Quoting: LungDrago

Quoting: tuubiAnd you're saying we should all be entitled to sale prices after a sale has ended, even if that means purchasing from a random dude on a shady key reselling site like G2A?

I wishlist games I actually do want to buy, and if I miss a sale, I wait a few weeks or months for another one. There's always something else to buy or play anyway.

That's the problem, isn't it? There are tons of games, games go on sale en masse and it's very easy to miss one amidst everything else. Or maybe the sale's timing sucker punches you in a different way - it comes right before your payday, it comes right when you were on a vacation with no internet access or maybe you just plainly haven't used your computer for a while. Then when you do miss one, you can't be sure it will go on sale anytime soon or even ever again. So yeah, if I've just missed one, I went to G2A to get it. I guess my point is that time-limited offers such as these have proven inconvienient numerous times and G2A is the service that provides that convienience (for a while, after a certain point the prices there are the same as everywhere else anyhow). I always figured some purchase is better for both parties than no purchase or a maybe-down-the-line-if-the-stars-align-later purchase. It would be better if there was a more direct way that pays the devs better, but that's the can of worms you open with time-limited offers. Either you ax those completely or find a way to improve your service/store so that I don't feel the need to go G2A to make my purchases.

This has a number of problems. Firstly, this is based on an assumption that game sales are random. They are not, the biggest sales are seasonal and if a game is going to go on sale, that's most likely when it happens. You have at most a few month window when you cannot know if a game is going to be on sale. You are also still clinging to an entitlement to a temporarily lowered price but haven't made arguments why that entitlement is justified. Hell, you even mentioned that stores could stop doing sales entire, so why aren't you willing to buy the game at full price? That's what you'd be doing if stores didn't do discounts at all.

Secondly, "some purchase is better than no purchase" isn't really valid when there's a bunch of devs who would rather that you pirate their game than buy on G2A. With many of these purchases no benefit goes to the developer. At best they profit nothing, at worst they take an actual financial hit from it.

Basically, nothing you've mentioned is an insurmountable problem and thus a justification for going to G2A. Sales aren't random, they can be reasonably tracked and games aren't such a vital commodity that you can't wait for the next sale if you happen to miss one. Just because you can get a small amount of convenience from going to a grey market doesn't justify it.

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Quoting: K3rcus

Quoting: Samsai

Quoting: aokamiI wonder how can they even flourish a business out of stolen keys...

Are there any rogue agents trying to generate collisions ?
Or do they actually stole them from phishing, unauthorized access or from the inside ?

That's the kind of questions I'd love G2A to answer as they might know better.

Beginner's guide to laundering money using G2A

1. Steal credit card details using phishing techniques.
2. Buy loads of game keys on Humble or game developer's own websites.
3. Sell keys on G2A to cash out.
4. Leave game devs to deal with chargeback fees while G2A gets rich off of the cut they get from stolen keys.

Why don't they just revoke the keys?

If so many stolen keys are actually sold in G2A, the user will know, everyone will say on the Internet that their key bought in G2A has been revoked, even though not many buyers denounce G2A, it would be a problem for them, and they would worry about doing something.

They could revoke the keys but since that key now belongs to somebody that thinks they bought a legitimate key, they risk pissing off people playing their game. The devs already have to deal with the chargeback but on top of that they risk PR damage if they actually try to do something about it. So, not exactly a perfect solution.

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Quoting: aokamiI wonder how can they even flourish a business out of stolen keys...

Are there any rogue agents trying to generate collisions ?
Or do they actually stole them from phishing, unauthorized access or from the inside ?

That's the kind of questions I'd love G2A to answer as they might know better.

Beginner's guide to laundering money using G2A

1. Steal credit card details using phishing techniques.
2. Buy loads of game keys on Humble or game developers' own websites.
3. Sell keys on G2A to cash out.
4. Leave game devs to deal with chargeback fees while G2A gets rich off of the cut they get from stolen keys.

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Quoting: SilverCode

Quoting: SamsaiWe know for a fact that the anti-cheat itself won't support Proton. There's no way they will bother to create a kernel module to replace their rootkit, not to mention even if they did the kernel module would become incompatible in no time. The best they can do is either fall back to a higher trust mode or just disable multiplayer while allowing games to start. Or it's just words to get over this particular PR blunder.

In one of the Denuvo PR blurbs defending their actions, they said the software was only done at a kernel level so they can get access to security features offered by the physical CPU. I don't know what features they were referring to, but it could be possible that these same hardware features are accessible to user space on Linux, so it only requires changes to Proton to function. That is a bit of a leap though.

Sounds like diversion and distraction. I bet they just wanted to peek at arbitrary memory or intercept data. Also, even with how crappy Windows is as an operating system I honestly don't think Linux provides access to any security features in user-space that Windows doesn't. Basically, don't listen to a Denuvo rep because they are going to lie either intentionally or accidentally because they don't actually know how their software works.

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We know for a fact that the anti-cheat itself won't support Proton. There's no way they will bother to create a kernel module to replace their rootkit, not to mention even if they did the kernel module would become incompatible in no time. The best they can do is either fall back to a higher trust mode or just disable multiplayer while allowing games to start. Or it's just words to get over this particular PR blunder.

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Quoting: DorritAnd you think that putting people in house arrest is "doing something about it" ?
Open borders and, in the case of Italy, 300.000 Chinese immigrants is recipe for catastrophe.
What brought us here was too much government; only the fall of these so-called social democracies and the return to healthy individualism will return Europe to its former glory.

Are you proposing 300k Chinese just happened to immigrate to Italy carrying COVID-19? Because I'm quite sure that is not the case. If you really want to restrict any disease from hopping from one country to another you need to totally isolate that country, meaning absolutely no travel, immigrant or otherwise. Immigration was not the issue here.

Also, yeah, putting people into "house arrest" is "doing something about it", since people won't flood the hospital capacity and leave tons of people to die in the streets.

Quoting: Dorrit

Quoting: tuubiCan you be more specific? At what point in history exactly was Europe a better place to live? Just curious.

1914 was a watershed.
After that governments never stopped absorbing more and more power, never let a crisis go to waste. We were finally left with crumbs of our former liberties, in exchange for sclerotic leviathans we call States, EU on top as a rotten cherry.
Now they're taking away even the crumbs, in the name of health security.
I pray for all to crumble back to that August, when Governments were small and people free to decide for themselves.

This I find extremely funny. It's not like in 1914 extremely powerful, centrally lead global superpowers existed. Even better, those superpowers usually had some kind of a king in control to whom your average individual was but an ant. And these kings had a nasty tendency to send these average individuals to fight each other in pointless wars. But I suppose since they never were encouraged to stay home for a few months in order to stop hospitals from overflowing, they must have had it so much better than us.

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Quoting: Solitary

Quoting: Samsai

Quoting: Solitary...but it always boils down to one weak point and that is people itself.

... unless you believe that democracy doesn't work, which I very much don't agree with.

I am not sure you or I understand each other. I think democracy works wonders... because it basically limits the aspect of "people problem" that I mentioned, because nobody is allowed to have too much power. The system is designed to limit, slowdown and prevent any radical changes.

Meanwhile with socialism, where you have strong government you get that problem, because you are governed by people that inherently have more power thanks to stronger standing of the state. People with too much power = abuse of power.

Ah, in that case we are in agreement. Overly concentrated power creates conditions ripe for abuse. I would like to propose, however, that social causes can be furthered without concentrating power among the few. There are even people that believe socialism can be done in that way, see anarcho-communists for example.

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Quoting: SolitaryThis is already reality in most of the EU, capitalism mixed in with (more or less) democratic socialism... "free" healthcare and decent quality public education with certain assurances that you wont end up homeless after one mistake. I would say it is working pretty well.

This is true in the sense that us Europeans tend to have it better than others in some ways. However, it's still a constant fight to protect these public systems from privatization attempts, not to mention having to fight the capitalist aspects when they do shitty things like threaten to sue people 3D printing ventilator valves in the middle of a pandemic because the company cannot manufacture or transport them in adequate amounts.

Quoting: SolitaryWe have seen what marxist socialism can do, all through out 20th century and it is always only good on paper. Fighting for the little man, the workers, peasants, or in current day it is minorities...

People hungry for power often justify their attempt to grab power with beautiful words and promises. I mean, the US only goes to war to bring democracy to undemocratic countries. That, however, does not make democracy itself a negative thing...

Quoting: Solitary...but it always boils down to one weak point and that is people itself.

... unless you believe that democracy doesn't work, which I very much don't agree with.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Samsai

Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: GuestWow, looks like an sjw wet dream, I mean they already established 2 terrorist groups under the names ANTIFA and BLM. These people are nuts, truly thinking the world would be better if it was conquered by china...

China? I think you're confusing Socialism with Communism there.

Isn't China pretty much just a ultra-capitalist hellhole that just happens to be operating under a "communist" one-party system? I mean, for a worker utopia the workers sure don't seem particularly happy.

Yes. Because communism doesn't work.

Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: GuestThese people are nuts, truly thinking the world would be better if it was conquered by china...

China? I think you're confusing Socialism with Communism there.

Oh so would you prefer the soviet union over china then? Mm, such nice form of government there.

It doesn't really matter which you go for, it's gonna end bad. Capitalism is great in that it drives progress in all fields as everyone strives to compete with each other, I think we've sorta reached the end of the line there as by this point the corporations are starting to try taking over the world (and succeeding too) and have found simpler ways of increasing profits (marketing and PR) than offering better products.

Change sure is needed, but be it socialism or communism, neither would improve anything, in the absolute best case scenario, they would provide stability and comfort for society for a couple years, at best couple decades, before it all collapses under it's own weight.

Horrendous derailing incoming.

It might be worth keeping in mind that world isn't quite as black and white as what your writing seems to imply you think it is. Political and economic systems have a bit more variety than Soviet Union or our current capitalist systems (not to mention I'm pretty sure MY capitalist system differs plenty from YOUR capitalist system). There have been many proposed reasons why the USSR/China/North Korea systems have created quite awful messes and one of them is the inherent authoritarianism they have been built upon, which allows the elite to screw over their people while reaping all the benefits themselves (sound familiar?). Whether that is actually the case or not, just boiling things down to "<ideology> doesn't work" is not really productive.

You also brought up the failures of capitalism but interestingly you seem to be opposed to toppling that system, which may or may not require some kind of an uprising a la the game in question. This makes me think, how do you think a failing system should be fixed, particularly if that system benefits people who are powerful enough to resist amicable attempts to fix it?

And finally, it is actually possible to construct new systems by combining parts of other systems that have been proven beneficial. It is possible to have markets and competition in otherwise socialist systems for example. Limiting yourself to a binary choice between extremes generally leaves you with two bad choices. Some additional nuance is usually required.

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Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: GuestWow, looks like an sjw wet dream, I mean they already established 2 terrorist groups under the names ANTIFA and BLM. These people are nuts, truly thinking the world would be better if it was conquered by china...

China? I think you're confusing Socialism with Communism there.

Isn't China pretty much just a ultra-capitalist hellhole that just happens to be operating under a "communist" one-party system? I mean, for a worker utopia the workers sure don't seem particularly happy.

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