Ubisoft Steals ‘No-CD Crack’ to Fix Rainbox 6: Vegas 2
Written by Ben Jones on July 18, 2008“Piracy is BAD” proclaims every copyright dependent industry lobby group. “Downloading is stealing” is another popular one. How about “downloads are a lost sale”? Ubisoft clearly didn’t believe that last one, as they distributed a no-cd patch from the scene group RELOADED as a fix for one of their games.
Piracy can be a funny business at times, but the rhetoric is often extremely predictable. So when something unexpected happens it can knock you off your stride. Something like… a major game publisher distributing a Scene no-cd crack as a fix would do it, for instance. If it sounds unlikely, that’s because sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. In this case, the publisher is Ubisoft, the game ‘Rainbow Six: Vegas 2‘, and the Scene ‘no-cd’ crack – yes that’s there as well.
The situation revolves around that oddest of characters, Direct2Drive (D2D) - an online games store, owned by IGN, selling games over the Internet as protected downloads. Game code is modified to prevent the standard retail DRM from inhibiting game play (as there is no actual disc to check for) with Trymedia activation utilized instead. More importantly, since the code around the DRM has been modified and changed to a different system, regular patches from the game developers can’t be used. Instead, patches must be reworked by D2D to accommodate these changes. These changes are not always quick, a point D2D does try and defuse in its FAQ.
Thus we come to Rainbow Six: Vegas2 (R6V2) which, since its release in March, has had three patches released for it. The third, 1.03 provides a lot of changes, including new play modes, so legitimate purchasers of the game were eager to try it. The problem is, those that bought it via D2D can’t use it. This is the problem inherent in DRM. Those that buy the product are the ones affected, not those the DRM is designed to defeat.
After lots of complaining and attempts to fix things themselves, one Ubisoft employee found a solution. A zip file was uploaded to the help/support site, named “R6Vegas2_fix.zip”.
If D2D users patched to 1.02, then replaced the EXE with this one, they could then update to the new patch. However, someone ran a hex edit and it appears the fix was not Ubisoft code but actually a ‘no-cd’ crack released by the Scene group RELOADED, as shown here.
Since then, the zip file containing the fix has been pulled from the Ubisoft support site, so we’re unable to verify. The game’s community is as baffled by this as everyone else. Since the claimed origin of the fix, 10 days ago, there has been no word on it officially from Ubisoft, beyond a ‘Community Manager’ who states
We’re looking into this further as this was not the UK Support team that posted this, however if it is an executable that does not need the disc I doubt it has come from an external source. There’d be very little point doing so when we already own the original unprotected executable.
As soon as we find out more about this we’ll let you know.
_________________
Ubi.Vigil
Community Manager
Ubisoft UK
Although it is not unknown for a Scene release to be used to ‘fix’ a retail product, it’s certainly rare to have that fact promoted. That the ‘no-cd’ patch works, might have some relation to how brutal the Scene is when it comes to the quality of their work, especially in games. Whilst this is a validation that the Scene isn’t as bad as the lobby groups would have you believe (they fixed the game, and did it for free) you can bet that Ubisoft won’t be smiling at E3, and that they, and Direct2Drive, will continue to use DRM to annoy and inconvenience paying customers.
Previously: UK File-Sharers and the “Wireless Defense”
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61 Responses
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Haha.. yet again the pirates do a better job then the scores of programmers can do..
Pathetic..
I love it, RELOADED should sue over copyright infringement….LMAO
@2- LOL! Good one!
Yeah reloaded is awesome. The funny thing is.. ive heard more people downloading cracks to games they legally own then I hear people actuley cracking it to pirate.
People DO have problems with the DRM crap these companies torture there customers with, and when you try and get support, they tell you your a pirate and ignore you.
What these companies don’t realize is, without these cracking teams they would be less successful.. people don’t want to have to put a stupid plastic disc in every time they want to play a game.. this isn’t Super Nintendo days anymore, you don’t have to have big cartridges to play a game.. neither should you have a PLASTIC DISC. I have a computer that doesn’t even HAVE a CD rom drive, because its not necessary. There are better more efficient ways to load data on a computer.
The irony…
Sounds more like they’ll do anything to get out of actually working.
Really interesting… probably the programmers were too lazy to program a no-cd fix themselves and one already had or just found that crack…
(Like the saying “When something already exists, why recreate the same thing?”)
Very interesting strategy…
I hope it stays that way, with the difference that game companies distribute no longer DRM versions at all and stand to their own updates, not investigate them… good work stays good work, doesn’t matter who made it, once released…
Typical money-grubbing have-it-both-ways corporates fuxx.
Havent EA done this before? cant remember the game….
I’m not sure how these no-cd cracks work…but isn’t it possible that the Scene crack was just a leaked copy of the original unprotected executable in the first place? So when the Ubisoft tech put up internal code, it appeared identical to the crack which was already available from Reloaded?
Like I said, I’m not really familiar with the technologies involved here, it just seems to me like that might be a possibility.
Louis, if that were the case, then the reason the fix contained tags for the scene release would be??
The only way the fix would have the tags would be for it to come from the reloaded release.
Of course, again I must point out that I, as yet, have not seen this ‘fix’ zip so can’t verify it.
stupid americans show their true colors once again lol
yeah unreal tournament 2004 used the crack made by the scene in patch 3369… (the final patch)
lolu wud have thought they cud have least stolen off a decent cracking group instead of rld…
wasnt this just another one of rld’s crack that used that vm shit?
maybe vitality nxt time eh ubisoft?
@Zz
You morron, this is a french companie, it was made in their Montreal, Canada, studio.
So I guess Studid anti-american showed their true colors once again
Great work RELOADED ;)
http://forums.ubi.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/1991064316/m/1691091476
see, it’s the incompetence that losing you money, not piracy
Google cache someone?
yea waiting for a vitality proper :P
http://forums.ubi.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/1991064316/m/1381029176
> “lolu wud have thought they cud have least stolen off a decent cracking group instead of rld…
wasnt this just another one of rld’s crack that used that vm shit?
maybe vitality nxt time eh ubisoft?”
What’s wrong with Reloaded?
Or in leet scene talk: “wtz rng wt rld?”.
@22
“What’s wrong with Reloaded?”
like all of their rls’s are nuked and then propered by vitality… (as said before ususally do to a poor crack (e.g. VM crack..))
Ontop that they are a generally just poor group that make a mess of things (see assassin’s creed)
not complaing, just commenting…
and i dont no whos comment u where reading @ the time but the onli one of those abbriviations (?) i used was rld(=reloaded)
and thats cos its their tag… (see any of their rls’s
(rls means release…)
THAT’S UBI-SOFT FUCKED THEN
The first thing I do after buying any game is to get a nocd crack.
Why should I break my cd drive by having keep inserting it whenever i want to play the game.
If it don’t need shit off the cd, it don’t it fullstop.
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