Slashdot Mirror
Garry's Mod Catches Pirates the Fun Way
UgLyPuNk writes "A few hours ago, Garry Newman – the creator of Garry's Mod – asked, quite innocently, whether anyone was unable to shade polygon normals. He received a few comments, mostly jokes, but a quick look at Google suggests that there are indeed a few people who are experiencing problems with their game. You can hear Newman's chuckling from here — not the normal response to a wide-spread bug report, but this is no normal bug. It seems that the developer has deliberately enabled an error in GMod, which will only affect people who have pirated the game."
Back in the 80's, the developers of a submarine game called Silent Service built in a piracy check that would cause the sailor guy's pants to fly up over his head if your game failed the copy protection. They got quite a few phone calls from baffled pirates.
except that they're catching legitimate customers with the shitty DRM system.
Here in my car
Where the image breaks down
Will you visit me please?
If I open my door
In cars
Seriously what is the point of this? To flush out pirates on forums? Because if it is to be a sneaky anti-piracy system it is pointless. I have heard about games that detect pirated copies and corrupt saves or don't let you finish the game etc, but what is the point of giving pirates a bizarre error message? Wouldn't "Stop being a douche and support indie developers!" be a better message to display?
Not that I would ever actually pay for Garry's Mod as it is just a "dev tool" type mod. I don't see any creativity in it besides what the Half-Life 2 developers put in. I looked it up years ago and when I saw it cost money I laughed and spent the money on better games.
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
It takes a couple minutes just to load the page banner, then once it does, it redirects to an advertisement page.
I like to RTFA, but you can be sure that I won't be visiting that site ever again.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
seems like this guy was caught red handed: http://www.gameshampoo.com/2933/garrys-mod-unable-to-shade-polygon-normals
Pirating GMod 10 is like visiting five ice cream shops in a row and getting enough "tastes" to fill a quart. Simply not worth the effort, considering that GMod10 is, was, and will remain ONLY. TEN. DOLLARS. If you own any of Valve's excellent recent games, you've fulfilled the only other requirement (a Source engine game). Chances are high that if you're interested in GMod10, you've already got one or more of those.
I can understand pirating a $50 game because you want to stick it to the publisher or you want to try it out before shelling out, but pirating something that costs $10 strikes me as a remarkably pointless gesture.
You should turn signatures off.
Calling your customer a pirate on a public forum without very solid proof , even jovially is not smart (and may even be legally actionable).
1. How does he know there's no bug in his copy protection code that does not inadvertently trigger for legitimate users under ANY circumstance
2. How does he know the people "pirating" haven't paid for a legit copy and decided to get around all the BS restrictions by using a crack anyway.
I have personally encountered situation 1 before in freeware of all things. The Vista Australis freeware mod developers accused people who were seeing a particular bug in their of being pirates, because pirating MS Flight Sim 2004 could cause the information about the install directory in the registry to be missing. It turned out there was a particular circumstance, which happened to me, under which the bug was triggered even without any kind of piracy. I had never pirated the game. I didn't take kindly to being called a pirate, and was labelled a trouble maker on the forum for pointing out that accusing people of piracy without proof wasn't right even if the software they developed was fantastic and free (which it was), and even if the accusation was jovial.
This is not an example of a fun way of catching pirates. It's an example of a software developer over-estimating his cleverness and acting like an ass.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
There's an incredibly loud auto-playing advert. Thanks for the warning, guys.
More advert submissions from the slashdot janitors...
If it is this easy to detect a pirated copy of the game, why not all the game developers are doing it to prevent privacy? What am I missing here?
for those that didnt RTFA the error number was their steam ID, so when said could be pirate posted on the steam forums about it with the full error message valve could then check the steam ID to see if they owned the game, anyone who owned the game and got hit by this "bug" (could happen) would be found to have G mod in their steam account and no ban hammer would be applied (since G mod is only available via steam this is a good way to catch people with pretty much 0 margin of error) so the dev was infact not being an ass and legitimate consumers were not harmed :)
The bug report contains the steam id of the accused pirate.
Checking was only done by Garry -> replacing said SteamID is therefore easy to do.
At the moment they only got a Ban on the forums and nothing else, but if this has more severe consequences one could plugin the SteamID of another person without problems and therefore get them banned.
I've always wondered why developers didn't do this.
Switching the soundtrack to Justin Bieber music was enough to scare most players off.
Settlers 3 did something similar, if you had pirated the game the blacksmith would make pigs instead of iron, thus you could never produce any weapons.
I'm not too sure if I condone this behaviour, nor do I think this is a 'fun' way to catch pirates: A fun way was how the Nintendo DS version of Michael Jackson: The Experience made copied versions of the game unplayable and taunts gamers with the blaring sound of vuvuzelas: See here
The problem I have with these kinds of protections is that they also might affect paid customers; Same as with strict DRM.
I already bought Garry's Mod after having played it for free (as the HL2 mod).
It was less than 10 dollars, so a real bargain. But I would have reconsidered it if I heard of this beforehand.
Nonetheless, all power to the developer to protect their property.
When you shoot a mime, do you use a silencer?
A few hours ago, Garry Newman – the creator of Garry's Mod – asked, quite innocently, whether anyone was unable to shade polygon normals.
A few moments ago, Googlebot visited the sites.
A hour from now, a puzzled evil pirate gamer types "Unable to shade polygon normals" in Google, and guess what pops up? They're going to think "oops, I'd better not report that issue. In fact, it's better not to report any issues in any of my pirated games! Glad this issue has already been documented!"
This is the information age. People document things openly. Don't build DRM that is built on top of ignorance and secrets. It only works for a while and you wasted time.
Isn't that the name of a band from the 80s?
The purpose of existence is to make money.
In response to the several comments re: "it's all in good fun, just a joke, not trying to catch pirates" -- note that what's happening is tricking people with a fake error message that includes their Steam ID, so when they report it can get their account banned.
FTA: "Not long after posting the request, the user found themselves permabanned from the forums for using pirated software."
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
...get hold of a persons 64bit steamid.. and post a thread in a forum with the following error to get a person banned from steam as long as the steamid have no registered transaction for GMod?
Engine Error:Unable to shade polygon normals()
so the dev was infact not being an ass and legitimate consumers were not harmed :)
...they were harmed by the developer intentionally introducing a "bug" that rendered them unable to use software that they paid for.
Mind you, this "harm" is very much temporary, and nothing remotely near critical (considering the software in question), but still, they do have grounds to be annoyed, if not upset.
And considering that he either knew or should have known that this "bug" would in fact affect some percentage of legitimate users, one could make the case that he was being an "ass".
Not that I would say as such; it sucks that they can't play with the sandbox they bought for a few hours/days, but there are worse things than being unable to play a specific game at a specific time...
My sig can beat up your sig.
It could be used on PC (and i think i remember an old game doing it, just like ultima 7 a/b "oink oink oink" if you answered wrongly within the game) Bad PR. Plain and simple, and cost. 2% can ammount to a LOT for big budget.
I remember something like this in gunship 2000 where it would do a piracy check by entering a code from the book. I was about 10-12 at the time but didn't understand what it was really asking I just wanted to fly. MY dad figured it out after phoning their support line ...
First time you blow something up it would crash out with a meaningless error message!
The comments on that GamePron link make me want to gouge my eyes out. They're worse than the Official WoW forums! The argument where people claim to pirate games because they're "poor" and it's justified in that not everyone can get decent jobs? It makes the mind boggle.
No portion of this post may be rebroadcast without the express, written consent of Major League Baseball.
The piracy detection fails occassionally, and a honest paying customer gets hurt (and probably buys less in the future, because he feels (and rightly so) that he got cheated).
Obviously you'd have to extensively QA test any potential checks and the consequences and prevent false positives but the intention would be to pepper the code with these things. Just when the cracker thinks they've fixed the game, another one turns up. Confound and annoy the crackers and pirates and just generally waste their time. And when a patch comes out, introduce a few more. And rebase the code so everything moves around. And of course shame anyone stupid enough to complain on official boards.
And It suffered heavily from a bug that would pop up in the pirated version. Ton's of people where complaining on the forums that the game was buggy and no good because of it. And other people listened and didn't buy it. So if software developers really want to do such a thing either make it a minor problem or patch it in later, because if you don't it can hurt your reputation.
This type of thing has been done several times before, obviously. From using seemingly innocent errors to denying game content.
My most recent run in with this was with Darkstar One. You need a jumpdrive that jumps X amount of distance to continue the game after the tutorial-ish introduction. If you 'pirate' it, you can't jump that far.
Problem was of course, that I did buy the game, but that my CD/DVD drive somehow failed the required check... So here I was with another useless game I actually bought. No wonder people pirate this type of thing, usually they're cracked to prevent stupid shit like this.
Anyhow, I had to wait a few months for NEC to release new drivers for the DVD drive and suddenly the CD/DVD check no longer failed.
Look at Garry's twitter feed he has pirated movies in his iTunes from axiom and gokU61 (rocky)
image
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3590255/Bits/DRM.png &
post
Bye Bye DRM - thanks @Craiggwilt http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3590255/Bits/DRM.png
Thu Apr 07 2011 15:52:16 (Eastern Daylight Time) via web
-b
Ultima III wouldn't let you interact with NPCs - they'd say "Honesty is a virtue, I will not help you" or something to the effect.
Personal experience. As a teenager I bought Ultima III (I think) for the Amiga for $many_weeks_allowance. The original floppy was corrupt, and being an expat in a remote country meant I couldn't get it replaced. A buddy mailed me a pirated copy to replace it. A "fun way" to catch pirates for sure, but there I was with a box, shiny cloth map and a game that would tell me I'm dishonest. Never got to play it. Guess whether this experience motivated me to (a) buy more games or (b) pirate games instead.
</childhood_trauma>
I understand the rationale behind copy protection and DRM, but they can make life hard for legitimate users and end up counterproductive.
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
Sure a few MIGHT take the time to visit their forums and get laughed at.. But in reality the majority do... :Hey this game is buggy and sucks. *delete* NEXT!
And now they, and any of their friends. Associate your game company with producing buggy garbage. Making sure none of them will NEVER be a customer.
Talk about win the battle but lose the war... That's just retarded. And it makes me laugh.
Theres far too many shitty games out there for your sneaky drm to really ever be noticed.
People always love to toss out the excuse that game (software) piracy exists mainly because of cost. Yet we see many examples where people will pirate (steal) items with 99 cent prices like those on the App store.
If you "understand" pirating a $50 game then you would understand pirating a $10 game. Justification on price is odd because your still excusing theft? I will assume the price points are merely the level at which you would succumb to the temptation, in other words, where you would feel justified in it?
As for sticking it to the publisher or the "man", again its another misdirection used to excuse oneself of responsibility. When taking has so little threat of recrimination far too many will take. It is no different than looting after a disaster.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Money (either try before you buy, or sheer ludicrous pricing schemes).
Really not an acceptable excuse in this case. It's $10.
Unless the work's publisher won't take your payment method, such as cash in the case of somebody still in school who does not yet qualify for a checking account. Or unless you happen to have been born in a country with an undervalued currency, such as many countries not in the top 20 economies.
There were plenty of games which tried to do something sneakily wrong to gameplay if they think you're a pirate.
The problem is that, basically, invariably there's the assumption that such a piece of code is 100% proven and bug-free itself. You know, unlike the rest of the program and unlike other shitty pieces of DRM.
A prime example of what I'm talking about was IIRC Gangsters by Eidos in the '90s. Among other things it would take as a clue that it must be a pirated copy running in an emulator -- until a later patch fixed it -- was if your CD is any other drive letter than D:. Because God knows that no honest customer ever would have more than one HDD or partition or have a RAM-disk or two CD drives or anything, you know?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Before you salute this vigilante gesture, a lone captain taking on the high seas of piracy, stop and consider these necessary questions:
1. How does the developer determine whether the customer's version of the product (a mod, no less) is legitimate or pirated?
2. Is this method a 100% foolproof way to detect a pirated copy?
3. Could a false positive ever be detected, flagging a legitimate customer as a pirate?
4. Could a programming error, introduced either now or in the future, ever flag a user as a pirate?
5. Could a cracked game executable, modified content files, or lack of Internet connection ever flag a user as a pirate?
6. What does the developer do with this new list of suspected users? Is it merely for research purposes, or does he plan to turn it over to other authorities (i.e. could these users be perma-banned not just from the forums, but also from the mod, from the game, or from the Steam network?)
7. What makes the developer think the pirate community can't bypass this slightly more deceptive form of DRM, like they have so many times in the past?
I do not condone the actions of people who would pirate an indy developer's $10 game, but I also don't condone a developer running wild on an anti-piracy power-trip. By banning every single person who complains of this from his forums, he may be inadvertently banning users with legitimate problems. It wouldn't be the first time.
The real problem is that people think it is OK to pirate stuff. Here are the most popular reasons:
1. They put DRM in there, thus the pirated version is better and I am entitled to steal it.
2. The game is too expensive, thus I am entitled to steal it.
3. I wouldn't have bought it anyways, thus I am entitled to steal it.
All of these are bull. No one has any right to steal anything that doesn't belong to them. There is a deep moral issue here with a good chunk of people on the net. This extends to torrenting movies and other entertainment. I don't see why people are so cheap. Even at 60 dollars a video game is about what it costs me for gas in a month or groceries in a week. It isn't exactly expensive. Anyways, maybe the only solution is to get rid of internet annonominity and allow publishers and developers to report pirating offenses to the police. And yes I am a game developer.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I remember playing a Settlers II RIP cracked version, but didn't found any glitch. Actually, I finished the game.
Garry: Your vindictive investments will be your downfall.
He's posted a write up:
Shading Polygons
=================
Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
As a paying customer, I want your 'protection' to be invisible to me. As a paying customer, I don't want to be forced to put the CD in the drive, I don't want you installing drivers or messing with my boot sectors. I don't want you putting extra crap on my machine. I just want a smooth, fun, gaming experience.
Gary's mod sounds ideal. As a paying customer, I see/hear/experience nothing amiss. And yet their game is protected from theft.
If the choice is the customer experience vs. stopping pirates, the answer should always be the paying customer. No plan to stop piracy is worth inconvenience to the paying customer. And I'll put my money where my mouth is. As a consumer, despite enjoying Assassin's Creed, I did not purchase the sequels specifically because of the overbearing copy protection. But I would happily buy products from the people who make Gary's Mod.
From his blog:
"Yesterday I made pirate versions of Garry’s Mod pop up an error. This error only happens when people pirate the game. 48 hours ago there were no results for this phrase on Google. As I type this there’s 717 results (and climbing by the minutes). This is partly as a result of me stupidly mentioning it on Twitter and lots, and lots, and lots of news sites posting about it. I don’t get why it’s getting so much attention.
The overwhelming response has been supportive. Which to be quite honest I don’t really understand. If EA or someone does something like this people go crazy. Maybe it’s the motive.."
More @ http://www.garry.tv/?p=2410
I'm pretty sure it has a very specific point. Saving 10 dollars. When you're 20,000 in debt in student loans, you don't need to be spending money on anything when there is an alternative where you don't -- it isn't always about morals.
Like all copy detection, I'm sure this is 100% accurate, so losing hundreds of dollars worth of games without appeal seems like a great idea.
If the DRM stays memory-resident on a person's computer while they are NOT using the game, then I have no problems whatsoever with people pirating the software.
In all other respects, I agree with you.
Yep, you definitely have my empathy. I've run into that kind of situation before myself.
I used Gangsters for example, because it actually happened to me too. I had 2 HDDs, 1 RAM-disk, and 2 CD-ROMs. There was no way that game was going to be in a drive letter lower than drive F:. So I start the game and pretty much I'd get screwed no matter what I do. I could have my gangsters even just sitting around doing nothing, and still get everyone arrested. Not only I wasn't getting my money's worth out of the game, but there's the sheer annoyance factor of, you know, "WTF does it want from me? What AM I supposed to do here?" Then I eventually run into its being recognized as a problem and patched, and pretty much went ballistic when I realized that the damned thing had cost me several hours of increasing annoyance, just because some idiot hadn't even thought it possible to have a legitimate CD in any other drive than D:.
And, yeah, there are a few other games where I still really wonder. Was I just bad at, say, Operation Flashpoint (another game which actually was proud of screwing the difficulty if it thought you're a pirate), or did their shitty DRM glitch on me?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Quite honestly the pirates got what they deserved.
Steam isnt an intrusive form of DRM which hardly affects legitimate customers. In return for the few small disadvantages (having to keep your games updated) you get a ton of online features like achievements and the Steam Cloud in return.
Not to mention that Garry's Mod requires a computer which costs $500+ to run smoothly. If you can afford $500 on a PC why cant you afford $10 (or $5 in the sales) to buy a game?
And I presume this was properly vetted by a well-budgeted QA process, yes?
That is enough about that!
Piracy is armed robbery, kidnapping and murder at sea.
So unless Garry is patrolling the Horn of Africa in a PT boat this has nothing to do with piracy.
Some descriptivist halfwit will chime in "but but but langwijez chanj LOOL0LOLL0!"....
Allowing copyright owners to call copyright infringment piracy makes the trivial sound grave, and the grave seem trivial. When you misuse the word piracy you are contributing to the problem of our insane IP laws. You're letting them win.
Imagine if we started calling all Germans Nazis instead of Germans. A descriptivist would call this evolution of language, but it would be applying the label of a group that committed horrific crimes against humanity to people who did not. It would eventually rob the word Nazi of it horror and add that horror to the innocent.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!