I was working on a comment to a general post asking how to start pirating games. I tried to submit it but then soon realized that the post was deleted by the moderators while I was working on the comment. So, here you go:
Yarr welcome to the ship. Three rules you must always follow, lest the empire tracks u and sinks ur ship. Penalties for piracy vary by region (in the US if the ISP receives letters from copyright lawyers too many times about your file sharing behavior, they can suspend your internet)
First thing is a bittorrent client. There is really only one true bittorent client, which is qBittorrent (https://www.qbittorrent.org/). Stay away from uTorrent, they aren’t good anymore. Others like Transmission are good as well.
Second is a VPN. My personal favorite is hide.me, since they have a Wireguard VPN (see https://hide.me/en/wireguard-vpn) and port forwarding. A very important thing to do is to choose one with port forwarding.
Port forwarding is the ability to open ports through your VPN. Basically, it allows you to be seen by Seeders even with closed ports, so they can establish a connection with you. This usually dramatically increases your download rate initially (because seeders can sometimes connect with you even if they have closed ports, it’ll just take a while). Also, it’s good for seeding as well and it helps the swarm! Here is a more complete explanation: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/35669790
Another very pro tip is to bind your VPN to your torrent client. In qBittorrent, simply change Preferences -> Advanced -> Network Interface. (To know which one, go to your terminal and type “ifconfig” if you’re on Linux or “ipconfig” if Windows. It will show you a list of all your network interfaces. Type this command two times, one with your VPN off and one with your VPN on, and whichever interface appears should be it)
Thirdly, come to a pirate site. There’s fitgirl-repacks.site, or there’s dodi-repacks.site. Download the installation folder and run the installation file.
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If nothing else, thank you for informing me about hide.me.
My, personal, inability to intelligently compare VPNs is what’s holding me back from port forwarding.
I’ve been trying to parse what I mean and failing:
A VPN should be at least affordable for me, no point looking if I can’t afford it.
It should be suitably secure, again no point looking if I don’t trust them to give/sell/surrender my data.
It should be suitably fast, no point looking if it’s slower than dialup.
And, it should have a minimum of features: port forwarding, easy to set up, etc.
Where the minimums are is subjective but I think these are the things that each of us consider. Price, privacy, performance and feature set.
Comparisons are either really good for “here’s the cheapest, here’s the most private and here’s the fastest” but neglect whether they’re P2P friendly or allow port forwarding. Or, the comparisons are really detailed on the feature set “max handshake encryption, max data encryption” but neglect how much I might pay.
It’s a whole lot of research for something I know I don’t/won’t understand and with potentially huge consequences should I get wrong. So: “Here’s the most private” I’ll take that one please
I’m currently on Mullvad, it topped a bunch of vpn comparison for ‘normals’ on security, and I have been content with them. But I’m ready to move up when my sub ends. Testimonials are just about all I’ve got.
Edit: I suppose it’s ‘mid-level’ guides I think are missing. Beginners have their cheap/secure/fast articles. Advanced users can compare on “max handshake encryption” whatever that means. I need a “so you want to effectively and securely support the swarm, here are your options.”
Honestly I disagree with the need for bittorrent and a VPN when downloading games, for several reasons:
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Very few game companies pursue the MPAA / RIAA strategy of monitoring torrents and sending letters to ISPs. It’s not cost-efficient for most of them individually, and there isn’t a centralized organization with that level of reach and power. Those things are something you have to worry about if you’re downloading videos or music, less so games.
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For software specifically, you generally want to download them from trusted sites, and those use file sharing sites anyway. You don’t need a VPN for them - the reason you need a VPN on BitTorrent is because anyone can slide into a torrent and see who’s downloading there (or their IP address, anyway); this isn’t true for a file sharing site. The effort it would take for an attacker to get information on who’s downloading from a file sharing site isn’t worth it, especially since most such sites would resist as much as possible (knowing that pirates are a big part of their audience and that becoming known for exposing them would destroy their reputation.)
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While some of those sites offer torrents, those tend to be small and, again, not generally worth the time of the few videogame companies who do focus on them.
That said if you’re downloading really big-name AAA titles over bittorrent, your experience might be different.
But the main thing I would focus on in a guide is how to avoid viruses and trojans and the like. Those are the big risk for game piracy that isn’t present when downloading videos and music (unless you really screw it up and download and run MOVIE.AVI.EXE or something.)
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Any of these guides address the danger of downloading compromised games?
There must be a lot of trojanized torrents, and with the understandable need for secrecy in release groups, there’s always the danger of a supply chain attack. Also, games usually can’t be run on virtual machines without significant speed degradation, making them the perfect application to get direct access to your machine/network.
One way to avoid it is to prioritize GOG copies if they’re available. Since GOG has no DRM they tend to generally be untouched.
Gog games are also digitally signed. So you can check the signer and know it hasn’t been tampered with.
TIL, thanks for the info!
You can use virtual machine if you manage to set up direct GPU passthrough.
Having so much trouble with this I’ve been losing my mind for months.
Last time I tried it I failed, so I decided Proton is more than enough.
Yeah I’ve been trying to make it work for non Steam games, but Proton is a blessing for Steam games.
You can run non-Steam games through Proton as well. Or was it a game that doesn’t work with Proton?
It’s a pretty obscure game that Valve probably has 0 interest in getting Proton to be friends with it, yeah.
That doesn’t really matter, it’s optimised to run everything. Sure, it might not work and in that case you’re not likely to get help if it’s not on Steam, but chances it will run are pretty high.
Fitgirl is one of the best repackers out there, I have never found a compromised torrent coming from her. Dodi is too a very good and equally safe one. I’d say you can trust any torrent coming from their sites without any worry.
Would love some guides on torrenting over I2P.
I gotchu 😉
So, your course consists of things that everyone should already be doing when pirating at all? Why limit it to games?
Why gatekeep? If it helps a single user, it’s a worthy post.
It’s not gatekeeping if it’s common sense that people should possess already when it comes to pirating.
Where should they learn this if everyone was like you?
I audibly went “oh god” and SO goes “what?”, but how could I ever explain? 😭
Losing what.cd was like losing the musical library of Alexandria. Redacted is pretty good, but it’s just not the same.
How do we have any guarantee that the files downloaded from that site aren’t full of malware?
There is no way to be absolutely, 100% certain. Do not run pirated software on a machine that you absolutely could not afford to lose (ie. work machines). Back up important files.
That said, there’s a lot you can do to reduce your risk:
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Only download from trusted sources; this is the real value of repackers. The megathread can help with this.
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GOG games have their executables signed by GOG (and don’t need to be cracked, of course, because they’re DRM free.) As long as you make sure they’re legitimately signed they’re 100% safe. Note: You are almost certainly not bothering to do this.
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If you’re even slightly unsure about a file, you can upload it to a site like virustotal: https://www.virustotal.com/ - these sites are not magic. They run it through a bunch of antivirus software, which often relies on AI that will have false positives, and of course they can only recognize stuff that either fits the patterns in their AIs or has been seen before, so some stuff could slip through. Still, it’s a good basic precaution. If only a few results come back positive, it could be a false positive; if a bunch of results do, or if any of the results are specific about what they think is wrong with it rather than vague machine learning results, then you probably shouldn’t run your file.
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Sandboxes and virtual machines are the 99.99% safe way to run stuff if you’re unsure. Remember that a virus or trojan won’t necessarily be obvious when run, so to be really safe you’d have to run things there all the time. In truth, Sandboxie is lightweight enough that you could probably do it all the time without losing much beyond some mild annoyance.
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Running things on the Steam deck might help a little bit because most viruses aren’t designed to operate on that environment and because, even if they are, there is less there for you to lose than on your desktop PC (except your Steam account, of course.) Proton, which it uses to run Windows games, is absolutely not designed for security or anything like that - it does give them access to your entire file system, not just the box it creates - but a normal windows virus designed without the Steam Deck or proton in mind would just fuck up the environment Proton created for it, accomplishing nothing. And, of course, as mentioned, you have the advantage that you have less important stuff on the Steam Deck to lose in the first place. So it is somewhat safer to run pirated windows games on the Steam Deck than it is elsewhere.
All of that said, if you’re really worried, another solution is to emulate console games instead. That is pretty much 100% safe (absent some weird exploit in the emulator, which AFAIK has never happened.) A game running in an emulator can only do what the emulator lets it do, inside the box the emulator creates for it. Most PC games have Switch versions and Switch emulation is very very good, even if Nintendo has forced them to halt development - we’ll see if that continues into the new Switch 2, but for now it’s a very good option that is basically 100% secure.
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That’s the best part: You don’t! That’s pretty much the reason I stopped pirating PC games.
What about using TOR instead of a VPN?
You can’t use a torrent client via TOR.
@[email protected] but you can use qbittorrent with I2P 😉
