A few GUI gripes

[Gandalf Parker]

How many open source games do you play? Other than open source reverse-engineered of course.
I find that the heavy speakers for how such a thing would work tend to not even bother checking out the ones that do it. Music pirates rarely check the free music, video pirates dont know where the free ones are, games pirates dont play free games. And even if they do, very VERY few have ever gone back and paid for it

[JonBrave]

Originally Posted by Soyweiser

If you want something really scary, press tab in the army setup screen.

Ummm, nothing happens for me?

[Gandalf Parker]

if you have all your armies showing with their units and all, then hitting TAB will hide all of the researchers. Maybe you didnt have any researchers there. In big games (like I play), or at the home castle, its a wonderful thing to find. So I can assign units only to the commanders without having to scroll past all the mages

[JonBrave]

Ah ha!

I (happened to) try it in a province with just military stuff, expecting to see something affecting that! Yes, that could be useful

[kasnavada]

Originally Posted by Gandalf Parker

How many open source games do you play? Other than open source reverse-engineered of course.
I find that the heavy speakers for how such a thing would work tend to not even bother checking out the ones that do it. Music pirates rarely check the free music, video pirates dont know where the free ones are, games pirates dont play free games. And even if they do, very VERY few have ever gone back and paid for it

Half a dozen, over the years. Even paid for some (donate button). It's not very adapted to games, publicity or patronage are way better.

Also I happen to be in the situation you've very rarely seen, as are most of the people I knew when I was studying : now that we have jobs we pay for stuff we pirated because we had no money to get it. It was not available at all without pirating, because of lack of money. I stopped now, since got money and a job. Most of my friends from back then also did. However, I don't generalize. I let professionals do that, and studies show... well I don't like to repeat myself.

[Gandalf Parker]

Well I have had many friends who pirated also. Almost from its birth. Id LIKE to believe such ideals, but I didnt find the same results as you. So Im not finding it so automatic that such studies have no basis. YMMV

[Soyweiser]

Wow, GP you totally fail to understand how science works. I would have assumed that you where smarter than that.

Furthermore, I have no desire to discuss this any further. I was just trolling.

One more remark, just to stir stuff up a bit, why is there a shift towards free to play games?

[Gandalf Parker]

Depends on which games you mean. The latest free-to-play games tend to be bait-&-switch. They are free to play but all of the goodies cost real money. Id compare most of them to being just a new version of demo & full version.

[Soyweiser]

Like team fortress?

[Edi]

A point of view:

The study may indicate that pirates as an aggregate group, in addition to pirating stuff, buy more stuff legitimately than non-pirates. However, that is not necessarily applicable to an individual case and especially non-applicable to a niche market situation.

The study also seems to focus more on music and video piracy, which is a rather different situation than an independent game publisher. When you have a mass market of hundreds of millions of customers, the impact of even thousands of pirates is not going to have a big impact.

That kind of numbers obviously don't apply here, so that study, for the purposes of this thread, is completely irrelevant.

Hopefully we can now close that tangent and discuss the free to play games and their various incarnations.