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A comment on How Candy Japan got credit card fraud somewhat under control. Parent comment

Re:How Candy Japan got credit card fraud somewhat under control by lis on Tuesday April 05, 2016 @03:46PM (#11433723)
Blue Byte did something along the lines of your suggestion with the copyright protection of Settlers III. When the game detected that the DRM was broken, iron smelters would only produce pigs instead of iron.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Settlers_III

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Re:How Candy Japan got credit card fraud somewhat under control by viggity on Tuesday April 05, 2016 @04:37PM (#11434153)
reminds me of "Game Dev Tycoon", where if it detected it was cracked, the player had a hard time progressing because their virtual company kept getting ripped off by crackers.

http://gameological.com/2013/05/inventory-9-games-with-creat... (it is the first one)

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Re:How Candy Japan got credit card fraud somewhat under control by hellbanner on Tuesday April 05, 2016 @05:55PM (#11434863)
More specifically, the player's simualated video game company goes bankrupt, "due to piracy", according to the game.

More details & discussion from Game Dev Tycoon's developer blog: http://www.greenheartgames.com/2013/04/29/what-happens-when-...

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Re:How Candy Japan got credit card fraud somewhat under control by Symbiote on Tuesday April 05, 2016 @06:43PM (#11435180)
For a much older example, Sim City gave continual disasters after about 10 minutes if the version was detected as pirated. This was 1990 or so.
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Re:How Candy Japan got credit card fraud somewhat under control by stcredzero on Tuesday April 05, 2016 @04:47PM (#11434263)
Not bad, but even that reads like a bit of an FU from the devs. ("Pig Iron?") The best thing to do is to make it definitely seem like it was a bug introduced by the crack. (Maybe James Bond villains giving their secret projects suggestive code names and telling their entire plan isn't unrealistic?)
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Re:How Candy Japan got credit card fraud somewhat under control by kderbe on Tuesday April 05, 2016 @06:00PM (#11434900)
It's important not to disguise any anti-piracy measures as bugs, because pirates (or even reviewers playing pirated copies) will loudly proclaim that the game is buggy, and discourage legitimate buyers. This may have contributed to the closing of at least one development studio (Iron Lore, developer of Titan Quest)[1].

[1] http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?42663...

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Re:How Candy Japan got credit card fraud somewhat under control by eps on Tuesday April 05, 2016 @06:13PM (#11434985)
This must be specific to the games, because they do tend to be buggy on their own.

With non-gaming software the situation is completely different. When a cracked version craps out the prevailing sentiment is always that it was a bad crack. Always.

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Re:How Candy Japan got credit card fraud somewhat under control by stcredzero on Tuesday April 05, 2016 @09:02PM (#11435864)
It's important not to disguise any anti-piracy measures as bugs, because pirates (or even reviewers playing pirated copies) will loudly proclaim that the game is buggy, and discourage legitimate buyers.

I'm wondering why there isn't a service that lets you search for people encountering your crack-penalty. A really sneaky company would disguise itself as a hacker group, then offer a copy of the game that doesn't have that "bug." (But has another one.)

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Re:How Candy Japan got credit card fraud somewhat under control by sleepychu on Wednesday April 06, 2016 @03:21AM (#11437195)
Green Heart Games did basically that. http://www.greenheartgames.com/2013/04/29/what-happens-when-...
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Re:How Candy Japan got credit card fraud somewhat under control by jldugger on Tuesday April 05, 2016 @05:50PM (#11434819)
Well, if you want to convert a pirate user into a sale, you need to convince them that the bug isn't present in the retail copy.

So you're balancing making it hard for crackers to detect, and easy enough for players to encounter that shift behavior.

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Re:How Candy Japan got credit card fraud somewhat under control by stcredzero on Tuesday April 05, 2016 @09:03PM (#11435868)
So have a web search that finds people talking about the fake bug, then take appropriate action.
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Re:How Candy Japan got credit card fraud somewhat under control by Kephael on Tuesday April 05, 2016 @08:04PM (#11435621)
Bohemia Interactive have their games "degrade" if they detect they are pirated. Weapons become increasingly inaccurate and your character turns into a bird.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FADE

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