Bethesda: "50% of tech support inquiries are from those with pirated copies." - by EvaUnit02
addink on 25/10/2008 at 12:15
Quote Posted by dethtoll
Sorry, but simply disagreeing does not make it so.
Simply quoting a part of the response, does not reduce the original response to simply disagreeing.
Reading you original post again, I see that you did not oppose the original article. Somehow I got that impression. Stating that they claimed that pirated version cause issues in the article, which they didn't, didn't help.
So my analogy was indeed superfluous, but not 'fataly flawed' as you put it.
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Indeed you are right that if there is no serial number or other option to identify individual licenses, then the support will have a hard time proving callers to be a pirate.
I however don't see the serial codes to be in decline. The heavier DRM even requires some kind of unique id attached to the license. Otherwise limited installs just wouldn't work.
Also do note that a printed serial number is not the only form of a unique license id. Direct to drive purchases, like Steam, are attached to a unique personal account which serves a similar purpose.
Anyway divulging a unique license id over the phone/email isn't as unreasonable/unlikely as you claim it to be:
If present, a serial number is the key ingredient of what you have bought. The disk is useless without it. Keeping it to yourself is indeed advised.
However, the publisher/developer already knows your key. They don't necessarily know it's your personal key, but they do know what keys are out there. So divulging your key to the support isn't really divulging it to the rest of the world. Actively calling support isn't a form of phishing.
AFAIK most support even have access to spare keys, especially with games with limited installs.
A support asking if you have a key, might already identify pirates. Asking what the key is, should identify a lot of the remainder.
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But indeed if there's no unique id, support can't prove a thing. Still, don't overestimate the intelligence of a pirate asking for support.
Indeed they could have downloaded the manual and all sorts of additional files. But if they are smart enough to do that, than I doubt that they are confident enough to call support for help. In fact, if they are smart enough to do that then they probably don't need to call support at all, as they'll put their trust on Google first.
Also I wouldn't be surprised if developers/publishers keep a keen eye on pirated versions on bittorrent and try to find distinguishable files and/or features on those versions. If they wanted to they could use that information to identify pirates.
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TL;DR: indeed, it is unclear how they identify pirates in the absence of some sort of license id. But coming up with methods to get some indication if a version is pirated, is not that hard.
Briareos H on 25/10/2008 at 12:44
Oblivion and Morrowind have neither a CD key nor an unique serial ID so :confused:
fetgalningen on 25/10/2008 at 23:16
Quote Posted by jtr7
Maybe tech support asks for information that exposes the piracy.
That seems logical, they wouldn't make a comment like that based on nothing?
Gryzemuis on 26/10/2008 at 02:40
Quote Posted by dethtoll
Unless he specifically says it's a pirated copy, who would know? It's not limited to just pirated copies,
so yelling at him to buy the game solves nothing.Buying the game does solve something.
The price of a game does not just include the physical medium.
It does not just include the cost of developing the software and game.
It *also* includes the cost of potential customer support.
When more games are sold, there is more money for customer support. Developers can put out patches quicker. Heck, with more money coming in, there is more budget for in-house testing.
The point here is: pirating games does not only cause a loss for the developer in missed income. It also causes a loss where they have to assign more budget for customer support.
Piracy is just wrong. Always. I can't believe how anyone can argue against anything that is anti-piracy. There are no reasons to steal intellectual property. There is no justification. There is no justifcation for attacking companies for protecting their property. If you don't like their anti-piracy measures, just don't buy their products.
Now you second question: how does a customer support guy figure out his customer has pirated the game ? I don't know. And if I was a developer, I would not bring out details. That's only helping the pirates.
(That being said, I do believe that companies always exaggerate. But even if 25% of their calls are from pirates, in stead of 50%, it is still ridiculously high).
I'll give you an example how developers can figure out stuff.
I used to work for a company that made network equipment. In their TCP implementation, they had a little feature that nobody knew about. If you would send a TCP Open message to one of their routers, to TCP port 69, the router would send back a RST segment. Just like the RFCs specify. But what very few people knew, is that the router would add 5 bytes at the end of the RST segment. Those extra bytes would be ignored by all TCP implementation, as the RST segment would cause a reset anyway. But the 5 extra bytes would hold the letters "cisco". That way, by just trying to open a TCP connection to port 69 of any device on the Internet, you could actually see if that devices was one of their products.
Very few people knew this. I didn't know when I was working in customer support. People only told me when I moved to the development department. When a large customer (UUnet) found out, they were asked to remove this feature from the code. That was somewhere around 1999. If you wanna verify this, just find a router with very old software (ios 10.2 or older) and send a TCP open to it. A sniffer or tcpdump would capture it.
This is just an example of how companies (or people inside companies) have little tricks to work with their products. A trick like the above won't work easily nowadays, because of NAT and firewalls everywhere. But there might be other tricks you can do.
gunsmoke on 26/10/2008 at 03:43
I had issues w/FarCry back in 2004 or 2005 w/the error message "Your CD-key is invalid or already in use". I had to read my legal # off to 3 or 4 different representatives in a couple different departments and STILL never got it resolved.
I ended up finding a way to fix it (as it was common to most all of UBISOFT games of the day like Rainbow Six 3) on the gamefaqs forums.
Point being, there are certainly cases where legit companies need your #.
redrain85 on 26/10/2008 at 22:34
I read this news a while back. There's a very simple solution to the problem. As has already more-or-less been suggested, here in this thread: make people register in order to get technical support. Ask them for a serial number from their copy of the game, at the least. Or even better, make them sign up for an account on the company's web site.
Yeah, it will be slightly annoying for legitimate customers. But it would solve this problem immediately.
Zygoptera on 26/10/2008 at 23:02
That's what Paradox does for its titles- if you're registered at their forums with the game you get extra forums including the tech support one, otherwise you only get the standard forum (and all requests for tech help there are locked).
Somewhat amusing to occasionally see someone at their forums complaining about registering their game being an invasion of privacy when they've already given more information out when registering...
van HellSing on 27/10/2008 at 12:59
So even if this statistic is true, what does it say?
Pirated and original games are equally buggy?
Pirates are stupid?
Just what are they trying to prove?
Phatose on 27/10/2008 at 13:34
They're trying to show that a pirated copy, rather than being a non-sale which neither loses nor makes the company money, actually costs the company money, thus totally discrediting the oh-so-common 'they wouldn't have bought it anyway' piracy excuse.
Myagi on 27/10/2008 at 14:33
Aside from the questionable fact that they know who had a legit copy or not. Wonder how many of the "pirates" calling were paying customers that used a no-cd crack. Still dumb to call support if you used that, but at least you bought the game.
Also wonder if tech support keeps some kind of stats of how many customers they successfully helped, and if so, might they be inclined to mark an unsuccessful call as a pirated copy ;)
