Software piracy scene and r/CrackWatch -

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

There's far too many repackers and not enough crackers. Masquerade seems to repack and release any old shit with no rhyme or reason

It's not like the rips of old, that shit could be genuinely impressive sometimes. There would be addons but they had strict guidelines as well.

I don't remember the final filesize but fortunately I have the NFO. The rip of Rune was 59x2.88MB in size, so 170MB. Released 8 days before the official release. They got the size down from a full CD by optimizing the textures(maybe audio as well), they looked identical, with the added benefit of a smaller install footprint and the game actually ran faster which lowered the system requirements.

One other superior crack/rip was the release of SiN. The release version had a bug where even if it was fully installed from the CD it would still read level data from the CD and making level transitions horrible.

One common complaint was the long load times, which measured in the minutes between each level, death, or quickload.[20] With later patches the long load times were greatly shortened, although compatibility with old save games was lost, forcing players to play through the game from the beginning or use cheats to progress to their previous point in the game.
...
The patch was exceptionally large; at the time it was normal to expect a game patch file to be up to 5 MB in size, whereas SiN's first patch was over 31 MB. This was at a time when a substantial percentage of internet access was via dial-up, causing Activision to take the unusual step of offering to send CDs containing the patch to any owners of the game who did not have sufficient bandwidth to download it from the Internet.

This was in 1998 and patches weren't forced down your steam pipe like now, you had to seek them out on their support page. I bought the game at release and pirated it early(I often did that), never knew there was any problems with it at the time. No problem with the pirated versions.

The RTM/gold versions of Master of Orion 3 and Arcanum both released months in advance and both studios swore up and down that they were betas and everything that was shit and broken would be fixed for release. Nah, never happened, the released version were identical on a byte-by-byte level.

Best pirate experience was playing Black&White early and after a long session one of the villagers got possessed by a dev(that game had so much weird Molyneux-style unused online functionality) then came up to me, introduced himself and asked me how I could possibly play the game this early if I had actually bought it. I told him the truth, I had it on pre-order and had been hyped since they started their dev-diary in PC-Gamer and I didn't want to wait 5 days more. He said something like "alright, I hope that's true" and disappeared. There was a couple of more chit-chat lines in between, if it was a bot it was a very good one.
I was actually going to cancel my preorder, didn't like the game very much, but he guilted me into keeping it.

 

[Neil]

Oh yea I should mention EMPRESS released a Just Cause 4 Denuvo crack just 3 days ago.
The NFO file has drama again.

View attachment 1962632



So what was the FitGirl drama? Here's some comments https://old.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch..._ended_i_am_safe_thanks_to_my_lawyer/gopvgnn/ (https://web.archive.org/web/2021022..._ended_i_am_safe_thanks_to_my_lawyer/gopvgnn/)

"girl" catfight

View attachment 1962650
View attachment 1962652


Someone who is more up to date than me made a story https://www.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/lqibnh/empress_there_and_back_again/




I don't have a horse in this race but I will say that cracking is so much more impressive than repacking

why do trannies ruin literally everything

 

[Mother puss bucket]

yeah modern internet connections are so fast, it's a lot faster to torrent the full uncompressed game instead of a smaller compressed version that then maxes out 100% of your cpu for several hours while decompressing it

It's easier to find repacks than original releases. You know fitgirl is about as trust worthy as a pirate can be, but you might not follow all the groups to know which are sketchy.

I've heard fitgirl is actually a fitboy larping. Is it true?

It's not like the rips of old, that shit could be genuinely impressive sometimes. There would be addons but they had strict guidelines as well.

I don't remember the final filesize but fortunately I have the NFO. The rip of Rune was 59x2.88MB in size, so 170MB. Released 8 days before the official release. They got the size down from a full CD by optimizing the textures(maybe audio as well), they looked identical, with the added benefit of a smaller install footprint and the game actually ran faster which lowered the system requirements.

One other superior crack/rip was the release of SiN. The release version had a bug where even if it was fully installed from the CD it would still read level data from the CD and making level transitions horrible.

This was in 1998 and patches weren't forced down your steam pipe like now, you had to seek them out on their support page. I bought the game at release and pirated it early(I often did that), never knew there was any problems with it at the time. No problem with the pirated versions.

The RTM/gold versions of Master of Orion 3 and Arcanum both released months in advance and both studios swore up and down that they were betas and everything that was shit and broken would be fixed for release. Nah, never happened, the released version were identical on a byte-by-byte level.

Best pirate experience was playing Black&White early and after a long session one of the villagers got possessed by a dev(that game had so much weird Molyneux-style unused online functionality) then came up to me, introduced himself and asked me how I could possibly play the game this early if I had actually bought it. I told him the truth, I had it on pre-order and had been hyped since they started their dev-diary in PC-Gamer and I didn't want to wait 5 days more. He said something like "alright, I hope that's true" and disappeared. There was a couple of more chit-chat lines in between, if it was a bot it was a very good one.
I was actually going to cancel my preorder, didn't like the game very much, but he guilted me into keeping it.

Today it's still the case of removing bloat. Instead of having to dig up your EA account and install origin the pirated version skips it all and gives you the game to play. Makes a difference in how well it runs on lower end machines and saves resetting passwords on accounts you never use.

Some online companies ship games a few days early to meet pre orders on time. You could have said you got your pre order early from an online retailer. Anything up to a week in advance would be pretty normal for these sorts of things.

 

[awoo]

why do trannies ruin literally everything

well Empress is one of two people/groups that can actually crack Denuvo so for the time being nothing is ruined

 

[Deadwaste]

other update: crackwatch is now down for a few months as their revenue comes from affiliate links through instant gaming and kinguin and they have literally no other revenue methods like a fucking patreon or bitcoin, and since not many AAA games are coming out, they cant justify leaving their servers up if no one is buying games

 

[Mother puss bucket]

other update: crackwatch is now down for a few months as their revenue comes from affiliate links through instant gaming and kinguin and they have literally no other revenue methods like a fucking patreon or bitcoin, and since not many AAA games are coming out, they cant justify leaving their servers up if no one is buying games

Is there an alternative?

They could have stripped back all the java script shit and made it plain text if they needed to save money to host. Crackwatch was good because it was just game releases, no woke shit.

 

[Deadwaste]

Is there an alternative?

They could have stripped back all the java script shit and made it plain text if they needed to save money to host. Crackwatch was good because it was just game releases, no woke shit.

i mean there's the reddit for it. its not much but it'll have to do

 

[awoo]

btw the Inuit TurdTax bypass I posted still works. tested it today

 

[Mister Qwerty]

 

[Deadwaste]

View attachment 2070581

rip i never even heard of this

 

[awoo]

I had no idea people still used warez bb. Unless you are downloading your fan DOOM wads or something.

Interestingly enough, EMPRESS has not posted any schizo blogposts recently on the containment subreddit and has been busy with Denuvo releases, which pirates are all glad for. Recent cracks are Forza Horizon 4, Assassins Creed Valhalla, Crash Bandicoot 4, Dragon Ball FighterZ Gogeta SS4, Planet Coaster, Jurassic World Evolution, and Life is Strange 2.

r/EmpressEvolution

r/EmpressEvolution: Here is a private haven for people who want to be up to date with my releases.

www.reddit.com

There's also some made music which reminds me of some old tracker or keygen music (although that isn't really a genre), fitting.

 

[awoo]

Empress is doing beta testing on cracks https://www.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/nlpgu4/empress_next_crack_update/

 

[lemmiwinks]

I've heard fitgirl is actually a fitboy larping. Is it true?

That's unquestionably the impression I got from this interview with "her". Note the parenthesis around the word "Queen" in the headline:

Some choice quotes from the article:

"[FitGirl's] clearly states that the gender issue is irrelevant, we began at the origins."
"While FitGirl was building a personal home archive, she (we will use this pronoun) stumbled upon public repacks released on pirate sites. These were much smaller than the ones she had made and that’s when things got started."

https://archive.ph/FSHP6

IIRC people within the cracking community also hated EMPRESS for having some interview with WIRED which caused most of them to freak out over the scene getting widespread attention and authorities catching them. That and she got into some autistic slapfight with Fitgirl over a torrent that EMPRESS purposefully made it so that the seedbox would give everyone else including repackers 200 KB/s because of trust issues with repackers.

That's interesting that Empress did the interview since (IIRC) this earlier interview with FitGirl was one of the reasons Empress blamed FitGirl for the alleged arrest.

Here is another article from TorrentFreak (archive) regarding the tranny-hacker slapfight. One thing worth noting for the OP is it verifies Empress new Reddit handle u/InfinityGoddess

(IDK the context, definitely a female sounding quote from this Janny-Ravaged thread.)

 

[Zero0]

A certain Russian repacker who was known in the cracking scene died recently
View attachment 1978360

I believe this is the guy.

 

[IAmNotAlpharius]

that's true
you can't get very many donations from people who don't want to pay for software. voksi could've made a lot more working in cyber security

I was under the impression that’s how a lot of them got their start.

Its about ethics in pirated software.

Something something no honor among thieves.

 

[Aaa0aaa0]

Of course Fitgirl and EMPERESS are trans: what fucking women name themselves something that screams woman and spend a ludicrous amount of time cracking code for other sweaty basement dwellers? Who the fuck in the hacking scene do you people know as TRUE and HONEST women? I don't know if it's because woman programmers are more likely to have social skills and therefore get jobs or just have no interest in impressing people who won't pay money for your coding skills but I haven't seen any myself (then again I don't run in these circles). I'm sure they're out there, but autistic manifestos and petty drama like that is more troon territory. Women have different types of autistic manifestos and petty drama than this.

E: spelling.

 

[0x0000C1A]

Of course Fitgirl and EMPERESS are trans: what fucking women spend a ludicrous amount of time cracking code for sweaty basement dwellers?

ftfy

A woman screaming that she is, in fact, a woman is one of the most basic functions of a woman. The only difference is that women do that for attention, but with trans people - they shout that for self-validation.

Everything else onpoint tho. There are no TRUE and HONEST women even in the vicinity of a disassembler.

 

[mensch]

Have never understood why people donate to these spergs. I mean yes I can understand that there was some work that went into the cracking by a person with a level of programming expertise I can only dream of. There is a certain artistry to it. But the whole damn point of piracy is to save your shekels so that you can put it towards something better in life than vidya, like saving for a home for your family or snorting blow out a stripper's ass crack. You might as well just play the pirated version now and if you really enjoy it, wait until it's 90% off in a Steam sale down the line.

 

[Shaka Brah]

Have never understood why people donate to these spergs. I mean yes I can understand that there was some work that went into the cracking by a person with a level of programming expertise I can only dream of. There is a certain artistry to it. But the whole damn point of piracy is to save your shekels so that you can put it towards something better in life than vidya, like saving for a home for your family or snorting blow out a stripper's ass crack. You might as well just play the pirated version now and if you really enjoy it, wait until it's 90% off in a Steam sale down the line.

Kinda makes me wonder if they pretend to be women to get simp bux.

 

[awoo]

Have never understood why people donate to these spergs. I mean yes I can understand that there was some work that went into the cracking by a person with a level of programming expertise I can only dream of. There is a certain artistry to it. But the whole damn point of piracy is to save your shekels so that you can put it towards something better in life than vidya, like saving for a home for your family or snorting blow out a stripper's ass crack. You might as well just play the pirated version now and if you really enjoy it, wait until it's 90% off in a Steam sale down the line.

It's not about the money
It's about sending a message