Cant play with friends or any games on demo

[Mr.Racoon]

wont let me play anygames on demo

[bert_the_turtle]

Yep. It's been that way for some weeks now. It's not a bug, it's on purpose.

(IV may want to update the info on the webpage about what the demo can do, though.)

[Wasgood]

Wait what?
No games on the demo?
That's catastrophic (or if intentional EXTREMELY stupid.)

[Mr.Racoon]

wait? what? why? so we cant play a game 1v1 no more?

[sfericz]

Sure you can, buy the game.

It wasn't stupid for IV's behalf. A lot of long playing demos bought the game because of it.

[Mr.Racoon]

Yah but were poor so we cant buy it and plus i want my friends to try it out but they want me to teach them then they block out the demo

[Mr.Racoon]

you know its just like saying "you cant play it if you dont have money"

[sfericz]

Hahaha, no its not.
Its saying "We worked hard to make this game, so you should at least pay something."

If you own a computer, you have a internet bill....then you should be able afford a 10-20 dollar game.
If you can't, I would suggest losing the internet bill and go get a second job.

[Ace Rimmer]

Or rather; "The game has been out for nearly three years now, couldn't you have saved $/€/£1 every couple of months and bought the game by now?"

[Mr.Racoon]

this is an odd question but cant we just mail the money?

[sfericz]

You might have a better chance of getting that question answered by using this method.

Although someone from Introversion still might see your question here, you never know.

[estel]

Where was this change actually stated publically by IV?

[sfericz]

There is something about it on the M.O.T.D. when you start Defcon, but it's not precise to what demo limits there are. Other than that, I don't know.

[area]

Okay, I can see why they've done this, but my friends and I ran into the following situation today.

Two of us downloaded the DEFCON demo, and had a quick game - just the two of us, neither of us using our keys, default settings. (Is this even meant to be possible? If not, that invalidates the rest of the post...)

Third friend arrives, wants to play. The two of us already playing actually have keys, just not on the machines we were using. We look up our keys, drop them into the authentication fields... and between the three of us, with two valid keys, we can do exactly the same as we could with two demo versions (without, admittedly, non-default options). We cannot have a game involving all three of us.

Does this not seem a touch inconsistent? With the addition of two keys, we gained very little functionality. If we had only added one key to the mix, we'd have not been able to play at all!

I'm not expecting any sort of change or upheaval, I'm just wondering if there's a further subtle explanation or justification that we've missed.

[bert_the_turtle]

(Is this even meant to be possible? If not, that invalidates the rest of the post...)

The instructions the metaserver publishes say that DEMO clients should not be able to host games, and on the Internet, that is true; the metaserver filters out DEMO keys. However, on a LAN, it seems it's still possible to host DEMO games. That probably is unintended, but not enough of an issue to publish a fix, especially considering that there would be no incentive for anyone to actually install this fix.