It is never more "ethical" to pirate something. Pirates are the lowest form of scum on the Internet, particularly those who rationalize their shittiness.
Quoting enoeraew37, reply 12it is more ethical to pirate than to pay
No such thing. If you don't like it, grow up and abstain.
I must disagree with both of you. Now before you wrinkle your nose at me and refuse to read the rest of what I am about to say, let me explain myself.
I do agree that not paying for something is wrong. This applies to piracy, but its not so black and white that you can say pirates are the scum of the internet. Frankly, the entertainment industry has gotten extremely corrupt. Cutting out content that was developed as part of the main game and then reselling it to you as DLC is wrong (Mass Effect 3, Capcom, etc.). I'd even go so far as to call it a form of piracy. All that stuff is right there on the disk but you have to pay an additional $15 to access it? Why is that even legal? If an auto salesmen tried to tell me I wasn't allowed to use the car radio that was already installed in the car I just bought until I paid him a "service fee" of $50, I'd laugh in his face and turn it on anyway. I paid full price for whats ON the disk. Not to have the disk sold to me in chunks after the fact. No where on the box does it ever say that what you're buying is only an incomplete version. People say I have to abide by the license agreement when I buy software, but why am I never allowed to see that agreement until after I buy and open the box? Thats dishonest for the simple fact that publishers know you cannot return opened/downloaded software. I'd go so far as to say thats a rather tricky form of piracy. My wallet sure feels shanghied in any case. You're being presented a product but you're not told until after you buy it that you can't use all of it or can only use it a certain way. If you want the full and complete product you need to pay extra, otherwise you're left with an incomplete product. Its no wonder people turn to piracy. DLC after the fact is fine. As long as its not developed along side the main product. How can companies have a problem with piracy when they themselves resort to such low and greedy tactics to make a quick buck? I'm not saying piracy is justified, but you have to understand that not everyone pirates to get free games. I personally refuse to buy any game that uses these greedy tactics to pad their wallet, but do you want to know something? Its getting to the point where there are almost no game companies, and thus games, still in business any more that don't do this to their customers. What then?
So what happens if you have a problem that only piracy can fix? Oh I know what you're thinking. How on earth could downloading a game illegally at any point be justifiable. Well, until this particular problem happened to me, I would have agreed that there simply was none. I bought the retail version of Skyrim. Paid full price. I knew you could get Skyrim online from Steam, but I didn't want to use Steam, which is why I bought the Retail version. No where on the retail box did it say Skyrim required a 3rd party program to run (more corruption, not being upfront about your products). I can 100% without a doubt say that if the box did say it required Steam or had the Steam logo on it I would have put the box back down and put the game out of my mind. I would not have pirated the game. I always pay for games that I play. It was only when I tried to install Skyrim that I was presented with the truth that I needed Steam to play Skyrim. Because of this dishonesty I will never buy another Bethesda product again, but I had already opened the box, and I had no way to get my money back (GG more corrupt business tactics). So I decided to go ahead and try it anyway. How bad could Steam really be, eh? Who knows, maybe it will grow on me and I'll end up liking it? Actually, it wasn't so bad for the first 2 days.
Unfortunately a huge storm blew through my area that knocked out the power for several hours. That itself wasn't the problem. The storm had severely damaged the near by internet node leaving me without internet for an entire week. Guess what Steam wouldn't let me do? Thats right, I couldn't play Skyrim for an entire week because I didn't anticipate this freak accident happening. I didn't know anything about Steam or its little tricks and quirks since I had never used it before. Apparently since I didn't set Steam to go into offline mode before this storm happened, and Steam couldn't connect to the authentication servers, it refused to let me play Skyrim. I couldn't put Steam into offline mode until AFTER it had authenticated which I wouldn't be able to do for an entire week. I find it absolutely ridiculous that you need to be online in order to go offline with this program. Counter intuitive to say the least. So for an entire week I was unable to play a game I paid full price for. But I weathered it out and and after the repair crews got the local node back up and running I was happily playing Skyrim again. I put Steam into offline mode just in case something else catastrophic happened. Then patch 1.2 came out week later. Wait, whats this? Skyrim is updating? Hold on a second, I told you to go into offline mode there Mr. Steam. Why are you downloading stuff? Turns out offline mode doesn't mean offline and it really means online. WTF? My faith in Steam was pretty much destroyed at this point.
Skyrim 1.2 was the infamous patch that broke the game for many people. I was one of them, unfortunately. Dragons being invulnerable was really only a nuisance. At least until you needed to kill one in order to progress the game (main quest). There where many other problems with the 1.2 patch but I'm sure most people are familiar with them. Needless to say, 1.2 was busted beyond belief and made the game unplayable for lots of people, including myself. I wanted to revert back to patch 1.1, but Steam doesn't allow you to revert to previous versions. I tried contacting Steam support about a way to do so. They just referred me to Bethesda support. when I contacted Bethesda about the matter but they just told me to contact Steam support about rolling back to previous game versions and refused to answer any further emails about the subject. Great, so now I'm stuck in referral hell where each party keeps referring me back to the other, both refusing to help while telling me its the other guys fault. Finally Bethesda said that I would have to wait until patch 1.3. Great. So now I'm stuck not being able to play the game again. 2 weeks later patch 1.3 rolls out.
I'm so excited! I finally get to play the game I paid for! AWESOME! Oops, they completely screwed up AGAIN! Yes, they fixed the invulnerable dragons bug, but now the game randomly crashes every 5-10 minutes and immediately every time I try to fast travel. Does Bethesda even have a QA department? At this point I'd had enough. I had paid $60 for a game over a month ago and I've only been able to play it for a week and 2 days. I wasn't waiting around for an undetermined amount of time for Bethesda to roll out yet another patch to fix what they broke in the patch that was suppose to fix the previous patch only to have this patch break even MORE crap... or something like that. Confusion aside, I had finally had enough.
I hope this doesn't upset you. I know piracy strikes a nerve with you Brad, but I didn't see much else I could do in this situation. I certainly don't make a habit of doing things like this, but I did pay for the game. I downloaded a cracked copy of Skyrim 1.1. There was just no way that I could continue playing the game as it was in its current state. There was no way I could return the game I paid for to get my money back. The last two patches where so screwed up that it really boggles my mind just how pitiful Bethesda's QA team is. I didn't download 1.1 as a get back to Bethesda. I wasn't doing this to spite them. It wasn't a "screw you!" at either Steam or Bethesda. I just wanted to play the damn game I had paid for. So tell me Brad, because I really do want to know your opinion on this. Does this make me a scum of the internet or was I justified in my actions?
I haven't touched Skyrim since beating the main quest months ago. I am just so jaded by the whole ordeal that I refuse to have anything at all to do with that game or Bethesda ever again. Or Steam for that matter.
Game companies have really gone down hill in the last decade. Honestly, I really want to see another 1984 video game market crash. There are so many game companies that have no business making games now a days.
Yeah, sorry, I guess I kinda rambled there for a bit.