Yes he did. I would not have been so restrained.
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Perhaps, but I could never match Axiomâs mad skills with MS paint. I love the way his name is beautifully plastered across another personâs artwork so artistically. And letâs face it, notepad is exceedingly hard to use to change the number 50 to 80 while only managing to break the game about 30% of the time.
Seriously though, I guess you have to balance annoyance and potential malware infestations at having hack your own game vs just paying the few $ that are asked for it. As for the modding of stats in bought games, people seem to be under the impression itâs difficult.
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Just so weâre on the same page, wifi and data are both ways a phone allows you to have an internet connection. Wherever you have phone service, you have an internet connection. It may be very slow. There are some remote, secure, and other areas where there is no phone service available. Those are the people who would be unable to play.
Iâve tried to explain earlier how an internet-only solution would work. The short of it is: the pirates would have no access to the choicescript files, only the printed output the server gives them. So this isnât a case where pirates will find a way in time. The best they could ever do is copy and paste the outputs and stitch it into some kind of ebook.
Iâve been around these forums long enough to see how the CoG staff bends over backwards and does somersaults to accommodate folks who bought games from one marketplace and now want it in another. Transfers and a ton of other things no other company would bother with. In this hypothetical, you can trust them to give you a permanent solution.
@Eric_Moser
Thanks for the thoughtful words. The core fans (the people we interact with here) are definitely important. But Iâm an author first and foremost. Iâm not afraid to wrestle in the mud with fans when I feel thereâs a good reason to. And protecting the livelihood of authors is something worth fighting for.
The solution I offered would work at the cost of several users and at the inconvenience of many more. With all respect to @jasonstevanhill, there needs to be a greater action taken aside from a public flogging of @Axiom. Insulting his hacking skills is all well and good, but if there is a solution out there to protect our work it needs to be explored.
With the way stats are handled by CScript, I donât think this will work. For every choice that involves a subroutine, the user must send an input to the server to be processed. And the feedback goes on.
In the end, thereâs got to be some sections of code sent to the client.
IMO, itâs not about the size of data used for this system. It leans towards the ISPâs reliability and stability.
Hoi. Weâre on the realm of text games, not MMOs. Why would you be banned?
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@Chinx buddy, can I suggest that it is always a bad idea to admit to pirating the work directly to the people who write the stuff (like me.) While I can see youâre trying to help in your own way, what youâre saying is itâs ok to steal because âthey were asking for it.â Ask any police officer and theyâll tell you thatâs no defense on the way to the station. You cannot justify stealing something just because youâve worked out how.
COG is a small company, it makes them especially vunerable to losses. And in the end you guys lose out. Many people (like myself) write part time. We have to balance enjoyment of writing against profit and time and the less we earn, the less time we can justify setting aside. I can earn more in a day job per hour than writing. Itâs as simple as that and pirates are part of the reason why. On COGâs side, the less money they earn, the less money they have to get authors to write for them. So the net effect is you get less games.
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Because Andymwhy was banned first there, so he could see him being banned here as some kind of revenge
Edit:
Iâm still trying to change their view, but as I said there, thereâs no point in talking if Axioms looks like a God, because we are nothing more than little humans that canât reach his art
I believe @Chinx meant at here :"
Them being banned at this forum.
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Because I do NOT have a phone like that. I have an old Nokia. I do not play on that for obvious reason. I play on a tablet and without external Wifi I do not have an internet connection.
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Well It was not cause of that lol , cause I know I was doing wrong .
Well I am no idiot dear I know it was bad idea .
With the differing laws from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, the different procedures and processes involved in pursuing remedies and redress, there really is no practical solution available. Even Microsoft has an uphill battle in enforcing their property rights and they have decades of experience and a budget much heftier than most will ever approach.
Supporting educational campaigns (ie. press articles informing the general public) and the like seem to be the most efficient and most effective means of dealing with this issue, at least for now.
Wishful thinking. No company in the middle of bankruptcy proceedings is going to prioritize their customers over whatever institutional debts they have, liquidating assets, paying out employees, etc.
Not to mention that by doing so they could potentially expose themselves to legal problems. If contracts were being signed giving COG the rights to distribute the game online, authors protective of their property could very well take issue with the DRM being stripped and source code being released. Unless there was some sort of clause in the contracts specifying âif we go bankrupt we have the rights to release all your property for freeâ, which would be ridiculous, COG wouldnât have any grounds to do what youâre proposing.
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Eww, go away. (20 motherhecking characters)
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Hyasshhh.
Remember, once, youâre young, just like him 
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I understand your point but it isnât quite right. Yes, it is relatively easy to mod/hack/pirate Choice and Hosted games but just because it is easy doesnât make it suddenly okay or legal to do so.
Humans are also relatively vulnerable creatures and I have the ability to murder them, but it would still be a crime to do so, even though it would easy. Your logic really doesnât make sense, I hope you can see the point I am trying to make.
Also, while Iâm sure everybody here appreciates you indirectly calling us stupid by not being able to understand ârealâ coder stuff, it may not be the wisest move on your part. You really need to have a better attitude buddy, at the end of the day, people like you are shitting on other peoples hard work so you should at least have the decency to be polite.
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Yeah tried, didnât work for me at least with buyed apps (free apps are no problem) and as I anyway work with an emulator I mod apps that way. (Also because it makes reading code more comfortable for me to do)
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Compared to what? Policing resources are limited and Iâd rather the state use them (our online policing is woefully inadequate in any case) to pursue and prosecute identity theft, which is the most serious online crime and, yes, that is my legal opinion compared to hunting âpiratesâ.
Also even if the police poured significant resources into hunting online pirates it probably still wouldnât benefit CoG and other small devs as you can bet your undies Disney would be the no. 1 priority closely followed by the other huge megacorps and Iâd rather we not spend a significant amount of public policing resources to aid some of the largest tax dodgers on the planet and that is my political opinion on the subject.
If I were to set digital policing priorities combating piracy and IP theft would be a bit down the list compared to:
#1 Identity theft
#2 Sex trafficking and child pornography
#3 Online scams (because quite often they feed into #1)
And, yes, should I ever find myself back in politics you can quote me on that.
It is already possible for IP owners to sue in civil court (even though that option is slow and expensive and also disadvantages small entrepreneurs and developers) whereas it most often isnât a realistic option at all for victims of the things Iâve just mentioned.
Arresting people and saddling them with a criminal record and often the concomitant loss of jobs and housing really is a disproportionate retribution in addition to being a waste of scarce police resources compared to the crime. Youâd be better off advocating for reforms of the civil laws and courts here, in my humble opinion of course.
Which for the AAA games who earn, or at least used to earn most of their revenue in the first weeks or month is âgood enoughâ. If youâve got a security measure that youâre sure hackers canât beat for at least 2 weeks you can make a fair bit of money off of outfits like EA, though most such security measures can and do inconvenience legitimate customers more then hackers or pirates in the long run.
Out of my personal league since I needed the resident Tigerâs help to even mod @Havenstone 's game in a way that didnât break it, but for the more digitally savvy nothing is too crazy, so, yeahâŚ
UmmmâŚlaptop whenever I can afford to go on vacation (donât quite trust hotel WIFI unless Iâm really pressured). In addition I like to go to really remote places and sometimes I simply like to turn my internet modem off in order to play games without the possibility of email alert interrupts, mostly to be unavailable to answer pesky work related emails that are non-urgent.
I agree that misguided and classist financial regulations can be a significant problem for people on the lower end of the economic spectrum. Back when I was a political aide our banks also deemed I earned too little to enable international payments on my debit card or let me have a credit card, so I feel your pain.
For some of my earliest online purchases having to beg, justify it to them and then reimburse some of my wealthier cousins werenât proud moments for a young adult.
Can you use your Google account through those emulators to buy apps and then play them on PC. Asking cause I may be interested in Kepler and it doesnât have a PC/Steam versionâŚyet and I donât like playing on the CoG website exactly because I like to look at the code and âcheatâ whenever I damned well please?
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Also called âpublishing.â
In pretty much any area of life, if enough people start living by the ethic, âItâs ok to take it unless someone stops me,â things are going to fall apart. If things made publicly available are treated like âgold in the street,â most people will stop making things publicly available. And we all lose.
Economies run 90% on trust and 10% on enforcement. If people violate the trust, the economy starts getting smaller; there are fewer exchanges, as people invest more in protecting or recovering their assets from theft and less on actual creation of value.
Meanwhile, if customers begin to feel like suckers for following a norm like âDonât steal, even when the cops arenât looking,â or âPay for your entertainment,â the base on which everyone actually depends just gets smaller and smaller.
(Anyone here play Settlers of Catan? If you have, and youâve gone through a long run of rolling 7s/playing knights, youâve experienced a simplified model of what Iâm talking about. The economy becomes more and more theft-basedâŚbut with less and less thatâs worth stealing.)
Sbenny, as we can see from their plea that Jason quoted above, is threatened by the breakdown of norms in this area no less than we are. Weâre all dependent on the pool of customers who follow the norm of paying for games, even when they know cracked versions are a Google search away. The difference is that Sbennyâs business model is itself norm-killing (not the distribution of mods/cheats, which I have no problem with, but the distribution of free games on which they claim ad revenue).
tl;dr This is why we canât have nice things.
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I know a lot of people likely responded to Axiom. And that itâs unlikely he has the minerals to show up again and suffer more authorial wrath. But I just want to point out how fallacious this analogy abou lending books is to the situation. This is not akin to lending a book, this is akin to whipping out your photocopier and running off a bunch of copies, then hastily scribbling your name in the cover to make sure you are credited for your non-efforts.
The argument that something is wrong, but itâs OK because everyone else does it, is just sad. Is this the best we can do as a species? To aspire to be equally rotten? I lived that life. Did stuff I knew to be wrong and told myself it was fine, because so many others did too. It was empty, and venal, and stupid. You can aspire to be better. Or you can just keep standing on the shoulders of actual creators and call yourself a giant. Itâs up to you.
@MultipleChoice, I am frustrated for you, and the other authors. But always-online is not a viable choice. I think you are way underestimating how much that annoys gamers. Imagine the sale reduction the omnibus app has likely already done to the iOS sale figures, but over all platforms. Review scores going right in the toilet. If AAA companies canât find a way to do it without avoiding these sorts of pitfalls, how can one with a fraction of the operating capital?
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Lol, wut. Iâm 22. And you probably only know that because you pirated it.
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