I've ringed in red the parts that irk me. I'm a legitimate customer. Why assume I'm a pirate because I've had the temerity to install my stuff on more than one computer or use more than one ISP in the years since I originally purchased it?

 

Wow, with words like "investigation" and "proof", it sounds more like you're an accused criminal on trial than a paying customer...

 

I see activations as a necessary evil, but some just take it too far. Why not reset the activation count after e.g. 3 months? If a registration code made its way to the file sharing networks, there wouldn't be an activation every couple of months - there'd be a constant stream of activations from different IPs all over the world.

 

The irony of it all is that the pirates will just rip out the whole activation scheme from the product. It doesn't matter how restrictive the activation scheme is, what matters is how secure the wrapper/encryption is, and this can be enhanced without causing inconvenience to the customer.

 

 

If you are going to implement online activation of your addons then please give us the means to either return an activation before we uninstall or reformat 

 

 

I see activations as a necessary evil, but some just take it too far. Why not reset the activation count after e.g. 3 months?

 

Our system allows both:

 

1) It's possible to Deactivate a product before reformatting, and this will recover one activation. There's no limit how many times this can be done, and no time restrictions either.

 

2) If you run out of the normal 6 activations, there's no need to contact support if your previous activation was obtained more than 3 months earlier, because a new one will be automatically granted even after the 6th.

 

The only time an user will ever have to contact us for a reactivation, is when both the 6 activations have been used up (so the user always forgot to Deactivate first) and the last one was obtained less than 90 days earlier.

 

In that case, we'll reactivate manually, with no questions asked, unless in case where abuse is obvious, like multiple activations from different parts of the world in a very short time (such an activation in the US and one in Russia after 30 minutes so, unless the user is assigned to the ISS, it's unlikely that he's traveling with FSX on his laptop...), but denied activation for these reasons are so rare, that are not even statistically relevant, like 2-3 times per year, over several thousands of customers.

I recently did my yearly maintenance, clean out fsx and re install. PMDG were quick to re activate, FSDT was easy, and user friendly, Aerosoft were good to . CS, I did not even bother to go back there, there products no longer deserve a place on my HDD.