Space Empires V Pirated!

[Arralen]

Azselendor said:
A few years back, a friend of mine released a program that was pirated pretty bad for a few weeks, we countered it by creating dummy-torrents filled with dead files (such as overly-large scans of various body parts in TIFF and BMP format) and distributed them to various torrent sites under the same name. I think we got about a dozen people in on the prank so that in the end, 9/10 torrents for his program was really one of us showing the dark side of the moon.

Can we set up the same for SEV and Dom3?
I would gladly help ...

[Azselendor]

I figure all the broadband users here, we could definitely disrupt it on a large scale. Anyone else interested?

[NullAshton]

I'm not, because disrupting it would mean that they would be all the more motivated to pirate it. Pirating perhaps does help increase sales of a product, and the SE5 torrent possibly attracts more attention to SE5 than usual.

[President_Elect_Shang]

No not me. It may sound funny but doing that just seems like a negative thing to do; maybe because I view it as a purposeful deception? To me one negative [pirating] does not justify another. Pirating is bad but it is going to happen so long as you have to pay for anything.

[Tim_Ward]

I'm struggling to see how pirating SEV helps increase sales. The logic works for music because some people do indeed download a few tracks from an album, decide they like it then go and buy it. That doesn't really work with a game... you either have SEV or you don't.

If we really want these torrents removed the best thing to do would be this:

http://www.mininova.org/faq

What to do if I want you to remove certain copyrighted files from your site?
Please note that we do not host any illegal content on this site. The torrent (metadata) files do not contain data that might be copyrighted in any way.
However, we offer a service to remove torrents from our site if the copyright holder of the software requests so. These removal requests are only valid if:
You are, or your company is, the copyright holder of this software (no generic anti-piracy groups).
You provide the exact links to the torrents, no complete (sub)categories or search queries.
You provide the complete name(s) of the content in question.
You provide complete contact information (including the name and phone number of the contact person), not a general anti-piracy mail address.
If your request complies with all of these rules, send a mail to copyright@mininova.org. Please keep the correspondence polite.
We remove postings as soon as we can, usually within 24 hours. Keep in mind that mails not applying to the above rules will be ignored.

Obviously, either Malfador or Strategy first would have to do it; preferable Strategy first, Aaron has better things to do

[Intimidator]

Don't understand me wrong , I'm not PRO-Pirate.
But through pirating I got to know SEIV 1.49, so simply said : without pirating I would NEVER BOUGHT SEIV-gold and SEV. And I would neither infected 4 friends, 1 brother and 2 nephews with the Space Empire Virus (they all bought SEIV and the most of them are going to buy SEV (or already did))

So, I know it's NO excuse but it's an simple example on HOW pirating can help a game to get known (see it as an extended demo)

[Azselendor]

Pirating software increases sales like this.

1.) Download Torrent
2.) Pirate tells others about the game and Torrent
3.) ....
4.) PROFIT!

No offense, but I think people who buy software after pirating it is maybe 0.01% of all software pirates.

Now while the dummy-torrent plan is deceptive, it's basically a ploy to sour the milk for would-be pirates and discourage them from attempting to pirate it.


On the other hand, we can have a bit more fun with the dummy torrent and load it up with advertising materials, the demo, and such and distribute that in its place of the actual game. This wouldn't discourage piracy of it, but expose the game's demo to more and more people.

[DeadMilkman]

Tim_Ward, unfortunately that wont really help, because torrents are not only usually posted to multiple sites, but there are torrent sites which index other sites torrents as well.... basically they spread.

What I do is put up torrents of each patch as they come out. And when there is a good stable version of the demo I intend to put up multiple torrents of that. A slightly different form of marketing you might say

As to the suggestion of seeding bad torrents, yes it will work, but the word usually gets spread pretty quickly if a torrent is bad. So it would be necessary to seed a new torrent occasionally, make sure it is the EXACT same size as a real SEV upload would be. And the file name would have to be something like spaceempires5.iso,or as a rar file. If you are just seeding a bunch of random files, it wont work. Because the bittorrent clients report the names of the files they are downloading.

And yes, if it is not obvious I am frequent torrent user. I download lots of porn, old movies, and tv shows. So I guess I'm a pirate, arrrrr.

[Phoenix-D]

No, if your a programmer the real fun is including the actual game..with critical bits missing. Say, it installs and runs fine, but dies with a "Don't pirate me" message a third of the way through.

[Azselendor]

when my friend did it, he encoded all of the nice little moon shots we included as a multi-part RAR file and we seeded 10-15 bad torrents each using popular names of other piraters.