Comment by truebecomefalse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by truebecomefalse | Hacker News Reader

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truebecomefalse

What about me? I bought Assassins Creed 3 on steam last week and ordered an xbox360 controller for PC from Amazon. I had the game downloaded and everything ready to go to have a relaxing day of gaming this Saturday. The problem came when I was required to create a UPlay account in order to open my game. Ubisoft's servers were down and I was not able to create an account or play the game. I spent a couple precious hours of my Saturday dealing with their incompetence and then gave up and decided to pirate the game.

I was not very pleased at this point and walked in to my office where we have a 1Gbit connection. I proceeded to torrent the game and grabbed Farcry 3 as well because, fuck em. This took about 45 minutes of downloading. I walked home and was playing 15 minutes later. Ubisoft is forever on my To-Pirate list for brazenly wasting my time on their pointless DRM.

I don't think I fit in your narrow categories.

PS: I spend about 200$/month on paid iTunes Content.

Am I the only one who thinks this is a completely unreasonable response? You purchased the game, whether or not you should be allowed to download another (slightly modified) copy is a legal gray area - but one I would morally support.

Downloading other products from the same company, just because they ticked you off? You've just escalated the situation from what is likely an unfortunately operational issue (no malice) to some form of revenge.

If you want relief from the harm done to you (which, I would argue getting the pirated copy of AC3 was), allow a court to determine the reward. In this situation, it's likely overkill.

Besides the fact that you were blocked of playing YOUR game because of the problem in THEIR Ubi-thing, there another major issue:

You need to install a program that according to their license can basically spy on you.

Some people will say nobody forced you to buy the game, but imagine: if all companies selling cars decided to add a bug to record your talks claiming they can this way offer a better service, how reasonable would it be?

I don't know how reasonable it would be, but it would be a great time to start a car company that didn't do that.

That is a minor category made possible by the major ones. The torrent you used was not seeded and distributed just for those who had paid for the game.

I myself prefer to pirate ISOs rather than find reinstallation media in my closet (a rare need), and it is just as irrelevant given most people seeding and peering also want the serial crack/gen file as well.

While I sympathise with your issues with Ubisoft's ridiculously hamfisted DRM, I simply don't believe this is a significant driving force behind piracy. I'm not claiming it doesn't exist though, or endorsing horrible DRM.

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