At one point crackers came up with loaders and virtualisation, which basically meant that they traced whatever the code was doing on a legitimate install and replayed it to a 'cracked' copy (including challenge/replies to auth servers etc) It really dumbed down hte whoel cracking process as understind how the DRM code works was no longer a necessity. Unterstandably there was quite a bit of discussion about loader vs crack. The advantage of PROPER cracks is that they still work, even when the original game does not (due to DRM servers being offline etc).