Classic British Flight Sim

Ive quite a few captain sim products that i have paid for and had some for a while. however during a recent re-install i got a message stating that i had installed this addon on more than 3 computers and to contact their customer support team !!HAaaaaa!!!

after about 2 weeks i got a responce stating that i had infact installed it on more than 3 computers and it was up to me to prove i hadnt????????

I let that go as i couldnt prove it unless someone from captain sim visited my home. well at the start of this month i had problems with fs9 again and did a reinstall, this time my 757 block f that i had only just bought gave me the same message. i sent an e-mail to them with all my details and still today i have had no responce. So a tad angry i downloaded bit torrent and got back what was rightfully products that i had paid for. yes this is illegal and i feel a bit uneasy doing things that way. however im not sorry that captainsim is getting screwed by these pirates.

i just wondered if anyone else here has had this problem with captain flimflam..... i mean sim

This, I believe is the fundamental problem with downloads. You cannot really blame captain sim for trying to protect their products. But you as a legitimate purchaser have the right (unless otherwise stated in the EULA) to install and uninstall the product as often as you like. If you owned the product on CD you would not have this problem.

UNIT wrote:So a tad angry i downloaded bit torrent and got back what was rightfully products that i had paid for. yes this is illegal and i feel a bit uneasy doing things that way.

If you have a legally paid for license, you can download and use the product from wherever you want.

Hi UNIT/Gordon..

Yup.. ultimately, the only way to avoid this grief is to buy the CD but downloads are so tempting aren't they plus they only take minutes to arrive rather than days! This is not the first complaint I've seen about CS and I'm sure it won't be the last. Similar can be said about the likes of Flight1 and FSD though F1 make it easier with their 'coupon' system. Simmarket have a slightly easier regime with their 'buy a backup' policy but as I found out only a few days ago.. this only lasts for 12months and if you don't have cause to download your software (as I didn't with the particular bit I was trying to find) on a regular basis.. the online backup is wasted.

As it happens.. I have a number of CS products waiting for reinstall on a new system so I may be walking into the same minefield as UNIT. Fortunately (or more like unfortunately) my install of FS9 on the new system is about as stable as an African government at the moment so it's pointless loading more on as the lot may have to come off again :roll: Terrain.dll.. error on unknown module.. g2d.dll and the last, g3d.dll make it too unreliable for VA flights in FS9. I think it's trying to tell me something as I've only had 1 error in FSX and that was remidied by installing a GenX patch :o

ATB

DaveB :tab:

I found myself in a very similar situation with FSD a few years ago. When I started my cadetship and headed up to South Shields I bought a laptop and installed FS on that. When I came to install my FSD aircraft they wouldn't work. I sent a polite email asking them what the problem was and I got a nastygram back saying I had installed their products on multiple computers over the last 18 months or so and they basically accused me of being a software pirate. Suffice to say they got the Agincourt Salute from me and I will not buy any of their products again.

There are various systems knocking around at the moment that vendors use to protect their products, I personally find the Flight One system to be far and away the best. I have purchased many products from them and installed them on multiple PCs over recent years and I have never had any problems at all. I have reactivated expired keys, recovered lost keys, lost passwords... even got the email address changed on all my old orders when I changed ISPs in 2006. No problems at all, they are IMHO a shining example of how FS addons should be sold over the internet. Their system has just got even better - they have recently introduced a new version of their wrapper that allows you to create an account with Flight One and you can associate your orders with that account. You can now reinstall your addons without a key file, you just log into your Flight One account via the wrapper and it will see you have already purchased the product and activate it for you. They have also introduced PayPal as a payment method with the new wrapper so you can use a debit card instead of your credit card. Great stuff. The whole system is very easy to use, and only requires you to have a net connection when you purchase and activate the product. After that you can install whenever you want, as long as the license is installed on your computer. What's more they don't do naughty things like spying on what other products you have installed like FSD used to do (and deactivating them if they thought you didn't have a proper licence!)

Also interesting to note is how in 2006 Aerosoft bucked the trend and moved to a much simpler system where you just have to enter your email and serial number (ie no internet connection or activation required). Then again look at Carenado - they have no anti-piracy measures at all! You just download an installer and that's it, it will work whenever you want on any PC you want

The whole piracy debate is very interesting I think.

This is a shame, up until recently Captainsim appeared to have sorted out their issues and were relatively quick to answer e-mails, and you could use the automated system on their website to request a re-activation once you'd installed it the maximum number of times.

With this sort of customer service they'll just shoot themselves in the foot and force people to piracy, which is a real tragedy.

Yeah ive got products from PSS/CLS/Flight1/PMDG/wilcopub and supronov. All these except for wilcopub and captainsim, reply to any quiries i ask of them and sort out problems quickly.

Unfortunatly PSS let me down by leaving me with no-way to retreve my addons from them when they desided to close their doors.

Yeah it's a shame about PSS. The writing was on the wall last Autumn when Norman jumped ship. I Took the opportunity to run the 757 and 777 installers and pointed them at an empty folder which I then backed up Looks like it paid off as I have just installed FS9 with all my addons on my new laptop.

As far as PSS goes you have three choices:

i) Go out and buy the Justflight CD versions. Expensive, but it means you have hard copies you can install whenever you want.

ii) Hope that Anthony Waterfield makes good his promise to resurrect PSS and give customers access to the aircraft they have already paid for. Suffice to say the way PSS was operating in its final years and the months of silence from Mr Waterfield means I am not holding my breath.

iii) Take the line that as you have already purchased a license for your PSS addons it is perfectly legitimate for you to download them from a P2P network. This will make you a pirate in the eyes of many, and more importantly it will expose you to the viruses and other nasty things that find their way around the P2P networks. Also, should you be "seeding" the file as you are downloading it you WILL become a software pirate in the eyes of the law

This is not unlike my FSX problems, the security part of Windows thinks that because of a mucked up re-install, my CD's are not real valid disks, which they are!!!! One day, an upgrade and a Vista OP might sort things out, but I have no great wish to spend a fortune just for FSX.

its an unfortunate set of affairs. they do this to stop pirates which it does not do. It just penalises us honest folk and forces us to resort to piracy to get what we bought.