3 strikes and your Out for the french.

[alienware]

As Alien said, I do download games to "try" (if they don't have a demo) but 90% of the time I go and buy the game. For example I downloaded Starcraft 2 the other day because none of my friends that own the game had any trial keys. Played it and I bought it yesterday (full price of £40). Music for instance I either use spotify or youtube. If I find myself listening to the sound alot I bite the bullet and download it off iTunes for 79p which is barely anything.

Pc gaming is too much of a minefield if I'm to be completely honest Brooksie. Now more than ever. They just don't give a crap about us any more. If you buy a game and unwrap it and it doesn't work? you are screwed.

As much as it pains me to admit it I did that with Fallout 3 as I heard some real horror stories. As in "I paid £40 for this game and it won't work, at all".

And it didn't for me either. Constant crashes. I find out there is a core problem in it and you have to hack around the INI file to restrict it to two cores. So I did that. Then I kept getting random crashes to desktop. After weeks of saving my game every ten seconds I come to find out that it's a codec causing it (FFDSHOW) and I need to disable FFDSHOW when playing Fallout 3 by again, putting in a script.

The sound was garbled, turns out it was another codec problem. Then my game would crash immediately on startup. Turns out if you have too many save games in the folder (over 3gb) it does that. However, I had been saving like a madman as it kept crashing. Little was I to know it made things worse

And that was Fallout 3. My favourite game ever on the PC. What's alarming is the PC version was actually the primary version. It has more controls than any other version.

The things I torrent the most are TV shows that have just aired in America and are not out in Britain yet (Clone Wars season 3, Sons of Anarchy season 3 and Eureka). I pay for the channels that these shows air on (Sky movies, Bravo and Sky 1) I'm just watching them before they air here.

Alot has changed since the days of Napster and Limewire.

I only watch South Park. I mean that too. So those are the only things I have on my PC. I own seasons 1-9 on region 1 DVD. However, getting up to change DVDs gets on my wick, so I downloaded them all. The others? well they're repeated over and over on comedy central, so I could quite easily have them on my PVR. Ripping DVDs takes forever, so I just downloaded all the ones I own (and don't !) as DIVX. Job done. Now I know it wasn't entirely legal, but O2 slapped me straight on the wrist for it. My argument to them was that had the net worked for the 7 months they had been charging me then maybe I would have spread it out a little lol.

A 50Mb line is not a pirate's wet dream, a gigabit or more line (which are actually less expensive than you might expect) with zero other users is probably more on the money for a major player. But then the ISP is never going to go after a big customer like that who pays upwards of £1000 a month when there are small fry exceeding their poxy download limits.

I suppose it depends on what we mean by a pirate Diablo. My idea of it is a kid who expects everything for nothing. They know sweet FA about proper hard core lines, so their wet dream is the up to 50mb Virgin XL advert

TBH? At my age (36 now coming up to the big 3-7) I know hardly any one who steals games. And the ones that do? they are mentally ill. I don't mean that offensively, I mean it for fact. One of them is a kleptomaniac. He hoards EVERYTHING and constantly whines about how crap new games are. I asked him the last time he sat down and completed one,or, played for more than an hour into one. He said it had been about 7 years. He steals it all simply for the sake of it. Fills up a 1tb drive every week or so then removes it, puts it in a pile and fills up another one.

The other guy just has OCD. He has to have everything so he can boast about it. He also has a 50mb line, and he also doesn't play any game or watch any of the movies he steals. I remember asking him once about a certain film and he said "Ooo, I think I have that". "Cool !" I said.. "Isn't it great?"

"Dunno mate, not got around to watching it".

Like you when I was utterly broke a few years back I stole a few games. IIRC I have about five. However, I sat and played through every single one of them. (and I own three of them as originals now.. Juiced, Juiced 2 and NFSU2)

But yeah, you usually find that people who steal stuff are either very young and haven't worked out how the world really works or, have big problems mentally.

 

[Diablo]

You make some strong points. I forgot about the kiddos, then again I still think the big fish are the problem. Games, music and DVDs have got a lot cheaper really, so its not a big amount of my income. The guy I know who pirates games is not well off, but even so I don't agree with it.

I don't know what the soltuion is though. Tighter controls on the quality of games? Maybe the big companies should actually test the games? What did they test crysis with at the time or did FO3 ever get QCed?

 

[alienware]

Hmmmblah has made a very good point. It is because of a-hole oiks. It is, it's them who are stealing games.

But let's seperate this into what it is. Theft, AND piracy.

Piracy is making illegal copies of a game and selling them. Theft is just taking them. Piracy has been clamped down on, but is a totally different thing. Piracy is down the local market with some dodgy looking bloke. Piracy is the bloke that goes shop to shop with a large duffle bag selling moody goods.

Theft is quite simply theft. Hence the F.A.S.T organisation, or, the federation against software theft.

The game price argument (at least on the PC) has been addressed. Game prices were reduced by as much as 60%. A brand new title on 360 or PS3 is £50-60. That same game on PC? At least 33% less. Take New Vegas Collector's edition. £49.99 on PC, £69.99 on the others.

Now some of that comes down to a licensing fee that Sony and Microsoft charge to release software on their platforms. That's how they make their money, through royalties on software sales. Sometimes they even make a loss on consoles but get it back through royalties. And the game companies coding for them are more than happy to pay those fees due to the enormous audience they are going to attract.

PC gaming is rather different. Piracy is much simpler and you don't need to mod or take risks with your hardware. So, if that was why they reduced the price? well, at least they are making a response. The problem is (as was said before) it wouldn't matter if a game was 2p. Because it comes down to that 'god given right' syndrome. Some people just expect everything on a plate.

So, hopefully people can understand what I am saying here. This isn't piracy as no money is being made, but it's plain theft. And, IMO people should not be allowed to steal whatever they want just because it's the internet. Corner shops and supermarkets have cameras. Supermarkets have security to watch people and stop shoplifters. As of now? the internet has neither.

For a few years I had the 'attentions' of what was nothing more than an internet stalker. He even went to the lengths to fake bid on an Ebay auction just to get my address so he could post it online. It was absolutely ridiculous, yet, when I tried to get something done about it? brick wall. There simply aren't the laws in place to stop that kind of thing.

However offline and in the real world? there are. Why? Jill Dando any one?

The internet IMO brings out a side of people that it wouldn't anywhere else. When I got into this thread and started discussing it that's exactly what I was doing. Discussing it. I don't want it to be a debate, I don't want to argue and I don't want to offend any one. As far as I am concerned this is no different to the real world. In the real world if you argue with some one to a degree it ends up with fists. You can not continually argue with some one in real life, or call them names, or swear at them without it coming to a conclusion. On the net? well, as long as you remain anonymous you are just that, and again, you shouldn't be allowed to.

And this again is why it falls back to ISP. They want to take the money but they don't want to protect any one. They just don't care. They don't care what you do, or what you get up to, they just want to keep raking in the money.

Without the internet you couldn't steal games on the internet. So if any one is to blame it is the ISPs. They need to do something about it.

And the thing is if I was completely wrong then fine, I would have no problem with that. But please tell me why all of a sudden FAST and all these other organisations against software and music theft ETC are all going to the ISPs?

Remember a few years back when they arrested random people and slapped them with fines? how well did that work? the problem remained. People still had the internet and they still had the capability to use it to steal because there was still nothing in place to stop them doing so.

The thing is I totally and absolutely agree with hmmmblah. It does suck to be screwed over because some a-hole wants everything for free. But sadly if you went around handing out guns sooner or later some one would use one. If you don't hand out guns and they commit murder any way? then you are distanced from it as far as possible and it has nothing to do with you.

TBH? the money they make (ISPs) should come with a responsibility. But sadly it doesn't, it's just money for old rope.

 

[hmmblah]

And this again is why it falls back to ISP. They want to take the money but they don't want to protect any one. They just don't care. They don't care what you do, or what you get up to, they just want to keep raking in the money.

Without the internet you couldn't steal games on the internet. So if any one is to blame it is the ISPs. They need to do something about it.

And the thing is if I was completely wrong then fine, I would have no problem with that. But please tell me why all of a sudden FAST and all these other organisations against software and music theft ETC are all going to the ISPs?

Remember a few years back when they arrested random people and slapped them with fines? how well did that work? the problem remained. People still had the internet and they still had the capability to use it to steal because there was still nothing in place to stop them doing so.

The thing is I totally and absolutely agree with hmmmblah. It does suck to be screwed over because some a-hole wants everything for free. But sadly if you went around handing out guns sooner or later some one would use one. If you don't hand out guns and they commit murder any way? then you are distanced from it as far as possible and it has nothing to do with you.

TBH? the money they make (ISPs) should come with a responsibility. But sadly it doesn't, it's just money for old rope.

Big time ISPs make money. They could handle monitoring everything and afford to have people on staff to watch. There are a lot of small time mom and pop type ISPs in the US though. Selling bandwidth to home users comes with a very small profit margin. They make their money by selling it to a lot of people. A lot of these small ISPs will have one or two network admins and a secretary, that's it. In order to have people monitoring what users are doing they would need to hire additional staff and may have to set up additional software and hardware to do the monitoring. This would kill their bottom line and force them to increase their prices, effectively allowing the bigger ISPs to be cheaper and take their customer base.

The organizations are going to the ISPs because they have nowhere else to turn. They have no idea what to do. Their DRM doesn't work and people, as you said, have that "god given right" attitude to justify theft. There's not going to be a good solution to this problem and the only real way to fix it IMO is to give people a good set of morals and slap the "god given right" crap out of their heads (yeah right, like this will EVER happen...fairy tale). No one wants to work today, they want everything for free and feel they deserve it because they exist.

Piracy and software theft is kind of like the war on drugs in America. Wasting money and resources doesn't help the problem at all and needlessly puts people in prison next to rapists and murderers for a crime that's IMO relatively small (there are exceptions to this of course). I'd rather see these kinds of people on work details instead. Slapping people with huge unrealistic fines doesn't help the situation either.

 

[alienware]

Big time ISPs make money. They could handle monitoring everything and afford to have people on staff to watch. There are a lot of small time mom and pop type ISPs in the US though. Selling bandwidth to home users comes with a very small profit margin. They make their money by selling it to a lot of people. A lot of these small ISPs will have one or two network admins and a secretary, that's it. In order to have people monitoring what users are doing they would need to hire additional staff and may have to set up additional software and hardware to do the monitoring. This would kill their bottom line and force them to increase their prices, effectively allowing the bigger ISPs to be cheaper and take their customer base.

It's actually very similar to the game industry. Around here BT hire lines to other ISPs who then make money out of it. BT = take the pee. They're so rich it's not even funny. A few years ago there was a survey done and apparently they profit so many thousands per second.

When I got home and realised how it worked here in the UK I looked up when they were going to update my 60 year old phone lines to LLU. Now this not only makes the internet far faster (up to 50mb instead of 6-8 max) but it's also far less congestive and works out about 1/3 of the price. It doesn't use the phone lines in the same way, so doesn't cause the problems. When I got home in 2008 it said they would have my entire area all LLU in 2011. Cool, I was really excited. I went to check the other day? thar's now changed to "we have no foreseeable plans to update your lines". Course they don't want to

As I mentioned, England is around 500 miles long from bum to top. And with the money BT make? we should ALL be fiber optic right now. In the UK mobile phones cost literally half of the US in the monthly plans because getting up enough towers was a five year job. Over there? hah ! I remember driving through WV (West Virginia for Brits who don't know how to decode the lower 48) and for about 80 miles nothing

And that's going to take years...

The organizations are going to the ISPs because they have nowhere else to turn. They have no idea what to do. Their DRM doesn't work and people, as you said, have that "god given right" attitude to justify theft. There's not going to be a good solution to this problem and the only real way to fix it IMO is to give people a good set of morals and slap the "god given right" crap out of their heads (yeah right, like this will EVER happen...fairy tale). No one wants to work today, they want everything for free and feel they deserve it because they exist.

Absolutely on the the nose there. They do have nowhere else to turn. Because they are out of ideas. I mean, if they were under the impression they could absolutely stop it? haha, no chance. When I was a kid long before the days of the net we used to have computer clubs. Nice and social, go to a youth center with computers set up (in my case Sinclair ZX Spectrum) and take a tape recorder. Hook it up, swap games, job done lol.

If you went to the market? fake games everywhere. So yes, was worse then than ever tbh. At least it was a social activity though and got people to leave their houses

Thing is, if the net stopped being that place people would go right back to before. Again when I was a kid some bloke we were told about used to come round with a suitcase full of pirate video tapes. We would rent them.

It's only as I got older that I realised I was stealing. So, I grew out of it.

If one were to really want this sorted? you'd have to take it to the govt and get them to regulate it like they do with certain things. Problem there? well, that opens an enormous can of worms. Again, the govt don't give a monkeys, because here they charge broadband tax

It would be very very simple for them to step in and regulate it, but there's just too much money coming out of it.

Piracy and software theft is kind of like the war on drugs in America. Wasting money and resources doesn't help the problem at all and needlessly puts people in prison next to rapists and murderers for a crime that's IMO relatively small (there are exceptions to this of course). I'd rather see these kinds of people on work details instead. Slapping people with huge unrealistic fines doesn't help the situation either.

Yup, again, absolutely on the money. Hopefully now you can see my "few will ruin it for the many" and also apples upsetting the cart. There are always going to be people like that.

And yup, fining people won't work. It would if you fined every single last one of them but, many wouldn't fold so easily and would go to court, costing the game producers millions and wasting years of their time.

This is an enormously deep subject tbh. I mean there is so much to it you could spend literal years going through the logistics of it.

Another point of argument here - game companies wasting money on protection, then charging more for the game to get it back, only for it to be cracked in hours.

Starforce and Securom? $2m. That's what they charge, per game, for their protection. It's so crap it's laughable AND all it does is punish legitimate users. What do I mean by that? well, a while back I was using Daemon tools and Nero. I own a bloody lot of original software. However, I also have learnt that DVD and CD are not these indestructable things were were led to believe on their release. The old "hey, a CD is really strong and a vinyl record is really easy to damage" washed well and conned us for a while. However the problems with them have now arisen. Data only lasts for around seven years on them. A tiny scratch is enough to set the lazer wrong and thus, they won't read. Hence came the scratch repair machines.. But hold on, we were told they were really super strong? BS. All they are is plastic, similar to record vinyl.

So yes, back to what I was saying.. I was using Nero to create NRG images (isos, basically) and then using Daemon to install them when I felt like it. I would back up my CD based games (gawd, I go all the way back to 1997 haha, Daytona USA PC any one?) and when wanting to play them mount up the iso and install.

I bought Crysis legally and legitimately. I installed it. I tried to run it.. spinning disc (securom) and then a stop error saying that my game was bogus. EH? After around a month of trying to get it to work I finally realised it was Nero and Daemon. Securom was looking at my legal legitimate virtual drives and accusing me of being a thief.

On the flipside? well, some A-hole double clicked a torrent, downloaded it and got to play it. Even now when I buy a legal game I will install it, go to their site to find the DRM removal tool to get rid of the hidden crap (something else they refused to do at first but were forced into when it was discovered it was highly illegal to hide things in some one's computer without offering them the ability to remove) then take myself off to gamecopyworld and find a nice nodvd crack so I don't wear out what I paid for.

So yes, totally in agreement with you there, and there are millions of counter arguments

 

[hmmblah]

That is why I like services such as steam. Even if I don't buy directly from steam, some of my games I have been able to add via cd-key. I can then download and play without the need for CD or DVD and still be 100% legal. I also like how Blizzard does things now. Once the game key is tied to your b.net account you can download the game. You also don't use the disc anymore.

 

[alienware]

Steam is wicked !

It is rather expensive though. See in the US PC games cost the same as their console counterparts. Here though? well they're far cheaper. As an example the site I use.

http://www.coolshop.co.uk/catalog/product/53731-mafia-ii-2--for-pc

Put pounds into dollars on this one. A console game here is £50. A PC game? usually £15-£25 tops. Steam? they want £35, full retail PC game price here.

They do have immense sales and I love steam (you can even back it all up

) but for new titles it never makes sense. I mean you get less and get charged more

 

[SiN]

It is all an excuse. Music is cheaper now than ever, with a CD costing around £7. When I was a kid a CD cost over twice that (£16 or so when CD was new).

Games on the PC cost bugger all... So who is to blame? the ISPs.

Basically they are selling packages that can only be used for leeching. They're uber fast connections (50mb in some cases) and are only there to be abused. However, it's all too much f*****g fun for the ISPs because they are charging £50 a month for what equates to nothing more than air. If their connections were slower and people had to wait, say, a week to download a PC game they would likely buy it. I get mine on release for about £17. So there's absolutely no point in stealing them unless I am wary of how it will run on my PC and want to evaluate how it runs.

Take Mafia 2 for example. Downloaded the demo, stuttery as chuff. Wasn't about to risk £25 so I pinched it. No better than the demo. So I have now stopped playing it and will buy it when they either sort it out or it goes budget. Bad coding FTL.

And that, to me, is perfectly acceptable. There are WAY too many hardware variables to put my trust in a game company and hand over my cash. However, I could sit here and prove that I have paid cash for any game I have ever played. Take Fallout 3. Again pinched it because of the horror stories I read (and believe me these were horrific tales of how it wouldn't even work). Downloaded, went to launch, CTD.What a waste of £35 that would have been !

However. Since then I have bought *both* the collector's eds. Simply because it was worth it. I have the full lunchbox set AND the Brotherhood of steel one.

But yes, going back to it? it's down to the ISP. I mean honestly, what the f**k would you need a 50mb £50 a month line for for browsing the web? Would it get you your emails any faster? would it heck.

Problem is people add that £50 into their budget, as they will. If they were running a £20 a month line? they could buy a game every month. But they don't want to do that. They want EVERY game for that £50, making games feel cheaper than they are. When PC games were £45+? they had an argument. However, they're not. I paid £17.99 on coolshop for Modern warfare 2 on release day. Battlefield BC2? £16 cos I got a £1 voucher. And so on.

When everything is free for so long and you stuff your fat greedy face full of it 10p would seem like a lot. But I don't blame them, I blame the ISPs for making it all to chuffing easy.

1.) If you buy games legally through services such as Steam, you still need to download it. And everyone always wants to download quickly.

2.) If every developer released a demo for every game, no one would have the "Will it run?" excuse.

3.) Unless you guys are pirating, why are you worrying, it doesn't affect you (except for DRM crap).

 

[alienware]

1.) If you buy games legally through services such as Steam, you still need to download it. And everyone always wants to download quickly.

Very true. But, there are two enormous plus sides to Steam. Firstly it is pure download and you are not uploading at the same time (upload is about 1/8 of download speed) and Steam's servers are super quick, meaning it's usually done and dusted fast. But yes, none of those things help, including Iplayer and so on. Even BTvision uses bandwidth... Go back to the pulling the teets of the cash cow without addressing the actual problems.

2.) If every developer released a demo for every game, no one would have the "Will it run?" excuse.

Ahh, but they won't will they? go back to it all being about money. Also note on every demo the disclaimer "Game play and performance do not depict what the final game will be like" or something along those lines. So it's *still* a lottery.

3.) Unless you guys are pirating, why are you worrying, it doesn't affect you (except for DRM crap).

It does affect us. We lose bandwidth and we have restrictions on us that can hurt legal usages (as you have pointed out). When I got o2 there was no cap and no fair usage policy. Now there is, 60gb a month. So I am now paying £25 a month for 60gb of bandwidth. Go over that three times? I get booted. Some one here was recently.

Also, the people who pirate DO affect me the greatest as during peak hours my net is poo. Since o2 stepped in though? it's been great. No doubt they are kicking the leeches off. So, that means they are actually doing something, rock on

 

[mrapoc]

We pay £25 a month for 30gb peak, 30gb off peak with Idnet. Sure its a bit more, but traffic isnt touched in any shape or form and I have constantly good speeds and no/minimum downtime with a helpful support team.

Keep increasing speeds...just put a cap on it within reason. I get by on 30gb a month with legal activity easily

 

[alienware]

And as I thought it has already began..

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11418962

 

[hmmblah]

lol, ouch.

 

[nathan616]

well chaps after 40 mins of reading this forum post:S, its opened my eyes to downloading, i do it alot but, if i like it i will buy it everytime as u can see by my steam account lol, if i dont the i scrap it compltly not keep a back up i just delete it completly.gamers who download a game illegally and just keep playing it and then find an online crack so they can play with friends is beyond me if u like it just bloody buy it, i have found steam can be a little price but it saves me keep rebuying it cus ive scractched the disks lol. As for capping the net speed as i red on the other page, that is harsh as i use my 50 mb for downloading god dam wow patches and steam games that is purly my reason for such a speed as it does help me and my friends have done this test many time before with the 10/20 mbs compared to my uber 50mb, so capping it would be unfair on peeps like me who do use it for legal ways.(like i say i have done dodgy downloads but always either scrap it or buy it, i use the dodgy downloads as my demo versions if u like as gamers only play the best bit in demos then u buy the game and find it complty sh*t ). (on a another note sorry for the spelling i type to fast and im a dumb brummie lol).