What Are These Morons Smoking?

Last week the Phantasy Star Online 2 community was in an uproar after Sega of Japan pushed a GameGuard update that caused all kinds of nasty side effects on players' PCs. The update was pulled back shortly after.

So what do you do if you're Sega of Japan and you have this broken GameGuard patch sitting around? Try to push it out again, of course! The update reappeared earlier today and is now wreaking havoc on user PCs for a second time.

The effects of the patch were immediately visible on my PC:



After that, pretty much everything stopped working. I had to do a hard shutdown of my PC because I couldn't even get Windows to reboot!

What the hell is going on here?

There is absolutely no excuse for this level of incompetence. NO EXCUSE. Hell, there is no excuse for this piece of shit GameGuard software to even be allowed to shut down processes without the user's knowledge or permission, especially when those processes are critical to the proper function of the operating system!

So this is the bottom line: until Sega of Japan gets their shit together and fixes this problem, I am done with PSO2. Since I'm an American, I realize they probably don't care about what I do, but I'm confident that there are plenty of Japanese players saying the same thing.

In the meantime, I will spend my time looking for a way to play PSO2 without running GameGuard. I am tired of putting up with this shit and I will not tolerate it fucking up my PC anymore.

Also, I sincerely hope that Sega of America is watching this debacle and taking notes. If this situation is allowed to repeat itself on the US/EU version, then fuck it – I won't play. And I'm probably not the only one saying this, either. GameGuard is a renegade piece of shit malware program and should be wiped off the face of the earth forever.

Rant over. I'm out of here.

GameGuard Rollback

After the PSO2 GameGuard update earlier this week, I posted a small rant about GameGuard's incredible ability to protect users from their own PCs.

It turns out that not being able to open Volume Mixer was the least of my worries. Other PSO2 players reported BSODs and frozen computers. The update apparently even caused Windows to report itself as "not genuine" in some cases.

Thankfully, Sega noticed the problem. A GameGuard update was issued today that appears to roll back this week's Windows-breaking change. Sega is encouraging players that experience problems with GameGuard to send a report; details can be found by clicking the link above.

I'd like to hope that this is the first step in getting GameGuard removed entirely, but I'm not holding my breath.

Yes, GameGuard Still Sucks

Last night I decided that I would listen to other music while playing PSO2 for a change. Unfortunately, I was having a hard time hearing the game's sound effects over my music, even after cranking the sound effects up to 100% in-game. So I thought I'd go into the Windows Volume Mixer and turn up the game's master volume. Easy enough, right?

Nope. A recent GameGuard update now blocks access to the Volume Mixer while PSO2 is running. Attempting to open it generates the nifty window you see above instead.

It is still a mystery to me as to why online games continue to use the piece of shit that is nProtect GameGuard. It's well documented that GameGuard is useless, and the recent NPC incident is further evidence of that. In fact, GameGuard seems to do a better job of blocking innocuous programs (like Volume Mixer) than malicious ones.

Companies like Sega that produce multiplayer online games need to wake up and find a solution that is better than GameGuard. An in-house developed anti-cheat system that is integrated into the game software would probably do a much better job. In fact, anything would.

Alternatively, I implore developers of antivirus software to take notice of GameGuard and do something about it. It has all the characteristics of a common computer virus, so why not label it as such? Maybe then companies that use GameGuard will think twice about using it in their next game.

Everybody Relax

Earlier this week, Sega of Japan apparently updated the Terms of Service for Phantasy Star Online 2 to mention that connections to the game servers from outside Japan were no longer allowed (including via proxy). This sent the PSO-World forums into a panic and caused people to invent all kinds of crazy rumors about IP bans.

To make matters worse, gaming blog Kotaku apparently picked up on this community freak-out and posted their own poorly-worded take on the issue.

Here's the bottom line: despite what Kotaku and the folks on PSO-World would have you believe, nobody has been banned from the game servers for living outside Japan. So log on and play (after downloading the huge content patch), have fun, and RELAX!