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.Posted by.Posted by.Pros:. - Absolutely Love it!

• Portal Gun Addon Gmod
• Gun Mod For Gmod

Unfortunately-named news site Gamepron is reporting that Mr Garry Newman, creator of Garry's Mod, has gone and done something clever: he introduced an error to. There has been one of these suspect japanese interactive anime games that leaked a few pirated versions itself on various torrent clients. Extract all of the files with a program like Winrar. Open Minecraft.jar using a program such as Winrar. Minecraft.jar can be found at AppData Roaming.minecraft. Drag the files from ModLoader V5 and AudioMod into Minecraft.jar. From the Portal Gun Archive, drag the files from the “Place in bin” folder into the bin folder in.minecraft.

It's exactly from the game!.Cons:. - It has a gun glitch, where every gun goes out of ammo when I try to fire ANY weapon! - You can't pickup any ammo for any gun except the engineers metal.Improvements:. - Please fix! I seriously HIGHLY fixing this gamemode soon! - Keep those updates coming!

There is a mod that is just like this in workshop An addon may be causeing both your problems. This addon doesn't like some addons, like Customizable Weaponry 2.0 I also got a nailgun STAAAAAAPH. 3y.

Lars Westergren says: The problem with these sort of schemes is that just as games are bugged, so are sometimes the code that detects if a copy is pirated or not. This leads to legitimate paying customers getting locked out of their game, or even having their accounts suspended. But when it works, yeah, it’s hilarious how outraged the pirates get. Speaking of DRM, I’ve heard Dragon Age: Origins PC DRM servers have been down for a couple of days, so paying customers can’t play the game.

Pirated versions work fine though! Worth a chuckle, if you are in a morbid mood. Tei says: Yep. The clever thing here is that theres are a double check. Using the provided SteamID, can confirm if the poster have the game or not. So this work as “self denounce”.

People posting these messages are flagging thenselves as pirates, so is easier to check than after the fact. Is this combination of “I have this game”, “My id is X” and “player with id X don’t have buy the game”. So while this type of systems are almost always flawed, don’t seems the case here. —– update: Uh. After reading a GMod thread about the topic. Seems there are a few false positives. So the tecnical part “failed” flagging people.

But the human part (Garry) correctly flagged only the evil people. So the combination human+machine worked here, even after the machine part failing. Update: I sacrificed brevity in the name of correctness. Milky1985 says: If the ID’s for the pirarted ones are randomly generated (peopel posting on the forums will start doing that “for lolz”), if it gets banned it could ban a legit player who does not yet have the game, ironically stopping them from getting it. Or worst case scenario, could get a full steam ban because of it and lose all of there games.

I assume there will be some proper investigations going on if they do throw bans around. Nothing to stop my steamID being randomly generated, VERY small chance (one in however meany steam users there are) but still there! Now its been reveled EDIT Also now if someone does have a false postive, as happened (and happened with steam, remember the whole COD4 VAC fisaco when legit people got banned but everyone replied with “you cheater”?) people have to wade throgh 100’s of “you sodding pirate” posts to try to get info on it. While tis a fun idea, it does have side effects As an extra note, enever played garry’s mod, don’t have it, don’t know anyone who had it. Admit its a fun way to catch pirates but again, they need to consider that the dectection is NOT infalible (imo same goes for valve and there “no response” for VAC, again never cheated but working with computers i know that nothing is 100%).

Wulf says: I rarely ever say this, but loooooool This is so open for abuse it’s not even funny, and some folks I’ve talked to who’re very in tune with this sort of thing pretty much agree. @JustOneWay Forum IDs can in no way be linked to Steam IDs. You can actually register for a forum account without even having a Steam account. So it would be amazingly easy to get the Steam ID of someone who doesn’t have Garry’s Mod yet, create a forum account, and then falsely indicate them. This is going to get funny, fast.

I’m glad I do have a copy of Garry’s Mod, because if they’re still taking error reports now that this information is public, then a lot of people are about to get screwed. Not only that, but they’re only going to catch the dumb pirates, anyway. I mean, I’m as paranoid as hell with error reports wanting to send data about my PC when I’m not sure of everything contained, so I never allow that to happen. And I’d be incredibly distrustful and suspicious if a pirated game wanted me to report an error. Let me just go grab some popcorn. The Great Wayne says: Agree with wulf.

Besides, anyone dumb enough to get caught with this kind of move isn’t a pirate, it’s an idiot. Actually many wouldn’t mind if they go as far as sterilizing those they caught and not only ban them, y’know, for gene pool’s sake. Finally, kinda tired of the recurrent piracy debate around here, but I’d still be curious about where the PC video game industry would be atm if it wasn’t for its long history with the pirate community. My guess is: not so healthy as it is right now (despite whatever bullshit the producers have been eager to broadcast these last years, although there’s a shift in paradigm lately), for a lot of reasons. And to be clear: no, there’s no such things as half way crooks. Ain’t making an apology, but if one stop playing the offended lambda-good-willed citizen and start to think, I’m quite sure he’ll see what I’m talking about.

Vodkarn says: “@ErgatesAntius Nope could still be fraud as fraud can be defined as “deceit, trickery, sharp practice, or breach of confidence, perpetrated for profit or to gain some unfair or dishonest advantage.” This is from wikipedia but i know that fraud does not have to involve money. No money has to change hands for it to be fraud, just being dishonest to gain something, in this case to gain the advantage of knowing where the person is.” Wow, undercover cops are totally screwed I guess, eh? Says: MadMinstrel I think you missed the point. I was replying to Heliocentric’s point about the “all data should be free” brigade like that idiot BAREFoot (or however he capitalises it). Here’s how things work with everything else.

Company make a product (be it a TV, a car, a packet of cornflakes, whatever) & decides to sell it for x. Customers then decide either yes x is a fair price for the product being sold & purchase it or decide no x is too expensive for what the product is providing me so I will continue to live my life without said product or purchase a competitors product which costs less/provides similar experience. Here’s how it seems to work for some people where software is concerned.

Company makes a product (video game, operating system, application package, whatever) & decides to sell it for x. Customers decide either yes x is a fair price for the product being sold & purchase or decide no x is too expensive, I will simply use their product without paying for it. Oh and I’ll complain about the product not being up to the standards I expect even though I’m giving the person who worked on producing it nothing in return for their labour.

In which world is the second example fair compared to the first? Wulf says: @Malibu Stacey I pointed this out the other day, but working personal attacks and insulting people only hurts your credibility rather than making for a good argument. It just looks like you’re trying to harm someone instead of just presenting an opposing philosophy, and therefore appears unnecessarily aggressive, and thus removes the weight your argument might otherwise have had. I’m not sure how I feel about BAREf00t either, but calling him an idiot in the middle of your argument, specifically him, just means that the entire point has become to insult him, with no other purpose attached.

Bosch dishwasher sgs65m08au manual lymphatic drainage. And just because someone has a different philosophy than you, it’s no grounds to insult them anyway, and if they can provide their counter-philosophy without insulting you, then they come out of it looking the more enlightened party, and leaving you to look like a politician. Opinions good, but smearing people only hurts your own opinion, no one else’s. MadMinstrel says: @Malibu Stacey And I was just presenting a middle-of-the-road stance. You seem surprised by the latter behaviour.

Here’s what might be going through a pirate’s mind while he’s making the decision: - I will never see this in public domain as long as I’m alive - This thing is not available in my local library and never will be. It costs half/twice my monthly pay! (depends on country) - I’m not stealing, after all, nobody has less of anything after I download it. If I buy this, I’ll have to deal with the DRM (see today’s Dragon Age post for details) - Copyright is thought crime and a ridiculous concept anyway, let’s ignore it! - I’m not hurting the author because if I couldn’t download it, I wouldn’t have bought it anyway.

They RIAA/MAFIAA sued my (facebook) friend! That will show them!

- I’ve already bought this nice console/PC/TV/book reader/iPod, I can’t let it sit there gathering dust - I’ll buy it when I have the money/when the price comes down. All my friends are playing/reading/watching/using it! What do i do?! - I’ll just check if it runs on my system after all there’s no demo. I’ll just check if I like it, then maybe I’ll buy it after all there’s no demo. I can’t download the 2 GB demo and then the 16 GB game if I like it! My bandwidth caps!

I’ll just get the game None of these things applies to physical goods, hence the different pattern. The only real solution is to make prices and copyright acceptable. Says: Nope I don’t seem surprised by the latter stance, disgusted yes, surprised going by what I know of how human beings conduct themselves, most definitely not.

Actually most of your points apply to physical goods if you bother thinking about them. The difference between what you term physical goods & software is that rather than going without software when those points are considered, some peoples natural reaction is to illegally download. Look at it this way. Why do buses, trains, planes & every other public transport system have ticketing systems in place? That’s physical “DRM” right there yet you don’t see people starting massive internet threads complaining about how they’re forced to buy a bus pass to get to school/college/university/work etc. I wonder why eh?

MadMinstrel says: That may be true, but consider that the prices on public transportation, food and other necessities are invariably adjusted for local incomes. On some of those goods and services, prices are discounted for people with lower income like students, seniors, children, etc. While some companies offer student editions of their software, that is not generally the case. Some people will still board a bus without a valid ticket. And if they get caught, they will pay a small fine.

But if God forbid, you torrent a few songs, you’re in for a long, long legal battle and possibly the forfeiture of all your material assets. I do not support or condone piracy, but neither can I support or condone the corporate greed of the publishers in good conscience.

Edit: Oh, and please tell me how you could apply any of those to buying that bus ticket you speak of, or a hamburger? I’ve given quite a bit of thought to that list and excluded some points I had previously written because they could be applied to physical goods. I’m curious about how you did it. Baboonanza says: Me too. I was a dirty pirate when I was a kid, I don’t think I bought any games at all until I went to Uni.

For that reason I find it hard to condemn kids who do it now, and from personal experience I know that I wouldn’t be rabid game consumer I am today without that early exposure that I wouldn’t have been able to afford any other way. That sort of piracy is IMO in the long-term interest of the industry. OTOH there is 0 excuse for adults to pirate games, all the excuses I’ve ever seen are bullshit. At least if you do it you should have to honesty to admit that’s it’s wrong but that you don’t care.

Says: Surely this is a great way of teaching kids that pirate games, who have lost their entire steam account that actions have consequences? This so very much. The majority of people I meet in daily life seem to think they can do what they like without any consequences of their actions then bitch, whine & cry when suddenly they’re treated with the contempt their earlier actions have earned them. By all means people, “do it for the lulz” but don’t act surprised when people treat you like the dick you are being. Quxxy says: From what I understand, the way he did this was that the game asked the Steam servers whether or not the account being used had purchased the game. Since the only legitimate way to get GMod (that I know of) is via Steam, Steam knows everyone who actually paid for the game. If you were playing GMod and Steam said you hadn’t paid for it, then you had to have pirated it.

There’s always the off chance that you purchased GMod but Steam says you didn’t, but in that case, the game shouldn’t start at all. I think what you want less of is badly-implemented DRM. Admittedly, that’s 99% of DRM in the world, but occasionally it’s done in a reasonable manner. Of course, I may be wrong about the above, in which case I’m happy to be corrected.

Csuzw says: It was the same in Settlers 3. There were various “pirate bugs” in it but unfortunately even with a legitimate copy and a latest model (at the time) Plextor CD drive it regularly failed the check and the game was mostly unplayable.

I eventually got banned from the official forums for asking/complaining about it (I can’t say for certain, but it’s very unlikely what I wrote was abusive/ban-worthy – I’m just not like that). None of the other patches fixed it for me either and I’ve never bought another Settlers game which is a shame as what I saw of S3 I liked (even if it’s not generally well regarded compared to other Settlers games). Deano2099 says: It is interesting but err what’s the point? They’ve been banned from the game forums right that fair enough, but how does the Steam ID help?

Surely knowing the ID won’t allow them to stop the pirates playing? They say they have a list of all the legit Steam IDs that have bought the game, so they don’t have anything more than they had to start with. Unless the idea is that they get those users banned from Steam which no. Yes, I know the pirates ‘deserve’ it but that’s not the decision of Valve. It is a little sinister too, out of interest how would people feel if someone used a similar approach to say, upload your name, address and browser history to a website?

How much personal info is too much? Deano2099 says: Yeah I’ve never understood that. Microsoft do it too. If you’re caught with a modded 360, you’re banned from Xbox Live. Except pirated games won’t play online anyway. So feasibly a pirate that wants to play online might go and buy a legit copy of the one or two games he wants to do that for.

Except he can’t, because he’s banned. And remember MS charge a sub for an Xbox Live Gold account, needed to play online. So he’s banned from giving them money. The solution: buy a second, un-modded Xbox. The ones that, until recently, MS were selling at a loss. Hallgrim says: @vandinz says: “Ban them from Steam. It’s a good idea.” As pointed out above, why?

To stop them from buying games? When did pissing on pirates (who are potential customers, by Valve’s direct admission) become so awesome? I bet more than half the people on here have pirated games, music, movies, books, etc before.

Portal Gun Addon Gmod

(and no I don’t give a crap if you haven’t so don’t post just to tell me how angelic you are). The library doesn’t come to your house and burn all your books if you steal a book from them. They charge you what you owe them for the book, and go about their business. (And the library actually LOST A BOOK in this scenario. They don’t charge you if you let your friend read the book). Bhazor says: Actually that AI issue happened to me when I bought The Orange Box.

Gun Mod For Gmod

After being called a pirate for about five pages in the tech support forum another user said the same thing happened to him and gave me a solution. It just didn’t like Vista 64 and I had to run it with “-32 bit” as a boot instruction. I have no idea whether that was a real attempt to trap pirates or just a genuine glitch that happened to be included in a pre release torrent version and was fixed for most users by the release date. My guesses are the latter unless someone at Valve have actually mentioned it. Tanith says: Been done.

Although in that case it was probably not intended. In Gothic 1 there existed a crack for a very long time which let you start the game without the disk check. As far as I remember it was a modified version of the demo executable or something like that. Anyway, whenever you tried to change worlds e.g. When you had to go to the old mine the game just wouldn’t load or would crash (I don’t remember which) and when people came to the forums or to IRC with this problem it was pretty easy to spot the ones who have cracked the game (some of them actually owned the original but used the crack only so they would not need to use the CD).

Lobotomist says: This trick was done in many other games. But there is a down side too. Iron Lore Entertainment creators of great Hack and Slash game Titan Quest Claim that the game failed and that they bankrupted because of including this type of copy protection. Namely the “pirate bug” caused game to crash when entering certain area. But when the game was released word got around that the game is buggy and unplayable due to crashes.

When they announced that it only happens in pirated versions, it was to late and game got very bad hype all over and missed the initial sales tide. Since than this copy protection is used sparingly. DuckSauce says: That seems like a nasty downside, but Garry’s Mod has been around for ages, so that’s not really an issue. Awesome idea this was imo, but sadly not one that’ll work on every game(for one, can all steam games check the id or only source games? Second, not every game is sold on a platform).

But imagine if stuff like this were mainstream, the damage wouldn’t be nearly as much and it seems like there’s no harm for the customer who bought it, only for the pirate thus it appears a better form of DRM than any I know of(except for No DRM:P). I wonder if it really is only affecting pirates though Also what vandinz said, pirates might find a way around it eventually, but for the moment it works hehe. Says: Hallgrim the post above yours by Lorc links to the actual post on Quartertothree rather than Escapists own interpretation of what they think he might have meant. Interesting article all the same. The choice quote would be “There are few better examples of the “it can’t possibly be my fault” culture in the west than gaming forums.” which (unfortunately) sums up the attitude, around even lofty perches such as RPS of late, perfectly. Also this sort of stuff isn’t new.

Games dev’s have been doing these sort of things since the days of the 16-bit era Commodore Amiga & Atari ST (possibly even further back to the 8-bit PCs). I remember a guy at school complaining about his pirate version of Hired Guns kicking him out after a certain amount of play while the rest of us had hours of fun without issue on a legitimately purchased copy (this was a split-screen game best played as 4 player co-op rather than singleplayer). D3xter says: That would Imply that I either play Garry’s Mod or that my Steam account got banned which is a no on both. I rather find the people “hilarious” that rally against DRM (see one article above), but find someone losing all their games (for whatever reason be it pirating, credit card declined or using a crack) “hilarious” which is one of the worst kinds of DRM imagineable and its counter part in the “real world” would be someone stealing a TV or a toaster and then everything he ever owned being reposessed instead of a fine and sentence according to the severity of the crime (and that’s actual stealing not “copyright infringement”). Companies like SONY (GeoHotz case) are trying to implement the same for their physical products e.g. You not “owning” something you buy while others have completely accomplished said in the digital world and large amounts of people apparently not only being “okay” with that but appreciating it. Pointless Puppies says: Companies like SONY (GeoHotz case) are trying to implement the same for their physical products e.g.

You not “owning” something you buy First of all, this is entirely off topic. It was cute when people thought the Sony v Hotz case was actually going to be important in the long run, but now it’s sad. Second of all, you’re entirely wrong.

Sony wasn’t after changing the notion of consumer ownership. They were going after a hacker who compromised the security of their hardware, but most importantly, distributed security keys of the console (keys that no consumer ever owns). You still “own” your console. Sony never disputed that. If you want you can still hack your own console and write your own custom firmware to your heart’s desire and Sony’s not going to bang on your door unless you start distributing said hacks along with security keys. Learn the difference. Says: I assume the developers/publishers hope that people playing the pirated version which performs terribly hear from people who legitimately purchased the game that it runs fine & then decide to get a legitimately purchased version themselves.

Unfortunately I live in the real world where the people using the pirated version will simply bitch & whine about how bad the game is even though they haven’t purchased it and/or just give up & move on to the next pirated game because the 5 seconds of attention they gave this game have been exhausted & they have a dozen other torrents which just completed that they compulsively have to look at so they can brag to people how many games they played or how massive their collection of pirated games is. Adonf says: We used the same kind of trick on a game I worked on 10 years ago. Is was a strategy game with ants and on pirated versions after a few levels your ants turned reds and started moving way too fast, making the game extremely hard. I don’t remember the exact details but lots of people stared complaining on the internets about our game being unplayable due to what they saw as a bug., it was not clear at all that this was an anti-piracy feature.

I think even in the (paper) press they complained about this bug, probably because stupid people in publishing had sent them a version that they had copied themselves. Huh, stupid people in publishing So anyways, bad idea. Also, no computer program is 100% fail proof so when you implement this kind of tricks you know that it will affect some legit customers. a programming bug, not an insect. Says: There has been one of these suspect japanese interactive anime games that leaked a few pirated versions itself on various torrent clients.

It would then take a snapshot of the user’s desktop, and publish it on a dedicated website until the user bought the retail version. At least I found it hilarious. Then again, I converted from silly teenage pirate to actual buyer of games that interest me after I got my first job, so I have very little remorse for cheaters, hackers and pirates, especially since working in the industry myself. MrDay says: This reminds me of Sensi Soccer – the test version of the game was leaked and pirated to buggery and back.

Since it was for testing, the game had a feature where pressing a key – ‘F’, I think – caused you to win the match you were playing. This was to let play testers quickly advance to check later stages of the game. The story goes that people who had a dodgy copy started calling up Sensible Software complaining about the bug, so they were asked to leave a name and address for a replacement and got a visit by the fuzz. D3xter says: @Baboonanza: What he is saying is that people could just get people they don’t like to be banned, e.g.

I just googled your name and found your Steam account: The number after /profiles/ is your Steam ID, if this would actually lead to a ban I could just go make an account on their forums with your name and make a post saying hey I got this message “Unable to shade polygon normals(0580471)” and you’d just be left wondering why you can’t login anymore which would be a retarded thing to happen. Says: 0580471 isn’t a Steam ID genius. That’s a Community Profile ID. Steam ID’s are viewable in Source engine games with the status commmand in console.

They look like STEAM0:0:???????? Or STEAM0:1:???????? Where the???????? Is the actual ID number (8 digits is the highest I’ve seen so far). You can convert a Steam ID to a Community Profile ID using the Steam API but I don’t think you can convert the other way (could be wrong but last I checked it wasn’t possible). Also adonf Steam forums accounts are completely separate from Steam accounts so no that’s not what they did. I’ve had a Steam account since it launched but I’ve never registered on the allmighty cesspit that is the Steam forums.

Robert says: How I hate the people who justify copyright violation., for any reason. Mostly they reason from the wrong side: while it might not hurt anyone directly when you pirate a game/movie, it would not exist if everyone would do it. So essentially you are letting other people pay (or work) for your entertainment. It’s this out-of-proportion feeling of entitlement that’s growing rampant in the internet community. I mean, who are you that you are morally freed of spending money on a ‘service’ while others are not?.Formerly ‘erroneously’ described as piracy.

Robert says: STICK IT UP TO THE MAN EVERY CHANCE YOU GET! Even if the so-called man is alone, in his attic, taking care of his family. Not that it should matter who’s copyright you are violating. (If you put words in my mouth, so can I.) Actually, as far as I know (and a check wiki-check confirms), the term piracy predates modern copyright laws.

Even if it is a derogatory term, it’s one reappropriated by copyright violaters. One of the biggest torrent sites refers to it. But, fine, to please you and humour me, I shall edit it in. Says: “Firstly, you’re using the term ‘piracy’ which is a derogatory term christened by those who champion their right to limitless, restrictive and anti-competitive copyright protections.” Ever worked on something for two years, 60 hours a week, put it on sale for $20 and seen people not only distribute it for free, but whine at people on forums to THANK THEM FOR THEIR work as they did so? I suspect not, and if you ever do, i assure you your attitude to such silly pedantic posturing will change forever.

Wulf says: The interesting thing is that you’re also slamming piracy as an avenue of advertisement. What if someone pirates the game, and then realises what a great game it is and pays for it? You’d be surprised how often this happens, and yet there’s this myth that anyone who pirates anything won’t pay for it. (See my example involving films below.) Whereas, in truth, it might compel them to do so where otherwise they might have had no interest in your game. Yes, scoundrels that never pay, not even in the Steam sales that they can afford, are rather deplorable, but let’s please stop believing that everything is so black & white, because in doing so you’re only driving away potential customers.

Even Gabe Newell realises this, and said so in a quite famous quote – that pirates are simply under-served customers. If he gets it, then why doesn’t anyone else?

And he’s Gabe bloody Newell for crying out loud! Wulf says: Just so this doesn’t get lost in the sound and fury Cliffski, as someone who’s genuinely interested in your success, had you ever considered trying a Pay What You Want thing? I’m not sure if you’ve done it yet, I haven’t seen it though, but you could test it out on one of your products. It’s been a massive success though for a whole bunch of people because it allows everyone to set their own price point.

You can even put a minimum if you want, explaining that it’s to do with PayPal transaction costs, but I think you should try it. Not everyone has buckets of money, but if someone has been waiting for the chance to give you some money, then this might be a good way to let them do that. It might work out better than you think.

And I’m using the Humble Indie Bundle here as an example. In fact, why not get in touch with the HIB guys and see if you can’t work out a promotion via them? It’d get your games some great publicity as well, because they’re so, so good at that.

Just an idea. Robert says: “The interesting thing is that you’re also slamming piracy as an avenue of advertisement. What if someone pirates the game, and then realises what a great game it is and pays for it?” Good things can come from bad things, but that doesn’t make the bad thing right. This is about people making their own rules.

While some good may come of it, it should not be a carte blanche to do whatever you want. I dislike the constant validation of of an illegal act because of, frankly, minor reasons.

I dislike the backward reasoning: I shall take your work, use it, enjoy it and by my grace you shall have a alm. While there are people who handle this with respect, there are many who do not.

It’s the utter arrogance of people to do whatever theywant with another mans work. Gabe Newell has to cheerful and nice and friendly to sell more games. Says: cliffski it’s a bit disingenuous to ask people to choose between paying half or full price for the 4th expansion to a game that they’ve already paid four times that & then act surprised when the majority decide to pay full price. These people are already your audience, of course they’re going to be happy to pay the extra cash to a small indie like yourself as they probably already forked out around $20 for the base game & $5 each for the first 3 expansions (I don’t know what the actual USD prices are/were since I’m from the UK & see prices in GBP). Trjp says: A developer of an Android ‘app recently did something similar – and so far the feedback he’s getting isn’t terribly positive. He pirated his own App into the dodgy AppStores (they generally charge a one-off fee for a tonne of pirated Apps) but with a trick up it’s sleeve.

The dodgy version works as the full version does EXCEPT that at a certain point it sends an SMS to everyone you know, telling them you’re a software pirate The problem with this sort of approach is that it’s neither accurate nor helpful in converting people from their ‘immoral’ ways. Some people probably use these dodgy Appstores thinking they’re legit (they charge money!) and others may have received the dodgy App from friends or whatever Overall, he’s just made Android users paranoid about the level of access an App requests (something most Android users probably never checked before). Milky1985 says: The police and general public are not allowed to break the law to catch criminals (it is both annoying and sensible, how can you say “Don’t hurt poeple when you have just hurt the guy to catch him”). I don’t care if its a pirate version (its possible someone didn’t know it was pirate, assumed it was “ad supported” as its the free version), that company has now broken rules themselves, ironically opening themselves up for revenge (why shoudl i buy the real version if they don’t follow rules) People are intrinsically stubborn, and yes I know that is spelt wrong:P.

Trjp says: I don’t think they broke any rules – they simply requested the permissions required to access Contacts and send SMSs and people granted that (probably without noticing). Even if they did look – Contacts access is often requested by Games which contain social network stuff (Scoreloop/OpenFeint) so that they can connect people to ‘friends’. The problem is one of harming people you don’t intend to harm – it’s impossible to avoid ‘collateral damage’ when you do this stuff – and even one case can backlash against you. End of the day, copyright violation is becoming a very, very common crime tho – to the extent that we should really be asking how we can change copyright and not how we can change people. Wulf says: Yeah, but there are Steam sales for that.

I realise that not everyone is rich and that some people might pirate until a Steam sale comes along, where they can at least offer some money for the game they’ve been enjoying, and it’s surprising how many people do that. I don’t subscribe to the whole belief that piracy is like terrorism myself, and all the screaming about 9/11 that that entails. People are just people at the end of the day, some of them are rude, some are obnoxious, but they can all still be decent.

This makes me wonder what sort of mindset it would take to pirate something and never pay for it, I’m guessing that the pirates who do that must either be kids with no pocket money, or people who have so much money (very rich people) that they can’t bear to see even a minute amount of it being ‘wasted’ on something so frivolous and trivial as a game. Then again, maybe this is me just thinking the best of people, I don’t know. I wouldn’t be surprised though if the numbers of people pirating Garry’s Mod are not huge. It’s cheap, it’s been cheaper in sales, there have been free weekends, there is a demo of sorts so I don’t see piracy being huge for it. I’d certainly sadly shake my head at someone who’s passed up a Steam sale for GMod and continued playing their pirated version of it, that’s for sure. But equally I’d shake my head at the GMod folks for pulling a stunt that’s so prone to false positives and could easily impact upon legitimate customers. I don’t think that locking someone out who’s actually bought the game is a good way to convince them not to pirate, myself.

But what do I know? Lamzor says: i dont get this. I just checked and there are plenty of nonsteam versions of this game(pirated). Does this mean that this happened only to few people playing some shitty cracked version? I also think that pirates couldnt care less about their (facepunch) forum accounts being banned. I dont think that valve would do anything(apparently didnt in this case). Mostly because its so easy to create false positive forum post.

And as it seems, this also happened to people who bought the game. They posted on forums and also exposed their steamID. I think that developers should provide more reasons WHY to buy the game and not create evil schemes how to ban them on some forums and irritate some paying customers in the process. Take super meat boy. So may addons and new levels were added to the game. No sane person who would like to play this game will pirate it. I also dont believe that Mr Garry Newman did not pirate any music/game/app when he was younger and could not effort each new game, album or app.

So why the evil schemes? I like Amanita Design approach(pirate amnesty-lower price for all) or humble bundle pack approach. Im sure that nobody will beat piracy(ever). But they can lower the number of pirated copies.

Sometimes piracy can also help. Remember the movie ‘man from earth’? I dont think that you would see that movie without help of piracy. Movie creators think the same.

Read their comments below. Wulf says: Piracy is a funny thing. I watched a cam version of Megamind. I now own the Bluray release. I watched a cam version of Alpha & Omega. I now own the Bluray release.

I watched My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (damn the people responsible). And I’m now set to buy the DVD box set, if/when it happens. Why do I watch cam versions? I’m not a healthy person. Never have been. So the whole cinema thing just can’t happen in my case, if I’m exposed to too much loud noise, I get tinnitus, then I get nauseous, and after having thrown up a few times, I’ve learned to avoid cinemas. But people keep talking about these damn films that I should watch.

So I watch them, and what do I do? I end up buying them because I loved them so much. In the case of My Little Pony, I watched ’em because Hasbro has no issues with it. They make money from toy sales rather than the cartoons themselves, so they haven’t been pulling any of the shows related to their toy lines, they haven’t made a single effort to do so, so all shows relating to their toy lines are widely available for download. But I’m going to buy the box set anyway because I love that show and I want to let them know that I’m interested in seeing more. Voting with my wallet and all that.

So there you go. (It’s actually gotten to the point where I watch a bunch of trailers to ensure that I’ll like something before I grab the cam version, since I know I’m going to end up buying it anyway.

And I want to support the right people with my money.). Lamzor says: @Malibu Stacey “The Humble Indie Bundle experiment has been a massive success beyond our craziest expectations. So far, 138,813 generous contributors have put down an incredible $1,273,613.

Of this, contributors chose to allocate 30.85% to charity: $392,953 for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Child’s Play Charity.” “The second Bundle was able to break $500,000 in sales within one day. The sale cleared $1.8 million in sales after ten days of sales. Bundle#3 made $440 000 sofar. – you can hardly call that failure. I myselves pirated some of those games in the bundles. Didnt play them so i didnt buy them. But i bought each pack for 15eur.

Not because its value is bigger, its because i think its very good idea which deserves my money. Now when i have them added on my steam acc, maybe i will get around to play them more often.

Btw not all pirates are bad. For example, on each decent scene torrent tracker Humble bundle pack torrents were removed while they were availible. DRM and nasty schemes is no way how to boost your sales. For example, mr Garry Newman can create the best game ever and i still wont buy it because of this stunt(im sure im not alone). Same as any game using online validation, spyware, constant connection check etc(uplay, starforce). Steamworks, clever securom(without need to activate all the time) and few others is as far as im willing to go. SuperNashwanPower says: Can you actually pirate a game and link it to your steam account?

I would have thought that a) Valve have a record of all your purchases centrally b) those purchases would correspond with your steam account. If you are playing something they have no record of you buying, wouldnt that be obvious?

Or is the loop hole with games you might buy elsewhere and then link to steam? Or is it just legally they arent allowed to do that kind of surveillance? I’ve never pirated a game so I have no clue how it all works. Iggypopbarker says: Sports Interactive did this for a while – problem being it affected hundreds of legitimate purchasers of Football Manager.

FM08 was worst – it had one of these ‘deliberate bugs’ where if you pirated the game, tournaments like the World Cup would be filled with the worst-ranked teams (San Marino, Tonga, Vietnam etc) instead of those that qualified. They tested it so badly that nobody noticed it affected everyone who continued their savegame from the demo in a legal copy of the full game. What made it worse is that SI’s head honcho, the uniquely charmless Miles Jacobson, was lurking the forums full-time on week of release, posting rants at people reporting this bug about how they were ‘filthy pirates’ ‘stealing the food off his family’s table’.

When, very soon after, it was undeniable that this bug was affecting real customers, he went quiet at first, and when prompted for an apology to those he had slandered, variously banned people, maintained they were pirates, and threatened to sue for claims that his rants had been directed at particular people (despite their tone and the fact they were in response to a quoted post making it obvious they were). Customer service at its finest. Says: I think if this is the way to stop Pirates stealing software then i’m all for it. If a few, and it does need to be a few, “Real” owners get hit by it, then they can prove they have the right to own the game or software, sound in the knowledge that the next item they buy should be even better. It is of course not the first time this type has been tries with games, going beck to the Amiga days it was common for software publishers to deliberately write errors into their games just to catch the Pirates out. They didn’t have Steam then. Still, even with Steam the Pirates manage to bypass the copy-protection and online measures anyway in the end.

Gary’s Mod though, still made me chuckle.