released game. Most people migrated to official Battle.net when WC3 was released, I know I did. They really wanted to keep their private beta private and polish it without the entire world looking in on it.