1) paying members should not have to see members-only trainers be posted on the web. this hopefully helps prevent leaked trainers. paying members should not have to worry about paying to be members and then seeing the trainers they paid for be posted on the web somewhere. this is not to harm you but to prevent abuse of your membership by others who would post members-only materials before it is time. i think it would be wrong of us NOT to try and prevent this from happening.

2) the previous methods were working to catch people but didn't stop the spread of posted trainers. we caught many many posters and banned them. however, once the trainer was posted on the web, it's too late. thousands and thousands had access to it at that point. this next step basically kills all copies of the banned member's trainers in existence from working once that member is banned.

What it DOES NOT DO.

1) it does not send your name, financial information, anything personal, or anything to identify YOU as a person. in fact no information goes out of the trainer at all, except to check for internet connectivity. it merely checks with cheathappens to authenticate the trainer and then it runs. if the authentication fails, the trainer will not operate.

2) it does not read your harddrive, your files, capture your keystrokes, anything like that. why would we do something like that to our members? we want you to stay with us and tell others about the site.

some additional notes and questions answered-

1) this is nothing like bioshock or any of the other protections in games. i programmed this myself from scratch and it is the least intrusive way to accomplish what we wanted. you should notice nothing on your end different unless you are banned or your internet connection is off.

2) we can't stop anyone from reversing our trainers or trying to defeat it. i can say that we encoded them to discover who did it and we have banned many who tried in the past. our previous trainer encryptions marked a very sharp decline in unathorized posting. however, we hope this ALSO prevents the spead of unauthorized posted trainers. is anything 100% uncrackable? we didn't say that!

3) i realize this is 'new' for a 'trainer' to have authenticity checks. this might seem crazy to some. however, the thought of people joining a site and paying to download trainers before everyone else was ALSO a 'new' line of thinking. thanks to the paying members, our site has been able to tackle more games and provide more and better content. we just want to protect the members interests and keep the work members only for the short period of time it is in that status. at one time i thought it was crazy to pay for 'platinum' membership at fileplanet to just be able to download files faster from them. but i did it and it really is a benefit to me.

4) you can try removing the internet connection after the trainer is running and see if it continues to run. once the trainer is authenticated at runtime, it should continue to run without internet connection. we felt that most people are connected to the net anyways, especially since they have to download the actual trainer from the net.

5) the reasons we and 'other large corporations' are doing these things is simple. some people are bad. some people don't care about other people and how their actions affect other people. they copy work, post it online, and basically kill all the work and time of the content creators. many publishers are dropping the PC altogether to move to the consoles. there are people that are saying, 'screw you cheathappens members' and then posting the work here on torrents and other sites where thousands can download for free what you are paying for. it might be that the herd continues to wander away, but at some point the things that the herd likes to eat (content) will also begin to drift away as well, as the content creators no longer have the time, energy, or MONEY to continue doing what they do.

6) there is nothing insidious or sinister about the new code within the trainer. if you have an online connection when you start it and you aren't banned, it should start immediately and then you can turn your connection off if you desire and play. you won't have to call support or enter codes or anything. just run it. you can run it on any computer you desire, just make sure you have internet connection at the start.

TokenBad99

If there can be some way for legitimate paying members to use the trainer offline WITHOUT having to go thru the online check every single time, for those situations where one may be without internet then i can deal with the rest of my personal gripes.

As it stands i'll be in said situation pretty soon, i'll be off w/ a laptop and no internet and i'd like to use the trainer but obviously now i won't be able to.

i have no idea how we can check the authenticity of a trainer without going online to check it. any ideas are welcome, but we looked at this long and hard. if there are 5000 copies of a leaked trainer on the net i can't think of any other way to shut them all down without some sort of online check-

best,
Cal

[Edited by hdf13, 4/9/2008 7:48:56 AM]

Upon running the trainer, have an entry somewhere for the user to enter in a username and password. This of course will be the username and pass to a VALID unlimited membership account. If validated, have it save something on the PC somewhere so that the trainer can be run on this PC indefinitely without an online check.

This way, you still get your check, and you can validate the rightful owner (ie, check the encrypted information vs the actual username and pass, if the info entered is NOT matching then the trainer will not run).

Unfortunately, that would not solve the problem. One could still give out his/her credentials with the trainer. Ofc., eventually he/she would be banned, but, too late by than... However, if the trainer needs reauth. every day... ohh, right, no, the resetting the clock problem still persists...

We also wanted to avoid having to authenticate or send any information to us so that we don't have any privacy issues.