Garry’s Mod catches pirates the fun way

[qubit]

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.

People started discussing the error on the game’s own forums, wondering why their game simply wouldn’t work:

Problem:
I need help with my garrys mod. Everytime I launch Garrys Mod, it starts up then about 5 seconds later after it is done loading, it crashed with the

Engine Error:Unable to shade polygon normals(#################)

Not long after posting the request, the user found themselves permabanned from the forums for using pirated software.

Making the situation even sweeter, the number which appears in brackets after the error statement is in fact the gamer’s 64-bit steamid.

Y’see, Steam keeps a list of which accounts have actually forked over the $9.99 for a legit copy of GMod – so it’s a simple matter of checking ids and turfing out the pirates.

Just another lesson on why piracy is bad, supporting indie developers is good, and why you shouldn’t mess with the nerds.

Best not post in that forum then...

www.gamepron.com/news/2011/04/12/garrys-mod-catches-pirates-the-fun-way/

 

[silkstone]

i wonder how many false positives this would turn up

 

[slyfox2151]

seems very effective

i wonder how many false positives this would turn up

not an issue, steam can cross reference the Error ID code with your account.

 

[silkstone]

If you’re on a Windows PC and Garry’s Mod is crashing you can now upload your crash dumps to our dump website. It will show you why you crashed (if you can understand it). If it’s my fault I’ll check into it – if it’s an addon’s fault you can alert the creator with a link to the dump.

• Crash dumps are in the dumps folder which is in your main Steam folder.
• Garry’s Mod dumps start with “hl2″ and end in “.dmp”.
• Your uploaded dumps won’t be visible to anyone but me – unless you share the URL
• Feel free to email me with a link to your dump if you’re concerned.
• You probably won’t see any useful output unless the crash was from the latest version of Garry’s Mod

From there website

 

[slyfox2151]

If you’re on a Windows PC and Garry’s Mod is crashing you can now upload your crash dumps to our dump website. It will show you why you crashed (if you can understand it). If it’s my fault I’ll check into it – if it’s an addon’s fault you can alert the creator with a link to the dump.

• Crash dumps are in the dumps folder which is in your main Steam folder.
• Garry’s Mod dumps start with “hl2″ and end in “.dmp”.
• Your uploaded dumps won’t be visible to anyone but me – unless you share the URL
• Feel free to email me with a link to your dump if you’re concerned.
• You probably won’t see any useful output unless the crash was from the latest version of Garry’s Mod

From there website

im not sure what your getting at here?

 

[silkstone]

im not sure what your getting at here?

I find it funny

He's baiting people into submitting their error reports, so he knows who has pirated the game and can report them to steam

 

[qubit]

He's baiting people into submitting their error reports, so he knows who has pirated the game and can report them to steam

Yeah, this is underhand. I was considering getting this previously, but now I'm not so sure.

I wonder how long until a hacker posts a workaround?

Creators should worry less about fighting so-called "pirates" and more on giving people a reason to buy in the first place by adding value. As Gabe Newell, head of Valve said a while back, "Pirates are underserved customers".

Right on.

 

[2DividedbyZero]

i'm surprised it was declared. nice effort though, whilst it lasts.

 

[silkstone]

Well, if you are stupid enough to pirate a game and post about it not working without even using google, then u deserve everything you get imo....
Still underhanded tho, if anyone picks any holes in this (i.e. it gets people who haven't pirated the game) then that'd cause problems.

 

[qubit]

Well, if you are stupid enough to pirate a game and post about it not working without even using google, then u deserve everything you get imo....
Still underhanded tho, if anyone picks any holes in this (i.e. it gets people who haven't pirated the game) then that'd cause problems.

I'm pretty sure there will be false positives. I'd be really pissed if I'd bought it and I got banned due to this underhand tactic. It's really putting me off buying it - and it was so cheap that I was considering it, even though I'm not sure how much I'd really use it.

It's a physics sandbox, not really a game as such.

 

[AsRock]

i wonder how many false positives this would turn up

Maybe those who have 2 accounts and not that game linked to that account ?.

seems very effective


not an issue, steam can cross reference the Error ID code with your account.

Sounds like so but...

 

[silkstone]

theoretically, could you post a dmp and get someones account banned if you knew their steam ID, by faking an error dump? i can imagine trolls jumping all over that.

 

[qubit]

theoretically, could you post a dmp and get someones account banned if you knew their steam ID, by faking an error dump? i can imagine trolls jumping all over that.

Yup, false positives...

 

[silkstone]

Yup, false positives...

woo, proxy servers and GMail accounts here we come. Internet tears, best tears.






j/k

 

[MLG The Canadian]

There are two companies I ..would never recommend.. pirating anything affiliated with: Microsoft & Valve lol.

 

[BumbleBee]

Gaming companies have other ways in which they can determine and cross-check how many non-legitimate versions of their games are in use. One method which is reasonably robust - and coincidentally highlights one of the directly measurable costs of piracy - is to look at tech support requests made by people who are using a pirated copy of a game. There are several examples which cement the picture of both the scale of piracy being extremely high compared to legitimate sales, and the direct costs of piracy also being high due to their imposition on limited tech support resources. Mike Russell, QA Manager of Ritual Entertainment, makers of the SiN Episodes games, discusses the impact of the scale of piracy on tech support in this article:

Some recent calculations revealed that, last week, gamers with pirated copies of Emergence requesting support outnumbered gamers with legitimate copies of Emergence requesting support by a ratio of nearly five to one. This, understandably, is a source of great frustration for Russell, who is essentially performing two jobs at Ritual and who only has a finite amount of time to spend on each. Responses he has received when attempting to troubleshoot problems have laid painfully bare which users are playing the game illegally. "What's Steam?" one asked. "I don't have one," replied another when asked for his Steam ID. "Oh, my copy didn't come with an installer," replied yet another user, "it's in a folder on a DVD. I just drag it to my machine and then run the game." For an independently funded developer such as Ritual, these time sinks and lost sales have a clear and measurable impact on the company's income and, thus, its long term self-sufficiency.

Bethesda Softworks, makers of The Elder Scrolls series and most recently Fallout 3 had this to say on the issue of the scale and costs of piracy-related tech support:

The amount of times we see stuff coming through where it’s like, the resolution to the problem was [the] guy had a pirated copy of the game… The amount of money we spend supporting people who didn’t pay us for the game in the first place…it’s f–ing ludicrous. We talk to other developers, guys who are [like] ‘Yeah, it’s a third, it’s 50% of our [customer] support.’

Similarly the developers of a popular free mod called Portal: Prelude also speak out about the level of piracy of the game Portal which they've witnessed:

Seriously guys, stop sending us emails because you can't install the game, because you can't launch the game, or because you have weird errors everywhere. We're not going to help you make the mod work on pirated versions of Portal or without Steam. This mod needs an original and legit Portal because it also uses some of the content of Half-Life 2 that extends Portal. Of course, this content doesn't seem to be included in the pirated version of Portal.

Update: The game Batman: Arkham Asylum incorporated a deliberate glitch which prevented users from successfully using Batman's glide functionality, but this only occurred on pirated copies of the game as reported here. Many people made forum posts requesting support for this "bug", only to discover that they had inadvertantly exposed themselves as pirates. Similarly, the game Aliens vs. Predator had several issues unique to the pirated version, and once again forum posts such as this one revealed that pirates are not above requesting support for their illegitimate games. It also goes to demonstrate how pirated copies can damage the reputation of developers, because glitches and bugs in pirated versions are often being blamed on the game itself rather than the piracy groups which made these illegal cracked copies.

http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_4.html

 

[erocker]

I prefer this method over DRM.

 

[qubit]

I prefer this method over DRM.

Hmmm... but Garry's Mod already has Steam DRM, so it's on top of it.

It's better than limited activations, always-on internet securom and the other crap though, I agree.

@BumbleBee: After reading that article, I have to agree that the drain on tech support for pirated copies though is real and it's unfair. I can't condone that. If you're gonna copy the game, at least have the decency not to bother the company for tech support FFS.

 

[digibucc]

the thing is - garry's mod is one of the games that DOES give it's legit buyers a lot, for a little.

some games are overpriced. if crysis 2 did this, i might be inclined to agree. but if notch did this in minecraft, i wouldn't. i bought garry's and never play it - and i see nothing wrong with him baiting pirates. as long as no legit user gets harmed, there is no legit issue.

 

[silkstone]

the thing is - garry's mod is one of the games that DOES give it's legit buyers a lot, for a little.

some games are overpriced. if crysis 2 did this, i might be inclined to agree. but if notch did this in minecraft, i wouldn't. i bought garry's and never play it - and i see nothing wrong with him baiting pirates. as long as no legit user gets harmed, there is no legit issue.

Notch actually owes a lot to the people who pirated his game, and also offers a lot to people who buy it.

 

[digibucc]

Notch actually owes a lot to the people who pirated his game, and also offers a lot to people who buy it.

yeah but he also made a version freely playable.

that's why indie devs are different. they are a part of the crowd, not just devs in offices.

i won't disagree that piracy helped him advertise - but that doesn't make pirates good guys either.

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

I prefer this method over DRM.

+1

i also think that the main companies that moan about piracy are the ones trying to sell me half of a shit game half way through making it, those companies that wish that all we had to go on when choosing a game are the hyped up sparsely connected bits of advertiseing and bought(money or goods changed hands) good game reviews.
at the end of the day its effin easy to crack piracy for a high proportion of cases, MAKE A GOOD GAME then MAKE A GOOD ONLINE multyplayer experience and make sure that that is the securist mofo in town(v unlike crytek) with serialised shizzle done ill then buy it

yes some will just play pirated 1player or cracked multy but that is then down to the games devs to sort out not just blame peeps for tryin, hands up all those who drive 1 MPH below speed limts exactly , and many a maybe can be turned into a yeh if they then like 1player(good game idea kicks in)

garys mod whos he anyway emurgence never heard of it must be shit

 

[WhiteNoise]

Good for Gary. I think its totally funny and more companies should do this.

 

[streetfighter 2]

Funny and all . . . but I was really sad when Gmod9 stopped working after Valve forced PC versions of HL2/CS:S to Orange Box on the PC.

It's a cruel way of forcing me to buy GMod10+. Very sad.

 

[Steevo]

I prefer this method over DRM.

And its great unti we consider games such as TDU from atardi, that have issues on egit copies.


I spi ed coffee into my aptop, guess which key isnt working?