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.

  • Yglorba@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    51·
    8 hours ago

    Honestly I disagree with the need for bittorrent and a VPN when downloading games, for several reasons:

    1. 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.

    2. 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.)

    3. 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.)