Here’s an idea for steam: Allow a user to set up one temporary user account at any time, valid for one (or two) days. That user account cannot buy or download any games, only use over from the first account during that day (by means of having net drive access, which pretty much prohibits anything but LAN usage). After the time expires, everything in that temporary account becomes unusable and a new one would have to be made. The small but constant nuisance would prohibit people from depending on this for too long and eventuelly make your friend finally buy that game you were playing over LAN the last couple of days.
edit: or instead of making it temporary, make such that the auxiliary user account can only ever start the same game that the ‘master’ is running at the moment.
I bet this feature would increase sales and make discussions like these not happen in the first place.
Well, Civ 5 is playable on a 2010 13-inch MacBook Pro (C2D 2.4/4GB/320M), but it chugs. I suspect it’s the CPU, as Civ 5 will make the fan on my Core i7 desktop CPU go to max. The intergrated video card doesn’t help, though the 320M is very respectable compared to Intel’s shitty offerings.
A look at the Activity Monitor shows only about 200K of paging out going on, so it doesn’t look like a memory issue (though I did order 8GB of RAM from OWC that should be here tomorrow).
The big thing will be once the PC patching settles down and Aspyr can catch up with the version number. They’re talking about sharing saves on Steamcloud, so you can start a game on your PC, and if you’re on the road, pick it right up on your Mac. Awesome.
Simply put, horseshit. I’m calling a spade a spade. Id est quod id est - it is what it is. There’s no complicated issue here. If the game allows for only 1 license at a time per purchase and you circumvent that, you’re committing piracy. It doesn’t matter if you download it from a torrent or copy it to play on a LAN. It’s still an illegal copy and no matter how much you want to dance around it, that’s what it is.
Let me know when anyone called you a thief or a tutor to other thieves. And in the meanwhile, don’t talk about arguing in bad faith when you make stuff up. It doesn’t help your point whatsoever.
It doesn’t matter if you have the tacit support of Firaxis or Soren. You’re still violating the EULA in the exact same way as someone downloading a torrent or someone making a copy for a friend to play down the street. There’s no difference and despite all of your ranting you know it. That’s why you can’t debate in good faith and are forced to make absurd comparisons like ripping the mattress tag & robbing a bank. Because it’s obvious that you’re simply wrong. My hunch is that you already know that.
And FYI, the purchaser of said mattress ripping the tag off isn’t illegal. That makes your comparison even more absurd. But we all get the point.
As such, this is where you finally end up - stuck in a dichotomy. You can’t say that you’d rather people don’t advocate piracy when you seem to be defending it in some cases. It just doesn’t add up. You can’t advocate that it’s fine to violate the EULA to make illegal copies to play LAN games - even with your kids at home - and then frown on someone making an illegal copy for a friend or downloading one from the web. It is hypocrisy. Justify it to yourself any way you want, just like “real” pirates do. In the end, there’s no fundamental difference.
By the way, the only one shrieking here is you. As I said before, I really don’t care if someone makes illegal copies for LAN use or downloading them off the web. But I’m not going to try to split hairs to justify one and condemn the other.
Jesus, copyright fetishists.
Not here to be Tom’s champion as I generally come down on your side of the fence on this, but …
Some people in this very thread strongly implied it. I don’t believe what you quoted above was just about what you said.
It doesn’t matter if you have the tacit support of Firaxis or Soren. You’re still violating the EULA in the exact same way as someone downloading a torrent or someone making a copy for a friend to play down the street. There’s no difference and despite all of your ranting you know it.
Don’t get me wrong, because I belive on erring on the side of caution and/or legality. However, there’s actually a real argument to be made against that (this surprised me after my curiosity on the subject led me to it). Unfortunately, it is a lengthy, dense mess of an argument that won’t make a whit of difference in this forum except for annoying everyone else, and besides that I’m not sure I entirely buy into it and would therefore likely be a poor advocate. It has to do with intent of creators, publishers, and distributors, content of the licensing agreements between themselves, etc… My point in bringing this up is just to point out that it’s apparently not as black and white as some would have us believe.
Rywill
4226
Yeah, he’s talking about me, and I didn’t strongly imply it, I outright said it. I mean, Tom is substituting “thief” for “pirate,” the same way he takes my colloquial use of the phrase “illegal copy” and points out that it’s not a crime in the California Penal Code. But those “called me a thief” comments were presumably directed at me. And like I said, depending on how Steam works, it’s either true or not. If Steam is selling you one license and you’re “fudging” a way to run multiple instances, you’re pirating the extra copies of the game. And the discussions up-thread about how to do that with other games are discussions of piracy and teaching people how to pirate. OTOH, if Steam is selling you multiple licenses and you have to “fudge” it because Steam won’t go through the trouble of supporting LAN play because of the small player-base, there’s no issue there. Like Blackadar, I don’t actually care that much about people pirating games. But it does strike me when people are being hypocritical.
Edit: Oops, turns out it’s a crime after all, so I’m actually OK for using the word “illegal” even in Tom’s technical sense. Thanks sinfony!
sinfony
4227
Did you know that people put the law on the internet for free for everybody to read? Shocking, I know.
JMR
4228
Anyone else experiencing crashes when loading a saved games once you already have a game going? I’m experimenting with different strategeries but every time I try to load a save the damn game crashes. I exited to the main menu and loaded from there but that didn’t fix it. I also uninstalled-reinstalled the game but still have the same problem. Only way to load a saved game is to exit and restart the game. Royal PITA.
JMR - it was a common problem that I thought that was on the list of fixes in the last patch, but it may be included with the “in-game saves taking more and more memory” fix in the upcoming one.
Rywill
4230
Also, I think it’s a known issue that saved games on large maps crash the game.
For some.
I know that Jpinard and some of the other “this game is broken, why doesn’t Firaxis fix it?!?!”-posters claim stuff like this as absolutes, but it’s never happened to me and I’m now at 228 hours played mostly on large or huge maps.
I had my first crash after the first patch, which suddenly broke DirectX 11 support for me… took me a while to realize, but without DirX11 I have no crashes.
jpinard
4232
Then I guess you’ll have to disagree with Firaxis own programmers then too. The problem I’m referring to is a memory issue and is fairly absolute. Though I write stupid stuff all the time, when it comes to PC hardware I’m fairly competant (excluding routers). As such, the first thing I did with both the crash types was run the DX9 executable to verify and used other drivers. There could be further issues with Directx that increase crash problems, but the two issues, the load-game CTD and this one are memory related and were verified by Firaxis staff.
If you really want to replicate it, play a Huge map, 19 civs (no city-states needed) from 4000 BC, save regularly and use those savegemes. If you have plenty of civs left by the modern era and are actively managing your empire, you will crash when cycling between cities. I was nearly 40 hours into my game.
My problem with this whole process is not hotfixing it or at least offering a fix to players “as-is” in beta format for those that need it. Many developers do this… even Firaxis used to.
I don’t personally see the difference between buying one copy of a game and installing it on two computers, and then playing it on both at the same time (whether you’re playing against each other or not), and lending the CD to your friend down the street to install it on his machine, and then both of you playing it at the same (whether in MP against each other or not).
Except in cases where spawning is explicitly allowed by the publisher, like SC1, either they are both pircay or neither is. That’s what the term ‘casual piracy’ refers to, isn’t it?
I’m not going to get judgemental on anyone here, but I am a little surprised to see some people here advocating a practise that seems to me to be indistinguishble from casual piracy. If the lisence doesn’t grant you the right to spawn copies for local MP, then doing so is piracy. It seems relatively clear cut to me, and I’m surprised to find out that that is not the prevaling view around here.
jpinard
4234
Looking forward to the new patch. And so is Spongebob apparently.
hong
4236
Jpinard does this better than me. :(
Janster
4237
And just like that, he won the discussion, good work.
Rywill
4238
This thread has become a shuddering Frankenstein’s monster that cannot be stopped. Woe to those who wanted to discuss Civ V on Quarter to Three. This may be my new favorite thread of all time.
It may be good to have a “Civ V gameplay only” thread ;)
rezaf
4240
But is there enough to talk about for such a thread?
I have some time this weekend, so I figured I’d play another game of Civ5 this morning, but I found it difficult to get into.
It’s all strangely dull. I think it’s a mixture of things, like some choices having so little impact (many of the policies, most of the world wonders etc.), exploration being cut short by the faster unit movement, stuff (especially units) taking so long to build … things like that.
Also, I know I was panned for saying that in this very thread earlier, but I maintain, the unique abilities of the civs are horribly unbalanced.
Anyway, I think I need a mod to really change stuff, but no truly meaningful mods have been released, it’s mostly tweaks and little rule changes.
I haven’t had any stability issues with the latest patch, but I don’t think I actually completed a game with it either - though I did play a pretty long one when I checked out the Mongols, but I somehow feel Firaxis should do a LOT better than they actually do, especially when it comes to community management. The modding tools have some pretty severe bugs/limitations, and Firaxis has done nil to resolve that.
Ah well, I think I’ll shelve Civ5 until there’s an expansion or until somebody - against all odds - releases a expansive gameplay mod.
rezaf
