Yet another Piracy: Good or Bad? discussion

[Eyestabber]

Strong inability to read edgeposting ITT.

 

[JRIz]

This discussion was originally in the KCD thread. I'm interested in that game but currently don't have time for it so I didn't pirate or buy or anything and so I'm not defending anyone here. I just want to point out that people posting from their moral high ground seem to be forgetting simple logic: Everyone agrees someone should support the devs they like by buying from them. But what if fantadomat likes CDPR very much and as such is determined to get KCD from GoG? Is he supposed to buy on Steam at full price now and on GoG later too just so he can support everyone? Why not send loads of gold directly to the people involved?

A good idea actually. He could have done that by backing the game. That would have been the best option for anyone wanting to play it now. That way, you would also avoid giving money to those publisher cunts who are ultimately responsible for the dilemma by delaying the launch on GoG. The development of KCD followed two models: copyright and patronage. The latter has produced far better art in former times and is now represented by crowdfunding. Ideally, everyone wanting to play something should back it so people actually interested in games have as say in the development and get good stuff while the rest can buy the newest copyright-based AssCreed and eat shit. A fragmentation of the market might be the only way out. Even if you think copyright is suitable for video games in modern times as opposed to only books in times when copying was significant work, you have to agree that in the end with KCD, the publishers -- again -- wanted to protect themselves from piracy and thereby stimulated piracy. This is only natural if your business depends on a logical falsehood: copying does not fit the definition of theft.

 

[AwesomeButton]

If you pirate games, you're a stupid piece of shit and a thieving asshole. I hope you get rounded into a gulag and maybe tear-gassed.

Whoa, look out for Mr. Badass over here. Imagine getting so mad over people copying data online that you want them to die.

I am pretty sure he is being sarcastic.

 

[AwesomeButton]

JRIz , I now have enough confidence (in him) to back a future Vavra game. Yes, even with the bugs on release.

 

[Tehdagah]

Pirating is annoying, most games don't even work properly.

 

[unfairlight]

I am pretty sure he is being sarcastic.

I take all threats online seriously. Whenever a 12 year old in cawalooty says they will kill me I report them to the FBI.
That was sarcastic too, but the edgeposting is still rather gay.

 

[Daedalos]

If something isn't worth buying, then it's worth nothing.

If something is worth nothing - is it really stealing? Also, you're not stealing, you're multiplicating or cloning or copying it, no the same thing.

Pirating is the new demos, since those aren't around anymore. No way to test the product or ensure its worth.
So pirating to get a feel for the game is valid, IF you buy it after, if you really enjoy it.

But still, if you make a shit product, you shouldnt be allowed to charge money for it, regardless of how much time you spent on it.

If somebody wants to give you money for your time and work, fine, if they dont, also fine. You wouldn't have many any money from pirates, anyway, it's not a loss for you, since it's not stealing, since the person wouldn't have bought the product anyway, had pirating not been avaliable.

IF you have money, and IF you enjoy the product alot, BUT don't buy it to support the devs, you are a major douchecunt, obviously.

 

[Eyestabber]

Piracy is actually worse than rape, IMO. If you have a pirate copy of KCD then you might as well be buggering Vavra's hairy asshole for all I care.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Piracy is actually worse than rape, IMO. If you have a pirate copy of KCD then you might as well be buggering Vavra's hairy asshole for all I care.

I already said I would "back" him, didn't I?

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[fantadomat]

Piracy is actually worse than rape, IMO. If you have a pirate copy of KCD then you might as well be buggering Vavra's hairy asshole for all I care.

He is such a handsome guy. Also KCD is not on gog. And can you really blame me

?
It is in my nature to make moralist hypocrites salty.

Strong inability to read edgeposting ITT.

Are you talking about yourself? You are just ignoring what normal people are saying to you and get offended just like certain creatures ...

 

[fantadomat]

Hahahahahahaha DRM is sooo good guys

 

[Great Deceiver]

Why is a video of shrieking bitches talking about shit they don't know being posted on the Codex? The fuck outta here.

On point - I don't have a moral problem with piracy, what I do have a problem with is people rationalizing the act of pirating stuff. "Oh, I don't make enough money" and variations thereof being the most common. If you're going to pirate something, be a man and own up to it, and don't make excuses. You're a lazy piece of shit who wants free stuff. For some people it's a deeply ingrained habit and old habits die hard. It used to be that pirating shit was not only infinitely cheaper, but more convenient than importing a boxed copy of a game for many people - the convenience argument is moot now that digital distribution is ubiquitous.

Any adult with a full time job isn't going to have the time to play a majority of games - or even the disposition. Narrowing down your choices to a few games you really want to play is a liberating experience and easy on the wallet.

 

[Burning Bridges]

Lately there is so much shit on Steam that I wonder who would even pay for 95% of these bullshit hobbyist experiments. It's like students selling off their lecture notes as literature. So I guess people just pirate a lot of shit and then buy a game that they like, because they want updates. Most is such utter crap that I don't even have the motivation to pirate them tbh

 

[fantadomat]

Why is a video of shrieking bitches talking about shit they don't know being posted on the Codex? The fuck outta here.

On point - I don't have a moral problem with piracy, what I do have a problem with is people rationalizing the act of pirating stuff. "Oh, I don't make enough money" and variations thereof being the most common. If you're going to pirate something, be a man and own up to it, and don't make excuses. You're a lazy piece of shit who wants free stuff. For some people it's a deeply ingrained habit and old habits die hard. It used to be that pirating shit was not only infinitely cheaper, but more convenient than importing a boxed copy of a game for many people - the convenience argument is moot now that digital distribution is ubiquitous.

Any adult with a full time job isn't going to have the time to play a majority of games - or even the disposition. Narrowing down your choices to a few games you really want to play is a liberating experience and easy on the wallet.

Because nobody else is talking about that shit,the only other video is in german.

Here it is in written variant if you are sooo offended by the chicks.

http://archive.is/Zjc7R

We were after one guy, say malware flight simmers

By Brendan Caldwell on February 20th, 2018 at 1:37 pm

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A flight sim company who put malware in one of their jets now say they were only after one person, in an attempt to downplay how many users were affected by what they described as “DRM”. As we reported yesterday, Flight Sim Labs normally sell planes to players of Flight Simulator X, but they recently included a malicious file called ‘test.exe’ in an installer for a popular airbus (you might have seen it if you’ve flown with EasyJet). The malware was designed to dump usernames and passwords saved in the Chrome browser. When this was discovered, the head of the company said the malware was targeted at pirates. It only ‘activated’ if the person installing the plane was using a pirated key to do so, he said. But they now claim they were using the clandestine .exe file to target a single, specific person.

The head of the company, Lefteris Kalamaras, made a post to the Flight Sim Lab forums, admitting again that the dodgy file was embedded in the installer. As in previous posts, he refers to the malware as “DRM” – digital rights management. He then goes into more depth about what they did and why.

First he explains what would happen if you were a “genuine” user running the installer for the airplane:

“As soon as the user entered their customer information (order ID / serial number / email) it verified this against our server database. Genuine customers and any other legitimate serial numbers trigger a full proper installation and no tool was called / used to figure out any pirate info. The installer that temporarily extracted the tool would remove it as part of its normal cleanup operation upon proper installation completion.”

Finally, he zones in on their reasoning for including this “tool” at all – to find the people who were cracking their airplane add-ons and distributing keys online for free (for context, this particular aircraft normally costs $100).

“…there were specific crackers who were successful in sidetracking our protection system by using offline serial number generators. We could not find how this would happen, but we happened upon a particular set of information (username / email / serial number) that would occur recurrently from specific IP addresses. We tried to add more tests in our subsequent installer releases, but the specific crackers were also upping their game in ensuring they sidetracked our installer. We even went so far as to figure out exactly who the cracker was (we have his name available upon request of any authorities), but unfortunately we could not be able to enter the registration-only web sites he was using to provide this information to other pirates.”

And from here, it just gets more and more Netrunner.

“We found through the IP addresses tracked that the particular cracker had used Chrome to contact our servers so we decided to capture his information directly – and ONLY his information (obviously, we understand now that people got very upset about this – we’re very sorry once again!) as we had a very good idea of what serial number the cracker used in his efforts.”

In other words, they began to put malicious software into their airplanes in an attempt to catch some pirates. But the focus shifted, according to Kalamaras, to keeping track of a single cracker.

The post goes on to say they intended to send all the collected information about this cracker to the “proper legal authorities”. Although it neglects to address the legality of installing malware on the computers of innocent users in the first place, nor the legality of harvesting usernames and passwords from anyone, whether they are a pirate or not.

This continues to be a grubby story. The whole shebang has been dissected by Fidus Infosec, an information security firm who made a post attempting to answer five pertinent questions:

1. What legal boundaries is this pushing, if not directly breaking the law?
2. How is the data being sent to FSLabs?
3. How is the data being secured and who has access to it?
4. What exactly are people’s usernames and passwords being used for?
5. What on earth were they thinking?!

They confirmed that the file ‘test.exe’ was indeed malicious, and that it was designed to “extract saved usernames and passwords from the Google Chrome browser and have them displayed in a readable format”. But through their testing they also concluded that “the password dumping tool (test.exe) is only called when a fraudulent serial is used” just as Flight Sim Labs attest.

However, the infosec folks also found that any captured information was being sent back to the servers of Flight Sim Labs in a badly encoded format (in Base64 – the encryption equivalent of wrapping a confidential memo in a few obscuring layers of cling film). They also questioned the security of the servers themselves, and summarised their thoughts like this:

“Whilst we fully understand the importance of DRM and combating piracy, it poses the question on how ethical some companies are being in doing so along with the legal and infosec implications of it.”

There are still unanswered questions. How many people – pirate or otherwise – have had their usernames and passwords taken by the malware? What has happened to those usernames/passwords? And how many people used the dirty installer legitimately, thus briefly hosting malware? We’ve emailed Flight Sim Labs with these questions and more, and will let you know if we get a response. But don’t hold your breath.

 

[Ash]

Piracy: yes it's basically theft if the game is available to you on the market, you never dished out a single shekel and are nabbing it. Do I care? Not really in most cases. If you want to thieve shit games and play them, I'd prefer that to you buying shit games and playing them., because then you'd be supporting shit and the growth of said shit. If the game is actually good, then yes I care if you pirate it and then never cough up. Who is the authority on what is actually good or bad? umm....me? :D

 

[Raghar]

fantadomat , do you go to cinema? That's more expensive entertainment than videogames.

Before they closed the cinema from socialism, and people were replaced with millenials for higher salaries. Cinema cost 70, game cost 1400. Add to the fact that cinema needs to pay for heat and electricity. While game, well you need to pay for graphic card CPU RAM HDD, internet connection, electricity. Considering he fixed prices Cinemas are paying, games should be for at least half price per hour to be comparable. Perhaps as low as 1/3. Can you blaze through main quest in 30 hours? Then it's more expensive per hour literally. Can you have normal playtrough in 80 hours? Then when you subtract heating and other fixed costs of cinema, game is still bit expensive. Can you play it 1400 hours and receive it for free? Then yes it's better than cinema. But, not everyone plays DotA2.

Which reminds me, if these youngsters were more willing to do piracy, perhaps they'd know more games and get some feeling for art. And wouldn't see games as mindless entertainment.

People in 1990 learned programming, SW eng, and office related stuff from pirated SW. They didn't pay a penny, and they learned outside of school. And funnily, they had decent education. People nowadays pay for school, get university title, then shows title and simple skills and tend to say, give me money. People who selfeducated themselves in 1990 said it's for free, and don't thank me.

No money spend for obtaining skills -> higher chance of not asking money for doing stuff.
Pay for education -> higher chance of ripping others to pay debts/reap profits of your investments.

True. There are those game that make you feel real empty inside as if you accomplished nothing. Then you wonder to yourself why you wasted your time playing a lame and boring game. Skyrim is a good example.

No, pretty sure you can tell Skyrim is crap way before the end...

You can tell Skyrim is crap the moment the Bethesda Game Studios logo comes on-screen.

The only problems of Skyrim are level scaling, and cuckoo main story. Considering nobody needs to play main story, Skyrim has plenty of other content, it's only about stomaching level scaling.

 

[Egosphere]

Not a fan of piracy, unless you're pirating great old games from devs who became sell-outs and started churning out "modern" shit, or fucked over their staff in some way etc.

 

[unfairlight]

Or the developers went bankrupt and the license is in the hands of a shitty company like Square Enix (Thief, Deus Ex)

 

[AwesomeButton]

Raghar , videogames are the cheapest entertainment per hour spent, given the usual expectancy for a playthrough. Cinema is more expensive per hour.

 

[Raghar]

Game 30 hour, 1400 money. Cinema 2 hours, 70 money.
1400/30 = 46.66
70/2 = 35

Netflix 400 per month.
Cable 3092 aka two games, but it includes everything up to a kitchen sink. (Including loan of DVR that allows to automatically skip commercials during prime time on some channels.)

Pub, you drink one or two beers, sit with friends for 5 hours, they they'd kick you out of pub because pub is closing, with word fuckers.

Basically, PC games are far from cheapest "entertainment".

 

[fantadomat]

Raghar , videogames are the cheapest entertainment per hour spent, given the usual expectancy for a playthrough. Cinema is more expensive per hour.

Don't care about the per-hour shit. I only care about if i like it or not. The most money for entertainment i give is for books! As for your question from earlier....yes,i do go to cinema once a blood moon. There are not many movies that are worth watching,let alone giving money to them. Haven't even bothered pirating movie in a months. Last movie that i have seen in a cinema was the nu bladerunner. Also the price for ticket here is from 3 euro to 6 euro for pre-premier. While most games cost 60 euro.....because EU is shit and have taxes and shit. Sooo from 20 to 10 times bigger the price. Most games don't have a campaign that is long 13-26 hours...that is in your logic of hour per dollar. I may repeat my self for 10th time but,i do buy good games RPGs on full price when i have the money and like the game and the devs. I do intend to buy KCD when it come out on gog,don't give a flying fuck for that drm called steam!

 

[PorkBarrellGuy]

The only problems of Skyrim are level scaling, and cuckoo main story. Considering nobody needs to play main story, Skyrim has plenty of other content, it's only about stomaching level scaling.

And the combat. And the spellcasting. And the bugs. And, and, and. Skyrim is garbage.

 

[Decado]

If you pirate games, you're a stupid piece of shit and a thieving asshole. I hope you get rounded into a gulag and maybe tear-gassed.

Whoa, look out for Mr. Badass over here. Imagine getting so mad over people copying data online that you want them to die.

I am pretty sure he is being sarcastic.

I was -- honestly, very few people should end up in gulags -- but also, I hate the entitlement and general scumbaggery of stealing someone's work. Just buy the game, if you are too poor to buy the game, go get a fucking job. Don't take things from people without contributing.

 

[fantadomat]

If you pirate games, you're a stupid piece of shit and a thieving asshole. I hope you get rounded into a gulag and maybe tear-gassed.

Whoa, look out for Mr. Badass over here. Imagine getting so mad over people copying data online that you want them to die.

I am pretty sure he is being sarcastic.

I was -- honestly, very few people should end up in gulags -- but also, I hate the entitlement and general scumbaggery of stealing someone's work. Just buy the game, if you are too poor to buy the game, go get a fucking job. Don't take things from people without contributing.

And i hate the entitlement of people spiting from ivory towers.