Piracy is getting worse...

[mavis]

Originally Posted by Adams Immersive

(Not to mention, I don’t care what scores pirates are getting—give me a ranking against REAL players.)

What does that mean, exactly? People who pirate games aren't "real" players? In what way are they fake?

[c0re]

Originally Posted by mavis

What does that mean, exactly? People who pirate games aren't "real" players? In what way are they fake?

In some way, pirates can so easily have any games, they so much don't have this "deservation" feeling that a regular can have by giving his money, that they have more chances to not really care about scoring, or giving high performance over time.

Basically, they want to play the game for an average amount of time, and then go on the next one.

So they will much less imply themselves in a unique game over time.

[EssentialParadox]

Another reason they shouldn't get listed alongside genuine players is because it's possible for the illegal copies to have 'cheating' modifications, artificially making their score higher.

[micah]

Jailbreaking an iPhone is not illegal. It breaks apple's terms of service. There's a huge difference between breaking a TOS and breaking the law. That's like saying it's illegal to make a gmail account with a fake name. Google might not approve, but it's in absolutely no way illegal.

Quoting the EFF about this exact topic:

If this sounds like FUD, that's because it is. One need only transpose Apple's arguments to the world of automobiles to recognize their absurdity. Sure, GM might tell us that, for our own safety, all servicing should be done by an authorized GM dealer using only genuine GM parts. Toyota might say that swapping your engine could reduce the reliability of your car. And Mazda could say that those who throw a supercharger on their Miatas frequently exceed the legal speed limit.

But we'd never accept this corporate paternalism as a justification for welding every car hood shut and imposing legal liability on car buffs tinkering in their garages. After all, the culture of tinkering (or hacking, if you prefer) is an important part of our innovation economy.

If you bought an iPhone, you own it. You can do whatever you want with it. It's illegal to pirate software, but it's not illegal to modify software you already bought (e.g. iPhone OS).

And all this talk about Apple tracking jailbroken UDIDs would just get the jailbreakers to write UDID spoofing software. It's just an arms race that can't be won, and all you can do is be obnoxious to legitimate users to prove that they're legitimate (e.g. Windows Genuine Advantage, anyone?). And everyone knows that since Windows Genuine Advantage came out, no one pirates Windows anymore, right?

As a developer, I know that a lot of people will pirate my games (probably especially my new game that's coming out, teh internets, since I'm planning on pricing it $1.99 and it has lolcats in it). And hopefully a lot of people will buy it, so I can make my living off of it. But I'm not going to waste my time with DRM or make users login to my server to play to prove that they're legit or anything. It's a losing battle, and against something that I honestly don't think is much of a threat. If there's lots of word-of-mouth that my game is fun (even amongst the pirates), I think that will likely improve my sales.