I've actually had GameGuard on a system before; I used to play Gunbound and Phantasy Star Online back in the day, and those were GameGuard titles. The stories about it borking your system are somewhat overstated, but it is quite true that once it's on a machine, it's difficult to get it off. The presence of GameGuard is the main reason why I refused (and still refuse) to try Aion.
Regardless:- as already stated, the NCsoft launcher itself doesn't involve GameGuard, at least not to my knowledge. Individual games that start off the launcher do, yeah, but that's a game-by-game thing. At this point in the game's life, it's unlikely that they'd try to put such protection into CoH. In any case it's mostly something that Korean developers have a mad-on for; while pretty much all of NCsoft's Korean-developed games have the software, you don't actually see it in NCsoft titles originating from elsewhere, like Guild Wars (or Auto Assault, Tabula Rasa, etc. back in the day).
The issue with the NCsoft launcher is simply that it's a needlessly large piece of software and is rather slow. That's a big enough problem in and of itself, mind you.
-- Acyl
Regardless:- as already stated, the NCsoft launcher itself doesn't involve GameGuard, at least not to my knowledge. Individual games that start off the launcher do, yeah, but that's a game-by-game thing. At this point in the game's life, it's unlikely that they'd try to put such protection into CoH. In any case it's mostly something that Korean developers have a mad-on for; while pretty much all of NCsoft's Korean-developed games have the software, you don't actually see it in NCsoft titles originating from elsewhere, like Guild Wars (or Auto Assault, Tabula Rasa, etc. back in the day).
The issue with the NCsoft launcher is simply that it's a needlessly large piece of software and is rather slow. That's a big enough problem in and of itself, mind you.
-- Acyl