Ever downloaded warez/cracks: Yes or No? [Anonymous Poll]

Did you ever use Warez/Serialz/Crackz?

  • Yes

    Votes: 65 69.9%

  • No

    Votes: 19 20.4%

  • On planet X, we are cowards. :p

    Votes: 9 9.7%
  • Total voters
    93
Richard Masters said:
I do wish I had downloaded cracked versions of Master of Orion III. That game was a real disappointment - and one of the few I bought before actually playing it.

The way I see it, Quicksilver owes me money for ruining the game. People still get together and play Master of Orion II instead even though it is over a decade old.
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Well duh, MOO II is still one of the best 4x space games out there.
 
jhunter1163 said:
I'm with Smackety on this. I don't have a problem paying for games, but the really cool old stuff generally isn't in the stores or even on Amazon, so it's off to Abandonia for me. And if you don't know what Abandonia is, you didn't hear about it from me. :boxedin:
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I thought that was legal?

I'm pretty sure their policy is that they only upload games that are no longer sold or made: abandoned.

From the Abandonia website said:
Wikipedia: "Abandonware is computer software which is no longer being sold or supported by its copyright holder. Alternately, the term is also used for software which is still available, but on which further support and development has been deliberately discontinued."

Since the software is no longer sold or supported, the copyright holders are not directly harmed in any way. This is why abandonware sites are, for the most part, ignored by the law.

The distribution of copyrighted software however is, and will allways be, illegal!
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My roomate in college justified using cracked software (mostly games) via the following logic: By playing top of the line games he always needed new hardware. Therefore by pirating software, he was actually helping the computer industry because he spent more on hardware than he would on software.
 
SalG13 said:
My roomate in college justified using cracked software (mostly games) via the following logic: By playing top of the line games he always needed new hardware. Therefore by pirating software, he was actually helping the computer industry because he spent more on hardware than he would on software.
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Er, that's weird logic. Since the whole question of copyright is that he's hurting the software companies (You know, the people busting their ass to make his game?)
 
I've dowloaded cracked versions of nearly every game I have bought. I hate swapping CDs.

I've only ever cracked one game -- for personal use. I turned the demo version of Avernum 3 into the full version by changing 3 JNE's into NOP's.
 
Another possible interpretation of the poll results is that not everyone knows what those words ending in "z" mean, and thus only those who use them would bother to come into the poll?

That's my thought, anyway.
 
I used to have an illegal copy of Rome: Total War, but I bought the legal version once the price went down. I've done the same with probably a dozen other games in the past.

I also hates the CD thing.
 
The CD-in-drive problem seems to mainly be a problem with games and I don't play games. Back when I was using a Commodore SX64 I had lots of cracked games.

Since I first got a Windows PC and now that I have a Mac, I've never used pirated software. I've had to deal with enough bullcrap from hackers without using warez. I've probably already gotten infected just using freeware.
 
Damien Evans said:
I used to have an illegal copy of Rome: Total War, but I bought the legal version once the price went down. I've done the same with probably a dozen other games in the past.

I also hates the CD thing.
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Speaking of CD thing, I loathe the new methods of copyright protection we're seeing; I have the same thing in my Fallout 3 CD. I can't even figure out how to install the game onto another machine, so I'm pretty much limited to my one computer; as gaming companies try to crack down on pirating, they end up hurting the normal legal user in the process.
 
And when exactly was the last time that a protection scheme actually prevented piracy ? I recently realized that while I bought all Civilization games, I actually played each and every one of them much more from pirated copies, just because I didn't have to insert the damn disk in the drive.
 
Lonewulf said:
Speaking of CD thing, I loathe the new methods of copyright protection we're seeing; I have the same thing in my Fallout 3 CD. I can't even figure out how to install the game onto another machine, so I'm pretty much limited to my one computer; as gaming companies try to crack down on pirating, they end up hurting the normal legal user in the process.
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It appears to be only the Fallout 3 launcher that checks for the CD/DVD. If you start Fallout directly (look for the appropriate .exe in the Fallout folder), or use the Fallout Mod Manager, you don't need the CD/DVD in the drive.

Oblivion, on the other hand, does seem to check for the CD/DVD in the game itself.
 
Recently I fancied playing UT2004 again. I bought a copy. It failed to work with its own copy protection, so I downloaded a pirate copy and used the CD key from the box of my legal copy.

The first ever PC game I bought was called Archipelagos. I read the manual for about a week, because it sounded cool and because the copy protection was so broken I couldn't start it. So I wrote a crack for it and released it on a warez site. Turns out it wasn't a very good game anyway.

My copy of MS Office 2007 doesn't work with the activation key I got with another version of MS Office 2007. So I had to borrow someone else's CD and install that way, again with my legal key.

I'm also one of those people who hates having to have a physical CD and swap it in and out. We're in the 21st century. I don't want boxes piled next to me and battles with scratched discs and calls to support. I want something that works. The few modern games I've bought I've almost always downloaded a no-cd crack for immediately, and never had to look at the disc again. Also, only one of my machines has a CD drive.

This has mostly been a rant against badly-written software and CD copy protection. Sorry to miss the point: yes, I have downloaded the entire Internet over the years. I have it on a backup drive.
 
If you install UT2004 under Linux - where it works well, by the way - it doesn't require the CD either.
 
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