You know what they call someone who eats food without paying for it, right?

If you play something, it has value. That is why you invest time in it. If you don’t realize that value, that’s more of a personal issue (I recommend looking into the concept of “opportunity cost,” you’re spending time with something of low value that you could spend with something of high value). But if you put time…

This is why Blizzard allowed “spawned” copies of their games, to give people a taste (usually in multiplayer or LAN) of the full game to encourage them to play. It doesn’t really excuse the piracy, but at least you had the integrity to put your money down for the game. Too many people never do.

You’re talking about “customers” for a free game being pirated. Your argument has no real bearing on the point made.

There’s nothing naive about it. You asked how it was negatively affecting anyone, which is incredibly naive. What it comes down to is, if you do not want to pay for a game, don’t play it. It’s that simple. You aren’t entitled to play a game, and deciding to do so does have economic consequences for the studio and…

The crime is counterfeiting. It’s an important distinction to make. By encouraging counterfeiting, the work of the original artists is devalued through saturation. This has real economic effects aside from the proverbial lost sales and still negatively impacts developers.

You can’t really fight piracy through tech, this is true, and you are more likely to harm consumers. That doesn’t excuse piracy as an activity, however.

Yes, but you do that by speaking, not by pirating. Say that you don’t like something, then demonstrate by not playing it. If you play the game after saying you don’t like it, your comments are hollow at best.

If you think a game is worth playing, it has value to you. If you didn’t think a game was worth playing, you wouldn’t play it. Saying that you wouldn’t pay for a game and then playing it is lying to yourself.

So why not make a third party campaign setting? There’s obviously a demand for a properly creative and representative black setting, complete with diversity of cultures and experiences. It seems like a no-brainer to jump on the opportunity.

So your opinions align with the findings. Good to know, eh?

Mods and fan projects shouldn’t be affected. However, frameworks like SKSE would need permission from the developer. Generally speaking, this shouldn’t be much of an issue, particularly if any given developer cares about the appeal and longevity of their game.

Hey now, some games include cheating as a deliberate mechanic. A prime example is Munchkin, which specifically endorses cheating if you don’t get caught.

Actually, most anti-cheat systems (ex. BattleEye) are actually explicitly checking memory for signs of cheat programs. The problem is that cheat systems are constantly being upgraded to alter their memory signature, providing a moving target, coupled with the PR fallout of potential false positives.

Both of which were still memory hacks, technically, as well, so still not precisely comparable (though the havoc they caused in online play certainly is).

Just to bolster your argument here, Game Genie was explicitly a memory hack. The strings of code entered were in fact memory addresses and altered values, which is why the Game Genie came with warnings regarding potentially unstable gameplay even with validated cheats.

Actually, a study has recently been done (it was in my RSS feed, so I don’t have it to hand) that showed that comments aren’t inherently bad, but rather used incorrectly. Specifically, they are not being used to encourage fruitful discussion but rather are serving as a dumping ground for throwaway comments. Part of…

It’s worth noting that the word “elitist” has been pretty severely abused of late. The “elites” that people like to rail against are generally those people who spent the time and money gaining experience and knowledge in a particular job or skill and thus have the background to fill a particular role (see career…

I wouldn’t say that it eliminated the difficulty so much as shifted the emphasis from handling surprise information to tracking multiple streams of information. I do agree that reducing the number of players to be managed did help with that shift, in part by reducing the swings in difficulty between guilds based on…

Nobody would be interested because it had already been done, meaning you didn’t put in the work to figure out how to do it. Apparently, you can’t recognize that puzzle solving is every bit a skill as twitch ability.