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.

  • Fedegenerate@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
    1·
    8 hours ago

    If nothing else, thank you for informing me about hide.me.

    My, personal, inability to intelligently compare VPNs is what’s holding me back from port forwarding.

    I’ve been trying to parse what I mean and failing:

    A VPN should be at least affordable for me, no point looking if I can’t afford it.

    It should be suitably secure, again no point looking if I don’t trust them to give/sell/surrender my data.

    It should be suitably fast, no point looking if it’s slower than dialup.

    And, it should have a minimum of features: port forwarding, easy to set up, etc.

    Where the minimums are is subjective but I think these are the things that each of us consider. Price, privacy, performance and feature set.

    Comparisons are either really good for “here’s the cheapest, here’s the most private and here’s the fastest” but neglect whether they’re P2P friendly or allow port forwarding. Or, the comparisons are really detailed on the feature set “max handshake encryption, max data encryption” but neglect how much I might pay.

    It’s a whole lot of research for something I know I don’t/won’t understand and with potentially huge consequences should I get wrong. So: “Here’s the most private” I’ll take that one please

    I’m currently on Mullvad, it topped a bunch of vpn comparison for ‘normals’ on security, and I have been content with them. But I’m ready to move up when my sub ends. Testimonials are just about all I’ve got.

    Edit: I suppose it’s ‘mid-level’ guides I think are missing. Beginners have their cheap/secure/fast articles. Advanced users can compare on “max handshake encryption” whatever that means. I need a “so you want to effectively and securely support the swarm, here are your options.”