Before the heavy online verification thing, I had a copy of a game which I bought (I think it was one of the Elder Scrolls games or perhaps a Prince of PErsia) which required the original DVD to start to the game even after I'd installed it.The DVD was not very high quality and shattered inside my drive (thereby destroying the drive too). I wanted to play the game but couldn't thanks to the verification thing. Finally, I downloaded a cracked version which didn't demand this of me and was able to play just fine.
It's tragic but it genuinely feels like that pirated games have better user experience than clean ones.
In the early 2000s I got an Adaptec SCSI card and a bunch of SCSI CD-ROM drives for free somewhere; I had a stack of 6 CD drives with discs for the games I was playing in them all the time.
This went wrong when I was cleaning my desk and I lifted them while I was playing Baldur's Gate II, creating a big scratch on the disc. I polished it up with some toothpaste and it worked fine after that (even used that same disc to install the game later, IIRC).
Kinda ridiculous really, but it was good fun playing around with these sort of things when I was young.
Seems quite complicated when the rest of us just used NoCD patches. Unless you didn't have the disk space to fully install the games - IIRC BG2 had the option to load some parts directly from the CD instead of installing them.
Not sure about TES, but all the Prince of Persia games had the same behaviour of needing the game disc inserted to even start. Was a very irritating countermeasure, presumably against people who used their disc to install the game on multiple devices.
It's tragic but it genuinely feels like that pirated games have better user experience than clean ones.