Can't play an EA game via geforce now due to quitting a couple of times in one day

orgrinrt@lemmy.world to Mildly Infuriating@lemmy.world – 567 points –

I’ve been getting into mass effect trilogy finally, and since I don’t own a gaming pc, I like to play through GeForce Now.

Well, just now I had some things come up a couple of times a row and I quit my game a few times, and now I can’t continue because of some sort of lock mechanism against playing on multiple computers…?

Did not know this is a thing, but I have a few vacation days and wanted to get this series properly started, so it’s a little bit annoying. Who knows how long I have to wait?

Ugh…

Edit:

Talking with EA support, they informed me that the wait is 24 hours. Jesus christ that is long for something like this. There goes my vacation day opportunity…

Edit2:

Wow! The customer support really pulled through, suggested they request a password change on my account from their side.

Turns out, this seems to toggle that flag, and I could now start the game! Hooray! Akash, my man, you saved the day! Cheers 🍻

72

This is such a tragedy. DisplayName field missing from registry was one of my favorite games growing up.

I torrented it at first but enjoyed it so much that I ended up buying DisplayName field missing from registry once I had a stable job and some extra disposable income

Piracy is completely justified.

How would that help in this case?

Not having to deal with EA's bullshit

OP said they don't have a gaming PC, meaning something capable of playing games at full spec

Pffft, just download some more RAM. You'd download a car, wouldn't you? 😂

Piracy is never justified. The solution is to not buy or use games from EA if anything.

Piracy is justified if it's to run abandonware, to bypass a broken DRM protection scheme blocking legitimate users from playing what they paid for, and for historical purposes (archiving, etc).

or if it costs 300 bucks in my 3rd world country, for a game that will probably be unfinished.

If you don't own the software when you buy it, it's not stealing to pirate it.

That's not true in the least. The smart move is to use alternative software.

I bet you watch ads, too.

Not OP, but I typically only pirate games if they're unavailable for purchase in a more legal way. Like PS2 games, for example.

Most of the modern games I buy these days are from developers I genuinely want to support and see more from, like Atlus or Vanillaware.

And, no, I use uBlock Origin.

Well no, I just stay away from proprietary software. For the internet I use ublock origin.

Courageous to make such a comment on Lemmy, where the community will bend over backwards to justify piracy.

Meme00144

Did you not read the part where they don't have a fucking computer? 🤦‍♂️

All these people can't read apparently. Just about every comment is like this.

It's a hate on not only DRM, but all paid services pretty much

Meanwhile somewhere out there a pirate is enjoying it right now

Can you run pirated games on GFN?

No, for that you need Shadow or some other cloud service that basically is a full PC available for you.

Of course you should transfer it from your machine or similar don't go and start downloading a torrent from the machine.

Worse, a console gamer. It's £5.99 right now on PSN. Barely worth pirating for that.

I'm 100% for piracy, but you forgot the step where the game you're pirating has been provided by 1500 other trackers and 1461 of those have been modified to bundle malware/spyware/ransomware...etc many users may never notice it, a lot will be caught by antivirus, but some will not.

Edit: I'm a software dev branching into security. The more I learn the harder it gets to find the actual source for cracked software and the more I notice just how sketch most are.

Example: It's not a great policy to eat whatever food you find first, regardless of where it was and who made it, and hope your immune system (antivirus example) takes care of it. Eventually you'll get burnt.

It sounds like you've been browsing some pretty sketchy websites. I have yet to find malware bundled in torrents from trustworthy trackers. And I've been pirating for many years.

Feeling sorry for you. Hopefully at least your cautionary tale is a lesson to readers here that giving any money to EA ever is a bad thing.

Thanks, though it’s not a huge deal. Just happen to have my vacation days now, and it would have been great time to play. I guess I have to figure something else out for today 🙈

Unfortunately I don’t think you can play this game without the EA launcher and DRM, so if one wants this experience, one has to also experience the entirety of EA with all of its malices and quirks..

It IS a big deal though, that's the whole point.

You had plans for today. You paid money for a service so you could make those plans happen, and then now your plans are toast. You paid money for nothing.

If you paid for a package holiday and then got denied boarding the plane for some garbage reason like "you've exceeded your maximum flight hours for today" (WTF?!l) then you'd be MAD and rightfully so.

Sure, this is just a game. It's less important. But the principle is identical and your reaction should be to feel cheated and robbed,not just shrug and let EA get away with not giving you the service but still taking your money.

Edit: I see you got in at last. I'm happy for you! :)

I get your sentiment, and agree somewhat, but I was able to play it prior as well as later, even if I had to wait 24 hours. So I didn’t pay for nothing, and if you meant gfn, then I was still fully able to use the service for everything else.

However, I did make efforts to right the situation, which I think is much better than simply complaining and feeling robbed. Those efforts brought fruit, too, and I was back playing in an hour.

But I still do see your general point and agree in the sense that we really should fight for our rights, and if unable to do so, strive to better things for others, so they need not fight 😌

Well as many people have already said, if you had a capable PC and a cracked version of the game, you can experience the game while forgoing EA's bullshit.

Glad the support person was able to work something out for you in the end, though.

Yeah, they should just sit quietly in their room never enjoying any video games!

Yeah, they should just sit quietly in their room never enjoying any video games!

Are you from a parallel universe where every single video game is by EA?

No, but they are a troll who thinks negative karma is a video game high score competition

Ah, I can see how this could happen. Each time you log on you get a different VM and EA didn't think about that before tossing the game up on geforce now (assuming that's how it works; never used the service. If you installed the game yourself then I guess it sucks that's how their DRM works).

Yup, this is likely the exact reason this happens. Oversight on their part. I contacted support and they told me they’d forward this further up The chain, I think this isn’t intended behavior for that safeguard lock, but rather stop account sharing or something like that.

Just need to check if running on gfn system and not playing an online game (which could have some problems with system hopping for bans or something maybe? Doesn’t seem likely but at least there’s a vector for malicious use, unlike in single player games), and if both are true, just skip the check.

We’ll see. I just got informed it’s a full 24h lock, and it’s set on the launcher servers somehow, which is not accessible on the account data. It’s launcher data, which means the customer support reps can’t do anything about it 😅

Just great stuff, EA never disappoints.

Well I don't think this is true, I used proton and still got this error

Did you happen to run it with different versions of proton? Each version would possibly be identified as a different "system".

I see EA is out of ideas for naming their games, and has started naming their game "DisplayName field¨.

Update: It seems requesting a password change from support side toggles the flag and lets you start the game again.

Unsure if this works multiple times, but at least for me, it worked, and this was my first time this happened.

Worth a shot people! If you ever find yourself on a similar situation

Do you have any PC at all? Mass Effect should even run on weaker PCs.

But yeah, these kinds of problems are why I won't bother with cloud gaming. Have you contacted support?

Yeah, the problem is disk space. I have a mobile dev workstation, which means I don’t need huge amounts of disk space, so I cheaped on that aspect when buying it. Can’t fit the entire Legendary Edition on this thing, even if it could play it.

Did contact support, they can’t help with this. Hopefully it gets forwarded upwards enough so that at some point this is fixed.

FWIW, memory is getting pretty cheap, it feels. a samsung 980 m.2 card with a terabyte on it are "only" 80. a seagate 1t drive is like... 56.

I find it difficult to imagine a game (or even three,) requiring a terabyte's worth of data. of course, bloated game devs are probably already passing their beer off to prove me wrong.

And thunderbolt/usb3/usb4 M.2 enclosures exist and are quite cheap if you don't have a slot in the laptop.

Except for Apple. The pricing for their ssds is still the one everyone else was charging a decade ago,

For example on the Mac mini they have the courage to ask those prices:

  • $200 for 256 gb
  • $400 for 750 gb
  • $800 for 1750 gb

Same for the RAM, $200 for 8gb (of ddr4 until a few months ago!) and so on

IDK, I've heard that MSFS can get pretty big once you start installing everything plus the cached imagery. Relatively quickly I found a post from someone that was using over 700GB and I assume that doesn't include the dynamic cached map/scenery.

As much as I hate EA and everything they stand for, their customer support has pulled through for me on more than one occasion. Props to them

This seems like an obvious bug with the licensing check in the game, or maybe an oversight by nvidia. (bug because one would think it would be adjusted for geforcenow) Why dont you contact nvidia customer service? Ive never used geforce now, but their shield departement is really good.

I did contact NVIDIA customer support too, but haven’t heard back since the ticket was not real-time chat. EA customer support was a chat though, and resolved the problem for me 😌

I’ll see what NVIDIA responds back. I think this might have some work for steam too, since I play this EA game via steam, but EA is not officially playable via GFN, but steam is. So I think there’s a lot of complications there to shift through.

I did try to contact steam too, but they have no contact info for this kind of problem, rather forwarded to EA.

Genuinely curious since my games stack there automatically. Is it a good launcher? I've never looked into it more than updating my graphics cards.

You may be thinking of the GeForce Experience app.

Cloud gaming is trash

Fair enough, it’s certainly worse than the alternative.

However, when unable to exercise the alternative, it’s nice to have an option to still experience and play games.

That's what you get for subscribing to something you could be getting for free.

Not that I don't agree with you, but that comment is kinda snarky

They state they don't have a gaming computer and play it through geforce now, is that actually possible for free?