GamersNexus wrote a piece that claimed Mirror's Edge: Catalyst has DRM that limits the number of hardware changes to four. According to an email from EA's press contact, it turns out that GamersNexus' article is not accurate. According to EA PR, if Origin detects five activations in a single day, the user will need to wait until 24 hours after their first activation to attempt again.
So you can change your hardware as many times as you want over the life of the game, just not more than four times in a single day, on a single account at least.
Image Credit: GamersNexus
This message didn't seem to say what they were implying it did. Turns out, it doesn't.
I decided to ask EA when I read the error message that GamersNexus posted — the article's interpretation didn't seem right. The wording was as follows: “Too many computers have accessed this account's version of Mirror's Edge(TM) Catalyst recently. Please try again later.” It seemed very odd to me that the wording “recently” and “Please try again later” would be attached to a permanent bricking of the game.
Again, it turns out that this is not the case, unless our press contact was not up to date about this specific title. As much as I dislike DRM, being a proponent of art preservation and archival, this part of Mirror's Edge's DRM should not affect the vast majority of users. This is something that should only affect people who are literally benchmarking a half-dozen (or so) graphics cards.
In short, it sounds like this is a non-issue after all.
Only people that change
Only people that change hardware 4 or 5 times a day is reviewers and even then most reviewers don’t do that less its a new product launch and they get all those cards in at once.
That’s fair. But it does stop
That's fair. But it does stop me from producing a story on Mirrors Edge with 10 cards for you. 🙂
I’m not sure what to think,
I’m not sure what to think, on one hand this won’t effect 99% of users, on the other benchmarking ect is not rare, and it bugs me the idea that if you boot a game you own on five systems, it’ll lock you out for 24hrs. It seems to me like the best solution is to have a system to register that waives this restriction, while still allowing a close eye to be kept on piracy.
Outside of people doing
Outside of people doing hardware reviews, trying to test many diff hardware configuration’s this would effect no one past that. 5 installs a day that resets daily i would say is pretty lax compared to some that are only 5 installs period before you have to put in a support request for.
“It’s okay that they are
“It’s okay that they are burning our fingertips, at least they aren’t cutting them off!”
well said, you got a nice
well said, you got a nice chuckle out of me.
Then they burn to the point
Then they burn to the point where you have to cut them off in the future due to cell death, necrosis, sepsis and the like.