Garry's Mod Pirates Get Stung

[Ravek]

That is fantastic. Whose pathetic enough to pirate a $10 game anyway?

The same people who would pirate a 1 cent game.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/100576-Who-Would-Pirate-the-One-Cent-Humble-Indie-Bundle

You seem to imply that pirating a 1 cent game is worse than pirating a 10 dollar game. I'm not sure how that would work.

Pirating a 1 cent game only cheats the developer out of a single cent. That's a tiny moral burden, that might be easily outweighed by a bit of extra convenience like not having to set up a paypal account (or whatever), etc.

 

[GGZeta]

Good on you, now that's inventive anti-piracy policy. Somehow I really just can't feel sad for the people that stole the game and then got caught. They're lucky a perma-ban and an inactive copy of the game is all they got.

 

[Daemascus]

That is fantastic. Whose pathetic enough to pirate a $10 game anyway?

The same people who would pirate a 1 cent game.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/100576-Who-Would-Pirate-the-One-Cent-Humble-Indie-Bundle

You seem to imply that pirating a 1 cent game is worse than pirating a 10 dollar game. I'm not sure how that would work.

Pirating a 1 cent game only cheats the developer out of a single cent. That's a tiny moral burden, that might be easily outweighed by a bit of extra convenience like not having to set up a paypal account (or whatever), etc.

It is worse. That one cent game was for charity, with one cent being the minimum donation. And being lazy is not an acceptable excuse for pirating.

 

[Luthir Fontaine]

awsome

Down with the bastard pirates!

 

[Andy of Comix Inc]

I support this but do think that Steam should allow for some sort of review of cases where gamers claim they had a legit copy and were mistakenly banned.

They do, you might recall - last year people who were mistakenly banned from Modern Warfare 2 (after being on the wrong side of a bug in a VAC housekeeping patch) were rewarded by being unbanned and given a free copy of Left 4 Dead 2 for the trouble. Valve has it covered.

 

[Ravek]

It is worse. That one cent game was for charity, with one cent being the minimum donation. And being lazy is not an acceptable excuse for pirating.

Who cares, it's just a cent. I find that a lot easier to understand than pirating something you'd normally pay $10 for.

 

[Desert Tiger]

How easy is it to obtain this ID number? My chief concern is that if someone figures out a way to get SOMEONE ELSE's number, they could fake the message and get that person banned. For example, I don't own Garry's Mod (yet), so if somebody pretended to be me on the Garry's Mod forums, and claimed to have the error message along with my ID, *I* could get in trouble for it.

This strikes me as a very dangerous form of antipiracy.

P.S. Thanks

If that happened you could probably just contact Steam (they've got really good customer support) and say so. Chances are, you log in regularly to Steam from a certain computer with a certain IP address. They can then easily and plainly see that the forum account logged in from a different computer to the one you normally would use, backing up your statement that you're not the perp.

 

[SenseOfTumour]

It is worse. That one cent game was for charity, with one cent being the minimum donation. And being lazy is not an acceptable excuse for pirating.

Who cares, it's just a cent. I find that a lot easier to understand than pirating something you'd normally pay $10 for.

Along with the crappy people who'll just pirate anything, not caring if they're taking money from charities and indie devs, there are people who have their reasons, you could have donated, then torrented it to save their bandwidth, or be in a country where you can't get it thru official channels, or don't have access to a credit card. In those cases, while it's still kinda wrong to pirate it, I imagine they wouldn't be too pissed if you dropped some cash in a charity closer to home to cover it.

 

[Ldude893]

THIS is how you properly combat piracy.

 

[Uristqwerty]

It is worse. That one cent game was for charity, with one cent being the minimum donation. And being lazy is not an acceptable excuse for pirating.

Who cares, it's just a cent. I find that a lot easier to understand than pirating something you'd normally pay $10 for.

Along with the crappy people who'll just pirate anything, not caring if they're taking money from charities and indie devs, there are people who have their reasons, you could have donated, then torrented it to save their bandwidth, or be in a country where you can't get it thru official channels, or don't have access to a credit card. In those cases, while it's still kinda wrong to pirate it, I imagine they wouldn't be too pissed if you dropped some cash in a charity closer to home to cover it.

If I remember correctly, they are only counting people who downloaded from their own site, for example if one person bought the bundle and then gave their download page URL to 100 other people. (Just checked, http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Saving-a-penny----pirating-the-Humble-Indie-Bundle )

Also, http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/12/Download-the-Humble-Indie-Bundle-2-using-BitTorrent

 

[Asehujiko]

I, on the other hand, find it all terribly amusing, and the pained squalling of those who got busted while seeking technical support for a game they illegally downloaded is just sweet, sugary icing on the cake of hilarity.

You find it hilarious that another poorly thought out scheme to "fight" piracy that only ends up annoying the ones who try to make up for it by helping the developers fix their bugs also enables a massive exploit to get other people banned?

 

[Irridium]

I, on the other hand, find it all terribly amusing, and the pained squalling of those who got busted while seeking technical support for a game they illegally downloaded is just sweet, sugary icing on the cake of hilarity.

You find it hilarious that another poorly thought out scheme to "fight" piracy that only ends up annoying the ones who try to make up for it by helping the developers fix their bugs also enables a massive exploit to get other people banned?

It clearly states that the Steam ID was shown along with the error message, hence it's easy to see if someone was "falsely" accused. So no legit customer was "harmed".

The only people this thing annoys and bans are the pirates.

 

[Asehujiko]

The only people this thing annoys and bans are the pirates.

Show me a QA tester that is willing to work for a one time $10 fee. Oh wait, you can't because Newman just betrayed all of them.

While the people who pirated and didn't actively try to help improve the product for those who bought were completely unaffected.

 

[Irridium]

The only people this thing annoys and bans are the pirates.

Show me a QA tester that is willing to work for a one time $10 fee. Oh wait, you can't because Newman just betrayed all of them.

While the people who pirated and didn't actively try to help improve the product for those who bought were completely unaffected.

What the hell are you talking about? Who did he betray? All he did was lock out pirates from playing a game they didn't pay for. Whats the issue with that?

 

[sosolidshoe]

What a surprise, Any-excuse Chalk finds it amusing, and thinks legitimate concerns are nothing in the face of the chance to maybe inconvenience a handful of pirates.

Nevermind that there's absolutely no way to prove that they actually were pirates.
Nevermind that there are likely now people who've done nothing wrong yet have been screwed out of their entire Steam game collection.

Oh yes, and nevermind that what the GMod guy did is actually more illegal than pirating a game. Seriously Andy, you need to play another tune, this one is getting ooooold, and you're starting to look like a bit of an industry bumlick.

 

[Asehujiko]

The only people this thing annoys and bans are the pirates.

Show me a QA tester that is willing to work for a one time $10 fee. Oh wait, you can't because Newman just betrayed all of them.

While the people who pirated and didn't actively try to help improve the product for those who bought were completely unaffected.

What the hell are you talking about? Who did he betray? All he did was lock out pirates from playing a game they didn't pay for. Whats the issue with that?

The only people banned were those who voluntarily offered to help improve the game.

The people who just pirated without contributing got away.

So effectively, he only discouraged people who pirated from helping him and others.

 

[Irridium]

The only people this thing annoys and bans are the pirates.

Show me a QA tester that is willing to work for a one time $10 fee. Oh wait, you can't because Newman just betrayed all of them.

While the people who pirated and didn't actively try to help improve the product for those who bought were completely unaffected.

What the hell are you talking about? Who did he betray? All he did was lock out pirates from playing a game they didn't pay for. Whats the issue with that?

The only people banned were those who voluntarily offered to help improve the game.

The people who just pirated without contributing got away.

So effectively, he only discouraged people who pirated from helping him and others.

If your talking about the people who tested this scheme, they'd just create new accounts, and use those for test purposes.