Pirates Beware

[Tenreh]

I just thought I'd let you guys know that thousands of people are playing Half Life 2 illegally right now with no consequence.The release that all the '1337 pirates' who apparently got 'pwned by valve' are using is an offline, steam free release of the full single player game.

Steam, I presume, has a listing of all the cd keys that are currently in circulation, and when somebody tried to use a generated one that's not on that list, but is still valid to whatever algorhythm steam uses, the account inputting that key will be banned.

All the pirates obviously know to create a fresh account to attempt that shit, especially after valve made it public that they were setting up their little sting operation. So what does this mean? People who enter bad cd keys lose their account.

What does that mean?

Accounts have nothing on them unless you've bought valve products, so valve is basically stealing from YOU.

Good work Valve.. Hey maybe not have all the enemies have exactly the same fucking model and skin eh?

[Pyro978]

Shadow-Dragon wrote..

Rofl... The leet hacker pirate peoples got owned! hahhah.

not really the leet hackers got owned, its the leet people who download cracked games that got owned.

[Tenreh]

Pyro978 wrote..

not really the leet hackers got owned, its the leet people who download cracked games that got owned.

Dude, no one got owned. The cracked version works great.

[ganymede]

Hmm so you didnt do anything wrong yet you are clearly giving up, do I smell a lie???



Come on you can just tell me, what thing did you do that was wrong??



Tenreh, Steam keeps a list of all the keys that were tried and Im pretty sure that one coming up around 20,000 times is pretty obvious. Thats probably how they caught them. Same way they can tell if people are using the CS:S cracks. If they find that your account has been online yet they cant find that you purchased it its pretty obvious.

[tekproxy]

No, people got owned... And by people I mean me. My friend rizzy has a cracked version and he's playing, I have a paid for version and I'm not playing.



PATHOS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!

[JTF_Cobra]

Man, if someone stole your account and got it banned somehow. First, they would need to know your steam login, and password. Which are hard to get for one. Plus, they would steal your account, then would have to download all the games, which would take a while. Then, on top of all that, why on earth would they download and install an illegal version of HL2 if they had your legal copy of HL2. It doesn't make sense, I also smell the lie. Your story just doesn't make sense. Sorry

[Tenreh]

You guys are worse than CNN with terrorism, spewing back the information they've heard with no thought of their own. Maybe.. 100 people who bought half life 2 couldnt wait another week or whatever and wanted to see if it would even run on their comps.. so they used a cd key gen and got banned. Maybe.. 500 people did the same thing, but used their HL1 or CS retail accounts cause they didn't realize that you can have your paid for product disabled by mistyping your cd key now. The other 19,400 accounts were blank accounts registered to free webmail services.

Where the hell do you see pwn? I see valve alienating their fan base.

The obvious way to stop piracy is to make steam pirate free. That doesnt mean you need to have your cd in the drive while you play online.. that doesnt mean you need to "authenticate" your single player game.. The best way to prevent piracy is to not sodomize (as one victim put it) your customers, but to create a great product, at a great price. What valve is doing right now isnt anti piracy. It's greed and spite.

[tekproxy]

Another master thinker times 10. I've been to several LAN parties where seedy characters could have my LOGIN INFORMATION.



Now, when you get the cracked version you have to configure it to use a certan steam username, password and NO you do NOT need to download all their games. In fact, you can download HL2 and unlock it without even having an internet-valid key code. All you need is one that has already been used and you can do some trickery with unplugging your network card while it's validating and it'll put it in your games list and then you can go into the properties and say you want the game to always be up to date and viola, it unlocks all your files. I know all this because, as I said much lan parties, in fact I have 3 computers in my room right now. It's a party 24/7 most of the time with many people doing many different things.



So anyways, you can get the crack, open the steamapp.cfg and put in MY LOGIN INFORMATION and try to connect. It doesn't even need to work for them to apparently go "omg wtf hax0r" and delete my account.



Even if I am full of shit and I'm lying I still FUCKING OWN THE FUCKING GAME AND I CAN'T PLAY IT WHILE FRIENDS THAT HAVE CRACKED VERSIONS ARE HAVING FUN THROWING BEER BOTTLES AT COMBINE.



Read this a few times before telling me I'm wrong.

[ganymede]

tekproxy youre wrong.



Tenreh its not the fact that there wasnt anything on those accounts its the fact that they were caught. Name another company that would delete illegal accounts??? You cant because they wont.



Of course its greed, wouldnt you want those people to pay for the damn game that you spent the last six years of your life making???

[Tenreh]

tekproxy wrote..

Even if I am full of shit and I'm lying I still FUCKING OWN THE FUCKING GAME AND I CAN'T PLAY IT WHILE FRIENDS THAT HAVE CRACKED VERSIONS ARE HAVING FUN THROWING BEER BOTTLES AT COMBINE.

And that, I think summarizes the complete failure of ValvE's little "experiment."

[tekproxy]

ganymede youre fat.



Tenreh you are awesome.



...



Oh well, instead of being angry at Steam now I'm laughing at this... I'm still right though. I'm about 30 minutes away from cracking HL2 myself. I have all the game files and programs necessary...

[Tenreh]

ganymede wrote..

Of course its greed, wouldnt you want those people to pay for the damn game that you spent the last six years of your life making???

People ARE paying for the game, the whole world has been waiting for this forever, and they're buying it, even after YEARS of delays, failure of steams auth servers so they CANT play once they've bought it, and now, this sting operation.

And if you've played yet, I'm sure you're now well aquainted with the stutter bug.

Everyone in the world is getting this game for Christmas and valve is gonna be wiping their ass with 20 dollar bills. My point?

Half Life 1 turned a profit didn't it?

That was before steam even existed. Amazing, isnt it?

[ganymede]

I am not fat, I just what you told me.



If they truely disabled your account without reason I sure as hell wouldnt be giving up that easliy. You seem to be and that makes me think you did something wrong.



And how is he awesome??? Standing up for people that steal a game?? Thats lame.

[tekproxy]

TOTALLY OWNED.

[Tenreh]

What is he giving up? There's nothing he can do except find some HL2 newbies and pose as a valve admin to get their cd keys. Or download the offline version until a good ****** comes out.. and hammer random keys in empty accounts until one auths. I sure as hell wouldnt buy a SECOND copy. Not after the first one didn't work.

I like how they banned you for cracking steam with your valid HL2 info tek.. roflcopterz.