No, it was better, not sure if it was a faulty crack or something, but there had to be LITERALLY no drives, even emulated (I am guessing Star Force, in case of lack of drive, allowed game to run)

And yeah, that was the biggest problem of any cd-based DRM, wearing of the disk

And I heard about that, funniest thing was when Vista came out and the driver was incompatible with the system.

Out of all DRMs I pretty much tolerate only one, Steam’s CEG. I mean, I did buy the game online, so it makes sense I need to be online to play it. Especially since you have ability to tur steam in offline mode and continue playing. Then we have Ubisoft’s uplay, I have no idea how it is ow, but when AC2 came out you had to be connected all the time to the internet, when for any reason connection died the game was pausing and you couldn’t even save it (since saves were stored remotely).

But can you switch the Steam to offline mode when their servers are down?

Yes.

At least, Steam loads and starts a game fine with my network cards disabled (it gives you a message that it can’t connect to the server and online functions won’t work, then starts). Just tested it.