FBI & NCsoft Join Forces: Declare War On Piracy, Start Hunting Jack Sparrow
Well, not everyone loves pirates. Sorry, Mr. Depp; I still think you’re sexy.
NCsoft released a press release yesterday explaining how they joined forces with the FBI in order to shut down a fraudulent private server that had cost the MMO game publisher almost a million dollars in pirated bandwidth alone. The server, L2Extreme.com, had over 50,000 registered users and was providing gamers with pirated versions of Lineage II; the pirated copies were actually provided through NCsoft’s own bandwidth.
According to Ars Technica
The real kick in the teeth was the fact that L2Extreme had garnered so many users. According to MMORPG Charts, Lineage II reached a maximum of 2 million subscribers in early 2005, but has since slipped to about 1.3 million. Most of that decline has been due to the continued growth of World of Warcraft internationally, but 50,000 subscribers running on a pirated server was a nontrivial impact as well.I maintain that piracy is a huge problem plaguing the gaming world, mainly because developers are often forced (usually by their publishers holding a gun to their heads) to use problematic/damaging security protocols like StarForce, which means that the rest of the gaming community gets hurt by these measures. What surprises the hell out of me is that Lineage II is still around to be pirated. Man, did I hate that game.
Boy of Tomorrow
Posted to Video Games on 21 November 2006
Other stuff like this: fbi, game piracy, jack sparrow, l2extreme, lineage II, mmorpg, ncsoft, starforce
