Anti-Piracy Solution

[wootersl]

I know my opinion won't matter to a hill of beans. But, I just wanted to vent. I think you Anti-Piracy technique stinks. I have to wait 1-2 Business Days to wait to use the program I bought?! Why can't you just send an email to the email on account and allow auto update of a license move? This is frustrating and ridiculous. Ok. Off soap box.

[Colen]

Hi wootersl,

For most license updates, we automatically just reassign the license to the new machine. The exception is when you transfer the license more than once every 4 months. In that case, the license is flagged for manual processing to ensure that your license details haven't been stolen / someone hasn't given their license number to all they friends / etc. We don't like having to do this, but we've also been to multiple conventions and had people talking right outside our booth about buying one copy of Army Builder and sharing it among themselves.

How many computers are you using Army Builder on? If you're using AB on more than one computer, you need to make sure each of your computers is using a *different* license number. Each computer needs its own license number to run properly - you can activate your free secondary license from the License menu, then use your new license number on your second computer to get up and running.

This is often the cause of unexpected (and repeated) license reassignments, so if you're running AB on more than one computer, please verify that each computer is using a different license number.

Hope this helps - please let me know if that clarifies things.

[wootersl]

Yes. I know how your lovely licensing system works. (That was sarcasm if you missed it). I have 2 licenses. My secondary one is the one I am -still- waiting to move to a new machine that I had to reinstall windows on because of a hard drive crash.

You want suggestions for better piracy protection? Why not have an automated system where you have to have to reenter your credit card number and 3 digit code. No one is going to share that with anyone.

Also, you method is also not full proof, it's just annoying to us responsible adults who don't want to screw you over. For those who want to cheat the system, they still will and it doesn't bother them to take the extra steps you impose to save themselves money. Just saying.

[Colen]

I just looked over the query you submitted to technical support. Based on our records, the license you submitted a request for has had two transfers since February this year - it was transferred from a Windows XP computer to a Windows 7 computer in February, and then back to that same Windows XP computer in May. That's why you triggered the manual verification - your license had already been transferred twice within the last 6 months.

Unfortunately regarding your proposed solution, it's both impractical (we don't have a credit card record for all our customers, such as those who purchase a physical copy of Hero Lab in a game store) and against the rules of our credit card processing agreement - credit card processors are not permitted to retain the 3 digit code in any way after the transaction.

Not only that, what happens when you get a new credit card? Now we need a way for someone to update their records when they've already got rid of their old card - based on the number of emails we get from people who have changed their email address and forgotten the old one, this would be very common.

I understand your frustration, but this is just something there just isn't an easy answer to - whichever method we choose to use, there will always be some people who are inconvenienced because of unusual circumstances like this. We're working on reducing our customer support wait times to mitigate this as much as possible, and hope to improve the Hero Lab licensing mechanism to avoid issues like this in the future.

I've authorized your license for early reassignment, so you should be good to go. Please double-check that you're not moving licenses between different computers in future, and you hopefully won't run into this problem again.

Hope this helps!