I have had my fair share of installation problems aswell, but then again, running full raid causes problems with more than a few games. As for imaging programs, i have 4 installed out of nesessity, and 11 active imaging drives due to the work i do. I can assure you i KNOW about installation problems.
All the online activation scripts are meant to work smoothly, and true they do, but they are easy enough to bypass, which is what i referred to with MS and HL. It took them less than a week, to come up with a authentication emulator. The irony of the emulator, is its a smaller file than the 6mb activation file. and you only download it once!! you dont need to download it everytime you play the game, or everytime the game gets the urge to authenticate your code.
With the date issue, again the need for internet, the very thing that type of protection is meant to NOT need. and a authentication server is easy enough to emulate.
I think choosing / creating a protection script is one of the most difficult things to do ever. (not the physical coding) The process of making it compatible with the very programs that is made to bypass it, yet to have those programs no be able to make the protection any more unsecure. The choise of what type of headaches you are going to put your clientelle through. Its a situation that you just cant win in. Someone somewhere will be unhappy, someone somewhere will say "i am not going to buy XXX because of the XXX protection", someone somewhere WILL crack the code and publish it.. Personally i think it is so wrong that these measures are a nessesity.
I am one of the unlucky people that very often need to apply patches, just to get a legal game working on my system. But then again, i hope that most gaming machines arnt burdened with hi-end video conversion tools and devices, my pc is acting as my universe though... if it crashes, i am out of orbit.
This is a situation where there are no right / wrong answers, even the answers that seem best at the time, are bound to either be too insecure, too easy to bypass, or have too many headaches attached.
Please do not understand me wrong, i am not against any of your ideas, in the case that their weaknesses can be overcome, they are great ideas, but they do have weaknesses, as has every protection on the market at the moment.
