I doubt N3V's system was either quick or easy for either them or us, particularly judging by the number of outages.
I'll happily provide proof:
http://forums.auran.com/trainz/show...lp&p=1369199&highlight=registered#post1369199
I'm basing this on the fact that this and other users had nothing registered. They could have gotten their hands on "legit" keys, or could have used a program called a "keygen" that generates random keys that are supposed to work with a given algorithm. Fortunately, keygens often (if not usually) don't work, and known-pirated serials can easily be revoked via a revocation list.
John's idea is an additional layer on what would already be a pretty tough system.
I'm not sure what torrents have to do with anything: As far as torrents go, you realistically can't torrent the DLS due to its size.
@ The first bit, about N3V vs Blizzard's outages.
You've never played a Blizzard MMO obviously. Their Battlenet in its infancy spent more time offline then on.... In more modern times, for their bigger platforms, they take all servers from a given game, offline for somewhere between 1-3 hours weekly for maintenance, with longer periods generally monthly for hotfixes and like, and up to 12+ Hours for new game patches and such.... And you think a 1-2 hour outage less then a dozen times a year is inconvenient?
As for the second bit....
So you're honestly telling me, that you're basing your profiling of all hackers that have in their hands illegal copies of TS12 off one newbie that may or may not have been telling porkies? I feel like I learned more trolling Torrent Sites and seeing what was available then off of anything posted in this thread so far.....
@Torrent as second DLS.
Who says you have to download the entire DLS? We all agree theres somewhere between 10-30% of it thats almost wasted space anyway. After that, you simply break the content up by author or category, or even just recommended Assets. This isn't hard stuff. You could even accomplish the same just picking random assets in 500MB blocks. Though I would point out, size doesn't really matter for Torrents. Torrents can be any size (I've seen 250+GB Torrents before, usually large bundles of god only knows whatever they wanted to throw in the mix), limiting the size has more to do with who the poster is trying to share with then anything else.....
@Jcitron & Neonthegriffon
I hear your points and agree with them. I would never suggest the method blizzard used for the reasons I outlined in my original post. I can't really see that working for N3V. As I stated before, I think from what I've seen so far, N3V's system actually makes some amount of sense, and I'm willing to give it a go. If N3V dies, or we reach End of Life for TANE, hopefully Tony will remember to Patch the Validation out before they go. If not, well, at that point it'll be "Thanks for the fish".
-Falcus