valve LOST an obscene amount of money the other night

[otomo]

You can play online with them if the server is cracked and a LOT are.

 

[laz]

You dont need cracked servers you can play online with legit servers

 

[soul]

I have two comments. First, a site that I frequent has CS:S up for download. I was browsing through the comments about it, and noticed two things:

1) A majority of the people downloading it said that they fully intend to buy the game, but want to try before they buy.
2) Yes, you can play it online. It seems to take a shred of common sense to get it to work, but it works. I don't understand why people refuse to believe this, even after several people in this thread alone have stated that it does indeed work online.

Now, onto the people claiming that a daily update is the key to stopping piracy on Steam. The ONLY thing that a daily update would be effective at doing is infuriating the people that have put down their hard earned money for the game.

Ignore the time it would take to modify the code, and distribute it to the content servers, because that could realistically be done with automated scripts. Also, ignore the fact that the warez groups WOULD be able to keep the supply going. The problem comes in distributing the update to every Steam user every day. Looking at the Steam stats page, I see that between CS and CS:S there are around 125,000 people currently playing, so we'll use that for a daily average for when HL2 is released. Assuming the update is a small 0.5MB download, that is over 61GB of data that is moving across the wire EVERY SINGLE DAY. For a delivery method based solely on internet distribution, that is a LOT of wasted resources. Add to all that, 125,000 people will get sick of downloading an update on a daily basis just because a group of people didn't want to pay for the game.

This is a long winded post, but the point is to get people to realize that a daily update is NOT even REMOTELY a good idea.

 

[phillychuck]

OMG - Too Large a Thread.

Warez protects the consumer from developers who suck.

Warez dudes tend to be collectors/packrats more then gamers.

Warez'd games are a pain in the rear end to play, patches break cracks, most of the decent online games are restricted to legit serials.

I have a pile of non-warez's CD's here I played for 10 minutes and gave up because the games were crap. There goes my $40-$50 down the spout. Point of Sale doesn't care, dev doesn't care, so why should I care if they can't design a copyright protection that works ...

Tring to warez a game like CS:S is silly, they'll break your ability to play on legit severs.. sure, you can circle jerk with your warez buddies on a few limited servers, what fun is that?

How about dev's who release a game that sucks that has a monthly charge? MMO's... OMG, you play it for months at a time, they break things, they fix things.. you shell out $50 for the game then upto $15/month to play their broken games. Can we sue them for theft of our time? No.

 

[Darth Valium]

Holy shit.. I nearly had an aneurysm reading that post.

Count up the people who think it needs to be fixed over the people who are here saying VALVe should sue someone. Yeah.. I am correct WE are here to encourage VALVe to fix these issues ASAP.

yeah, sue someone. perhaps sue valve if they don't fix this issues asap??? *g*, jj. and sue valve for not keeping their it safe. or sue gabe for using "gaben". nah, still jj.

btw: as aneurysm are in early stages hard to detect, even by skilled medics, i wonder how you were able to tell??? .

no idea how we ended in such stupid conversation.

my oppinions are nearly the same as phillychuck' one.

warezing and illegal downloads are market controll-instruments.
did you ever noticed that cinema-bills, audio-cd's and new games allways cost the same? what about competition and flexible prices, regulated by customer needs and product quality?
nada. a "britney" cd costs the same as a concert directed by "herbert von karajan" or "kurt masur"(okay, britney might be kind of popular somewhere, substitute her with something else then). or "soldner" as much as "do you like horny bunnies? 2" or "hl2".
that's just stupid and customer rip-off.

i rarerly compare sw to other products, but in this case:
would you ever pay the same price for a mercedes coupe as for a toyota yaris?

for sure, it's a shame when great games like hl2 get warezed, and their multiplayer-parts are ruined for some times by cheap-mofos. but this is still a subjective point, because i like this genre and i'm kindo hl2-fanboy(minor, but still).

nevertheless, great games will attract a lot of real buyers, so there is no point of worrying about. it's not the warez-scene, who corrupts the software/audio/video market, it's the content-producing industry.

ps: i'm no native english speaking one, so i'm sorry about misunderstandings resulting out of my minor english-skills .

 

[DvS]

If they just put in a little variable and changed it, it wouldn't do anything, becuase its the same line of code being changed, thus making it useless since all they need to do is go in and disable that line of code. And I Still woudn't want to sit and let steam update everyday I play the game, its stupid. I didn't get steam to look at the nice update dialog. Its just to much work for something that would still end up getting bypassed anyway. A steam updates the servers on every map reset.. So you can see the issue here.. The update rolls around and you get the patch.. but the server you want to play on just started a new map, and didn't get the patch. You can't play on that server until the new map becuase it started a new map before the 'update' was released.

And you would have to recompile the entire HL2 executable which contains the engine. If they did it in the gameplay DLL's, it would be pointless since that goes out in the SDK...

It's just to much of a hassle, and I'm not gonna discuss it any further. Pirating has been here, is here, and will be here int he future. It's not going anywhere.

-Limb

You say you wouldn't want steam to update every day, when in fact it does, what do you think steam is doing when it downloads a security module each time you play CS or any other steam game?

It wouldn't take much to make a tool that changes an access code in the auth part of the source by using an algorithm, depending on the complexity of said algorithm, it would take the hackers quite a while to figure it out, and by then valve could already have switched to a new algorithm.

They could even program the tool to make a batch of access code files, and store to be uploaded to steam users in the future.

It seems you refuse to even listen to facts on this, which points to nothing but stubborness.

warezing and illegal downloads are market controll-instruments.
did you ever noticed that cinema-bills, audio-cd's and new games allways cost the same? what about competition and flexible prices, regulated by customer needs and product quality?
nada. a "britney" cd costs the same as a concert directed by "herbert von karajan" or "kurt masur"(okay, britney might be kind of popular somewhere, substitute her with something else then). or "soldner" as much as "do you like horny bunnies? 2" or "hl2".
that's just stupid and customer rip-off.

i rarerly compare sw to other products, but in this case:
would you ever pay the same price for a mercedes coupe as for a toyota yaris?

That is because software and music are not physical objects, their value is determined by opinion (which is a moot argument, the real value is determined by a series of fees*), not by the quality of their parts like cars. It's really not possible to compare software and music to anything else for that matter.

*By this I mean that it costs roughly the same to produce each CD of two games.. the fees are roughly the same as well. You don't think it would be ridiculous if valve said "Well, our game is the best ever, so you pay more for it"

 

[Edge]

ps: i'm no native english speaking one, so i'm sorry about misunderstandings resulting out of my minor english-skills .

Well I apologize for my comment then. I thought you were a native english speaker.

 

[Varsity]

The problem comes in distributing the update to every Steam user every day. Looking at the Steam stats page, I see that between CS and CS:S there are around 125,000 people currently playing, so we'll use that for a daily average for when HL2 is released. Assuming the update is a small 0.5MB download, that is over 61GB of data that is moving across the wire EVERY SINGLE DAY. For a delivery method based solely on internet distribution, that is a LOT of wasted resources. Add to all that, 125,000 people will get sick of downloading an update on a daily basis just because a group of people didn't want to pay for the game.

1) Who said anything about every day? 2) 0.5MB? Far too much. These don't have to be big, or even as I've pointed out clientside at all. Related, as I've also said, you wouldn't notice the update. 3) It isn't wasted if it stops piracy.

 

[UKchaos2]

That warezed version works on legit servers with no need for steam at all.

Then Valve just patch the game so it doesnt work, and accounts using it are temp banned or perma banned for repeated offense. Also the banning has a 2 week delay so the crack-makers cant test if it works.

 

[Darth Valium]

That is because software and music are not physical objects, their value is determined by opinion (which is a moot argument, the real value is determined by a series of fees), not by the quality of their parts like cars. It's really not possible to compare software and music to anything else for that matter.

yeah, i know; one of the reasons i really dislike to compare sw to any other product. it added it out of abstraction-purporse and to include some polemic. i buy around 1-2 games per month, and my rate of becoming really angry about the product's quality and differences between promised/hyped and delievered are increasing from year to year. so if someone who's got some bucks lesser then me stops to buy and starts to warez, i understand him(perhaps i don't agree, example, him: "i've leeched hl2 last night" me: "it seems your brain was leeched in the nite before"; "i've leeched soldner last night", me "great work, please leech transport tycoon this night, just to show jowood how shitty their products are".).

a car is more then the quality of it's parts, manufacturing and support quality do count in too(and lot of other stuff too, hey, ask your local mechanic).
okay, there are some fixed costs which have to substracted from the price of a "intellectual" product, but there is still no reason they still cost the same. there is no gain for the customer, when the only regulation is trough selling quantites(still bad for the publisher if low, of course). perhaps audio-cds are having a small margin(not sure about, most music today sounds remixed, so intellectual investment should be low), pc-games margin is relative wide).

for example in the eu the nations have the same import-taxes for us-products, and within the eu there are no extra-taxes. so french(pc-games ~60€) people could easily order their games in germany(~50€), and don't have to pay extra taxes for it(there are higher shipping costs, so there would be any sense doing this anyway)

regular people are used to pay a lesser amount for a product of minor quality(as long there isn't a special label on it).

@edge: so i am sorry about it too (and honoured the same time).

edit:

*By this I mean that it costs roughly the same to produce each CD of two games.. the fees are roughly the same as well. You don't think it would be ridiculous if valve said "Well, our game is the best ever, so you pay more for it"

hm, they act like this, just look at the steam-prices
no, i intended to say that low-quality games should cost less then your regional established price. it's a question of fairness and customer-protections. it's a shame that in all countries with reformed copyright-law the publishers, producers and owners of intellectual property are granted a bunch of rights, while the customer lost in a lot of countries his right of a private copy, is forbidden to use a bunch of tools and gains nothing.

 

[LeXo5]

.......

that was a really nicely thought out point mayro, makes a lot of sense

 

[AngstyTeen]

Wow such a long thread to read through Off-topic How many people actually read the entire thread before posting? I wish it was everyone but sometimes that just doesn't happen. Well I think piracy does suck and something needs to be done and I think valve would probably be the one to do it because isn't that what steam is really for?

 

[switch]

hmm, anyone else find it strangly ironic that VALVe hired the creator of bittorrent to help them with steam distribution and the program he made is being used to distribution HL2 and is costing VALVe in potential money.

 

[flo_Orian]

you cant play this stupid warez crap online, so why should someone use it for longer than just a short peek?

 

[iamg30hd3]

you cant play this stupid warez crap online, so why should someone use it for longer than just a short peek?

the only stupid crap here is you.. the warez version CAN play online..

 

[zex]

Valve is logging Ips too

 

[chAos972]

When they update steam, it'll shut them out, for a while at least. I bought HL2 over steam so I dont mind either way.

 

[mashed]

I'm sure everyone has pirated something at some point (I plead guilty to downloading Dreamcast games that were not released domestically... they didn't give me an option to buy a legit copy) but why would anyone not want to reward the developers that make this frivilous hobby of ours so much better?

I look at the dialogue and model animation in a game like MGS3, I want to reward Konami with a purchase.

I look at the insane effort put into realistically modeling hundreds of cars, I want to reward Polyphony with a purchase.

I look at the sheer amount of gameplay and hilarious moments in games like GTA, I want to reward Rockstar North with a purchase.

I look at the insanely good graphics, fantastic scenery, facial animation, storyline, physics and basically everything else that is making HL2 such a piece of work and I want to pay for it. That's why I got the STEAM silver package. I get to play CSS now, and I know I'll have access right away to HL2 once it is released. Plus more of my money goes to the people who spend half a decade working incredibly hard just to elevate what I find entertaining to a whole new level.

Show some respect. Buy the games.

And then ultimately make mean spray tags.

 

[Xeinon]

I´m still whaiting for my pre-order too arrive

 

[x84D80Yx]

think thats bad? wait until hl2 comes. it will be just sp so you really cant stop the pirates there.

kinda sad

 

[Darth Valium]

yeap. there will be no way to stop people cracking software. hm, n64-modules were quite save .