Wirehead Studios

This is a general question about an issue which both Activision and id seem eager to deny the existence of.

What is the point of having a CD Key if the server is just going to reject it? Why does Quake3.exe tell LIES and say that the CD Key I enetered straight off the box is valid only to be told by the server that it's INVALID?? What kind of tight git uses sv_strictauth anyway?? And why can other people join a server with sv_strictauth set to 1but I can't??

I can't take this anymore! I have a legit copy of Q3 with a legit CD Key!! WHAT THE F*** IS GOING ON??? HELP!!!

Who you gonna call?

ID SOFTWARE!

(This one's beyond our help.)

Tried them already :(

Does someone else have your CD key? like before you bought it?

Yes, some warezing assholes have a tendancy to open boxes of software to get the CD key, and then close the box and toss it back on the shelves.

I really wouldn't know. It was ages ago that I got Q3.

You might also want to talk to those who you LAN with.  From personal experience, people who say that they'll uninstall your copy when they get home, don't, and worse yet, they play online.  Out of the three Q3 keys that I own, one is black-listed as a result of that.

I fully understand and sympathize with your frustration.
There's one slight thing that you must've misread though, because the game never states a 'key is valid', it just says 'your key appears to be valid, thank you', which means as much as: 'you entered x characters, and all of them were in the 0-9 and a-z range'.

Tab: True, true. Still a pain in the arse though. My choice of online servers is severely limited. Kinda defeats the purpose for ayone who actually BOUGHT the damn game.

Kain: I have 2 keys, one when I got Q3 and I got the other because I didn't get TA until Q3 Gold came out. Both of them must be on the blacklist, because even when I got Q3G I reinstalled VQ3 with the new key I STILL got the invalid_cdkey message whenever I tried to play online, so

Sham: I suppose, yes. There could be someone else out there with the same key. I sure as hell didn't give it to em. :shout:

I have 3 legitimate CD keys, from 3 legitimate copies of Quake III Arena.  I get "INVALID CD_KEY/MISSING CD_KEY?" Errors on normal Q3 servers all the time no matter which key I use.  I've never been infected with a virus, nor have I given my CD Keys out to anyone else, and I have all the proper ports opened.  I've not made typos in the CD Key either.  Frustrating?  You bet it is, especially when one day you can get on a server fine and another you can't get on at all.

I can report the same thing, luckily this doesn't prevent me from playing Generations or navy seals.