Unpopular opinions! V2: I Don't like half life edition.
17,782 replies, posted
i like being single
I think to be truly neutral, for a lot of subjects, It's going to look biased. One argument'l usually be more correct than the other.
"Piracy isn't theft" is stupid. Especially when people go "you don't steal the product with piracy, you just get a copy for free".
You get for free something that the author is actually selling. It's still theft.
[QUOTE=StoneRabbit;43802462]"Piracy isn't theft" is stupid. Especially when people go "you don't steal the product with piracy, you just get a copy for free".
You get for free something that the author is actually selling. It's still theft.[/QUOTE]
[img]http://puu.sh/6LnWl.png[/img]
you aren't 'carrying away' anything, the original is still there. piracy is copying, and you can still say that it's bad, but it isn't stealing.
I really despise posters in the giveaway threads that join FP SPECIFICALLY to ask for free shit.
[QUOTE=StoneRabbit;43802462]"Piracy isn't theft" is stupid. Especially when people go "you don't steal the product with piracy, you just get a copy for free".
You get for free something that the author is actually selling. It's still theft.[/QUOTE]
Piracy is piracy, theft is theft. None of us is saying that it's not a crime
[QUOTE=Samiam22;43802485][img]http://puu.sh/6LnWl.png[/img]
you aren't 'carrying away' anything, the original is still there. piracy is copying, and you can still say that it's bad, but it isn't stealing.[/QUOTE]
Theoretically, piracy may not make you steal the product, but it makes you steal the amount of money the seller was supposed to get if you bought it.
But yeah, you got the point. It's not REALLY stealing. I was more ranting about the argument itself, that people keep using to claim piracy isn't bad or illegal.
[QUOTE=StoneRabbit;43802581]Theoretically, piracy may not make you steal the product, but it makes you steal the amount of money the seller was supposed to get if you bought it.
But yeah, you got the point. It's not REALLY stealing. I was more ranting about the argument itself, that people keep using to claim piracy isn't bad or illegal.[/QUOTE]
I've never heard anyone using it to say piracy isn't bad/illegal. It's not as bad as theft, but it's certainly not good. Most of the time when I hear people saying it's not theft they're just saying you're using the wrong words.
[QUOTE=StoneRabbit;43802581]Theoretically, piracy may not make you steal the product, but it makes you steal the amount of money the seller was supposed to get if you bought it.
But yeah, you got the point. It's not REALLY stealing. I was more ranting about the argument itself, that people keep using to claim piracy isn't bad or illegal.[/QUOTE]
Piracy does not steal anything. It does not remove or take away anything from the original owner/seller. "It just makes you steal the amount of money the seller was supposed to get if you bought it." No, you did not steal anything, you simply did not give the money they were asking.
This doesn't make piracy right or legal, but piracy is also not stealing.
[QUOTE=StoneRabbit;43802581]Theoretically, piracy may not make you steal the product, but it makes you steal the amount of money the seller was supposed to get if you bought it.[/QUOTE]
this logic only works if you assume that they'd have bought the game if they didn't pirate it, and that line of thought is ridiculous. if you pirate games, you'll be downloading way more than you'd buy
[editline]5th February 2014[/editline]
obviously not justifying piracy, just saying your logic makes no sense
Pragmatism is just doublespeak for short-sightedness.
Really. That's all that it is. Because if you try to retain the explanatory power of the word after disengaging it from its banal definition of 'doing what works best,' then it basically means that you go along with the option that is most appealing in the short-term, inhibitions formed from past experiences be damned.
[QUOTE=God's Pimp Hand;43803095]Pragmatism is just doublespeak for short-sightedness.
Really. That's all that it is. Because if you try to retain the explanatory power of the word after disengaging it from its banal definition of 'doing what works best,' then it basically means that you go along with the option that is most appealing in the short-term, inhibitions formed from past experiences be damned.[/QUOTE]
I think you've made a bit of a leap in logic if you assume 'doing what's best' is the same as 'the option that is most appealing in the short term'. The second one seems to be the exact opposite of the first.
[QUOTE=StoneRabbit;43802581]Theoretically, piracy may not make you steal the product, but it makes you steal the amount of money the seller was supposed to get if you bought it.
But yeah, you got the point. It's not REALLY stealing. I was more ranting about the argument itself, that people keep using to claim piracy isn't bad or illegal.[/QUOTE]
So that means If i pirate a product I never intended to buy, by your definition Im doing no wrong because the potential money that the author was supposed to get from me is 0$, since I had no intention of buying the product (and never will even If i get a mil $ in the lotto). stealing 0$ is moral in my book, therefore piracy of products you have no intention of buying is also ok in my book. there is my unpopular opinion
[QUOTE=Janus Vesta;43803320]I think you've made a bit of a leap in logic if you assume 'doing what's best' is the same as 'the option that is most appealing in the short term'. The second one seems to be the exact opposite of the first.[/QUOTE]
In this case I meant appealing as seeming most sensible, sorry.
In the everyday context of the word, I think most people who call themselves pragmatists tend to eschew traditional thought and measure their success by the results they immediately attain, as well as avoiding to apply a theoretical lens to those results, which I think just further emphasizes their myopia.
Piracy might as well be Stealing, even if its not technically stealing.
Its fundamentally the same, except there is an infinite number of the product.
[QUOTE=Oizen;43803928]Piracy might as well be Stealing, even if its not technically stealing.
Its fundamentally the same, except there is an infinite number of the product.[/QUOTE]
it's not fundamentally the same, why do people insist in saying this?
take counterfeit money for example, would you call that stealing? no, it's also wrong and illegal, but it's not stealing because it just makes copies. illegally, of course, but it's not the same as stealing existing money. there's no need to use the same definition for something entirely different
Flappy Birds is absolutely terrible, and I hope the creator doesn't find much success from it.
Virtually all the sounds and graphics were taken off other games, and the concept is ridiculously unoriginal.
Angry Birds was unoriginal, but at least they had the decency to create some fun characters and good animations.
The only reason it's successful at all is because it's difficult. People don't like things looking simple and being hard, so they work at it to try and prove to themselves they can do it.
[QUOTE=Zukriuchen;43804065]it's not fundamentally the same, why do people insist in saying this?
[/QUOTE]
Why are you so insistent on nitpicking specific words.
If you're stealing, you're taking something that doesn't belong to you, instead of paying money for it.
If you're pirating, you're taking something that doesn't belong to you, instead of paying money for it.
I fail to see how this isn't fundamentally the same.
it make more sense to say "youre plagiarizing software" if anything. not stealing
Piracy, philosophy and theory...my theory:
piracy one of those things where 'What they dont know, wont hurt them'. the biggest issue with piracy is its own popularity, there are 2 kinds of people, the 'poor' and the 'affordable'. The poor cant contribute anything to the devs, they are like kids with no credit cards and stingy parents, or they are the kind that would never buy the game period and their mind is made up even if they had 1mil $. If the poor gets their hands on pirated software, there is no loss, cause it was impossible for them to get it any other way, by reason or by situation, devs miss out on a potential 0$. The 'affordable' are the kinds of people that can afford that software, they help out the devs. They usually dont know they want to buy a piece of software...until persuaded by ads or friends.
Heres the catch; no one knows whether or not they, themselves, are in the poor or affordable category. half the problems with piracy would be nonexistent it that were true.
For example, you think your in the poor when you cant afford your wanted software one day. And all that can change in an instant once you get Christmas money from your parents, or find money on the ground, or win the lotto etc. well now you have the money to buy that game + the will to buy it = affordable group. this example shows that it is pretty much impossible to determine if your in the poor or not, your judgments are inconsistent. the only people that know they are in the poor, are the ones that refuse to buy the game no matter the circumstance (even they can be inconsistent).
The affordables can be mislead by the poor easily. they see a poor squaking about their free software and the affordable thinks "why waste money on that wen i can get it for free?" and you will begin to see all these affordables thinking that they are like the poor, making up ridiculous reasons to justify why they couldn't buy the software. If the poor kept to themselves, and the affordibles continued to pay the devs, you can see a perpetual cycle of happy devs and happy affordables and happy poor. Everything goes to hell when the affordibles get 'corrupted' by the poor, affordables get in a group were they dont belong and no one/very few affordibles are buying software. I chuckle everytime i picture some guy saying this: "as long as dem affordables dont think about anythn but spendin', wee all be happeh campers" -a poor.
the problem with piracy is that some of the poor spill beans with the affordables and now no one wants to pay for software. There are a number of reasons why some of the poor talk to the affordable, and one main one is that there is an affordable who may have became a poor temporally and realized that he could save money from adopting the ways of the poor, this half poor half affordable guy spread the word and slowly this expanded into a community that we know now as pirates.
in conclusion
piracy could work, as in make everyone happy, only if the people constantly remain in their respective groups and are unaware of each other. But thats impossible and everyone already knows why.
this whole time i've been talking about piracy like it was some sort of government or some economic sht.
critique to your hearts content after all this is the forum for unpopular opinions. also the opinions in this passage are solely for educational purposes. Its intent is not to persuade anyone to go out and 'plagiarize' software. lel
[QUOTE=Oizen;43806041]Why are you so insistent on nitpicking specific words.
If you're stealing, you're taking something that doesn't belong to you, instead of paying money for it.
If you're pirating, you're taking something that doesn't belong to you, instead of paying money for it.
I fail to see how this isn't fundamentally the same.[/QUOTE]
it's not nitpicking, they're different things
stealing = taking something illegally
pirating = copying something illegally
steal money = owner of the money no longer has it
pirate game = owner of the game still has it
you're acquiring something without paying money for it, sure, but in a completely different way. if 10% of the people who play a game have pirated it, the company didn't lose 10% of their profits on that game, because there was no guarantee that those people would've bought the game if they didn't pirate it. if 10% of the people who own a certain product stole it from the store, the company literally lost 10% of their profit
Regardless of what your stance on piracy is, you can't deny that there's a ton of morons that pirate games because "I don't wanna buy it." Those people are more harmful than the people who couldn't afford it in the first place or people who just wanna try it out like a demo.
I think the best way to solve piracy is to come up with alternative payment methods for games. Some people simply can't afford to dish out 20-60 dollars on a game right away, especially in the digital world where, in general, you can't return your games, unless you live in the UK or something, but I'm excluding that for the sake of my argument.
Like, look at the new Killer Instinct on the xbox. You get 1-2 free characters out of the.... ~12-15 character roster, so you don't need any money to start playing. I also think it has some kind of free character rotation like League. Since it's a fighting game you aren't really at a disadvantage by having only one or two characters, and if you're really into the game you can spend an extra few dollars to buy the other characters you want. So, you could go "I love fighting games but I hate playing charge characters" so you end up spending like, 15 dollars on all the characters you want. Or somebody could go "I want everybody!" and spend 20 dollars and play all the characters they want.
I think THAT is the best kind of payment plan for games (assuming that it isn't freemium garbage bullshit). Unfortunately that kind of model only really works for fighters and ARTS games, though, because in other types of games you're usually at a disadvantage if you don't have every character/weapon.
I honestly think that microtransactions in games have the potential to be really useful and good for gaming, but so far nobody's done it right.
[QUOTE=milkandcooki;43806190]Regardless of what your stance on piracy is, you can't deny that there's a ton of morons that pirate games because "I don't wanna buy it." Those people are more harmful than the people who couldn't afford it in the first place or people who just wanna try it out like a demo.
I think the best way to solve piracy is to come up with alternative payment methods for games. Some people simply can't afford to dish out 20-60 dollars on a game right away, especially in the digital world where, in general, you can't return your games, unless you live in the UK or something, but I'm excluding that for the sake of my argument.
Like, look at the new Killer Instinct on the xbox. You get 1-2 free characters out of the.... ~12-15 character roster, so you don't need any money to start playing. I also think it has some kind of free character rotation like League. Since it's a fighting game you aren't really at a disadvantage by having only one or two characters, and if you're really into the game you can spend an extra few dollars to buy the other characters you want. So, you could go "I love fighting games but I hate playing charge characters" so you end up spending like, 15 dollars on all the characters you want. Or somebody could go "I want everybody!" and spend 20 dollars and play all the characters they want.
I think THAT is the best kind of payment plan for games (assuming that it isn't freemium garbage bullshit). Unfortunately that kind of model only really works for fighters and ARTS games, though, because in other types of games you're usually at a disadvantage if you don't have every character/weapon.
I honestly think that microtransactions in games have the potential to be really useful and good for gaming, but so far nobody's done it right.[/QUOTE]
I find microtransactions to be a disgusting way to even out the amount of money individuals pay, and subscriptions even worse. I want to buy a game and have that be it. I want to own it. It keeps the game from becoming annoyingly serious, it makes it so that serious fans don't end up paying $100+ to balance out all the people who don't pay at all, and it's significantly less stressful than microtransactions (I play WoT. I don't know how else to phrase that last bit).
[QUOTE=Mbbird;43806350]I find microtransactions to be a disgusting way to even out the amount of money individuals pay, and subscriptions even worse. I want to buy a game and have that be it. I want to own it. It keeps the game from becoming annoyingly serious, it makes it so that serious fans don't end up paying $100+ to balance out all the people who don't pay at all, and it's significantly less stressful than microtransactions (I play WoT. I don't know how else to phrase that last bit).[/QUOTE]
That's why I said they're not done right. They have [I]potential.[/I]
tf2 did it right.
Unpopular opinion: Micro transactions are not inherently evil.
[QUOTE=milkandcooki;43806379]That's why I said they're not done right. They have [I]potential.[/I][/QUOTE]
Of course it has potential, but paying small amounts of money for things repeatedly has yet to make me [I]not[/I] feel dirty and wasteful. Nobody has done it right, and I personally don't believe anyone has done it right.
More often than not, the majority of Facepunch fits into the "fedoratheistic neckbeard" stereotype just as much, if not more than the people you make fun of for it. With the only exception being the "likes ponies" part, an element of the stereotype which conveniently only exists on this one particular website and is completely unrelated as far as pretty much everyone and everywhere else is concerned.
[QUOTE=milkandcooki;43806190]Regardless of what your stance on piracy is, you can't deny that there's a ton of morons that pirate games because "I don't wanna buy it." Those people are more harmful than the people who couldn't afford it in the first place or people who just wanna try it out like a demo.
I think the best way to solve piracy is to come up with alternative payment methods for games. Some people simply can't afford to dish out 20-60 dollars on a game right away, especially in the digital world where, in general, you can't return your games, unless you live in the UK or something, but I'm excluding that for the sake of my argument.
Like, look at the new Killer Instinct on the xbox. You get 1-2 free characters out of the.... ~12-15 character roster, so you don't need any money to start playing. I also think it has some kind of free character rotation like League. Since it's a fighting game you aren't really at a disadvantage by having only one or two characters, and if you're really into the game you can spend an extra few dollars to buy the other characters you want. So, you could go "I love fighting games but I hate playing charge characters" so you end up spending like, 15 dollars on all the characters you want. Or somebody could go "I want everybody!" and spend 20 dollars and play all the characters they want.
I think THAT is the best kind of payment plan for games (assuming that it isn't freemium garbage bullshit). Unfortunately that kind of model only really works for fighters and ARTS games, though, because in other types of games you're usually at a disadvantage if you don't have every character/weapon.
I honestly think that microtransactions in games have the potential to be really useful and good for gaming, but so far nobody's done it right.[/QUOTE]
Or they could just release proper demos and make good games so the demos don't hurt sales. Take Spiderweb Games for instance. The demos for all their games are the entire first chapter of each of them. Which is actually probably too much to be honest (it can be hours of gameplay) but it's a perfect example of what the full game would be since it's a completely uncut section of the game and not cherry picked to just show off the best parts.
Valve are lazy developers and I don't get why the internet worships the fucking ground they walk on
[QUOTE=Ermac20;43807136]Valve are lazy developers and I don't get why the internet worships the fucking ground they walk on[/QUOTE]
idk maybe the extreme steam discounts that are given every season, or maybe it was the fact that steam gave 1 random game to every steam user that one christmas, or maybe im just biting on a hook cause valve's methods are appetizing
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