What is the deal with these shops?

[randy_w]

Sounds like you either missed my message (yet say others don't know how to read...) regarding the NFO from Killer_Frequency_READNFO_NSW-LiGHTFORCE, but you should also check out Super_Mega_Baseball_4_READNFO_NSW-SUXXORS and Witch_on_the_Holy_Night_READNFO_iNTERNAL_NSW-GANT before making any additional misinformed statements.

So one release group steals from another/shop? Wow such big news, I've never heard anything like this since I started using scene releases back in PSP days.
That doesn't make your claim "most scene releases are from tinfoil shop" stand. Try bring more of your "mountains of evidence" to prove your point.

trying to bring others down

Now you are the one "slinging shit". I just say people shouldn't rely on these public shops and stick to traditional methods, and I don't like how shop works. How's that "trying to bring others down"?

 

[TheDuck1234]

There seems to be a trend on gbatemp of users constantly "slinging shit" at community projects

I mean.. of course it's. This the only place where we can even talk about it without retaliation. The shops discord and reddit are ether closed or hard gatekeeped by mods.

 

[Deleted member 523475]

So one release group steals from another/shop?

Looking over just the span of a few days last month, I see 3 different release groups nuked for stealing from tinfoil shops. There are also several older instances. And you are free to check the pre times on all of the scene releases out there, and compare them to what time the files were released in one of the tinfoil shops, and also compare to what time the DDL websites upload them.

I just say people shouldn't rely on these public shops and stick to traditional methods, and I don't like how shop works. How's that "trying to bring others down"?

You've already admitted that you haven't followed any shops in years, and clearly have no idea how Pixel's shop operates. You've never used and have no idea what it is, yet you don't like "how it works" and think everyone should stay away from it? That's slinging bullshit. I'm slinging verifiable facts.

I mean.. of course it's. This the only place where we can even talk about it without retaliation.

Communities do not normally allow libel. You even have a mod here telling you that you're off-base and yet you trolls continue to just ignore all of the facts showing that you are wrong, and making statements about things that you have no idea about.

Anyway, have fun with your USB drive, maybe consider thanking the shops for a lot of the files you were grabbing from trackers/websites. Unless you'd rather just keep wishing that they would go away, and you'll be stuck waiting months for one of the few legit scene groups out there to upload a dump.

 

[randy_w]

I see 3 different release groups nuked for stealing from tinfoil shops.

Wow I've never seen any group stealing before or releases got nuke for that reason. That's such a huge finding, should I give you a Pulitzer award for it? Like all releases are made by that single group, and one single group caught uploading dumps from shop automatically means all other groups are doing the same thing. Slinging bullshit, right back at ya.

You've already admitted that you haven't followed any shops in years, and clearly have no idea how Pixel's shop operates. You've never used and have no idea what it is, yet you don't like "how it works" and think everyone should stay away from it?

I know how shop works,I'm inside many shops discord, including a handful got shutdown last year due to google cracking down on edu drive abuse, I know how "pro" works in T shop and the other T shop, I've seen enough drama in all those servers to stopped following them last October and go back to scene releases. Use those shops as you wish, till one day nintendo cracks their server down with a DMCA. So much for "preservation".

 

[Deleted member 523475]

one single group caught uploading dumps from shop automatically means all other groups are doing the same thing. Slinging bullshit, right back at ya.


I know how shop works,I'm inside many shops discord, including a handful got shutdown last year due to google cracking down on edu drive abuse, I know how "pro" works in T shop and the other T shop, I've seen enough drama in all those servers to stopped following them last October and go back to scene releases. Use those shops as you wish, till one day nintendo cracks their server down with a DMCA. So much for "preservation".

I posted three separate groups that got caught doing it within 3 days of each other, did you not see all of the images? And how am I slinging bullshit, are you disputing these claims? Qualify your statement, as I have done several times, and you have just made a "joke" about being proven wrong each time. You are in the Discords, take a look at the announce channels, and compare to when your scene "releases" are uploaded.

Well, you obviously don't know how Pixel's shop works, considering it just appeared at the end of last year. I'm actually not aware of any shops that shutdown in the past year, I think someone here said it happens every month but I have yet to see any evidence of that, I guess that was just more shit slinging from the bottom-feeding leeches and trolls that have nothing to contribute. Edu drive crackdown was announced in 2021 and enforced to grandfathered shools over a year ago. Yet both the T shops were working both fine for several years with no takedown issues...and you act like there is just one copy of each file, on one server. I'm sure all these scene groups will grab a copy of everything off the shops after a few months and upload as their own releases.

 

[Ethelbert]

Things that make me be against "shops":
1. them being against the good old ethos of open sharing
2. the insufferable nature of Discord mods and powerusers

If something I can't truly be without were only available at some "shop", I'd buy it myself, just to spite you "shop" admins and users.

 

[randy_w]

Qualify your statement, as I have done several times

Some group got caught uploading dumps from shop and some of their releases got nuked -> all scene release groups are stealing from shop, that's how you "qualify" your statement?

Many other groups got caught stealing before, don't act like it's a switch scene problem. And release time? That doesn't mean shit. One group releasing something faster than others doesn't mean other groups are stealing from them. A movie could be released by a dozen of groups, by your analogy, all other groups are stealing from the first release? Take that to those private tracker's IRC, can't wait to see what kind of response you'll get.

Proven wrong, tell me what I said about those groups are wrong? That scene groups dump their own releases? That we should use scene releases, not shops?

just more shit slinging from the bottom-feeding leeches and trolls that have nothing to contribute

I was in one of the shared drive last year and it belongs to a public high school. They were exploiting the edu drive, now they are exploiting Google Workspace, just checked one of those "stashes". If you don't know then keep your mouth shut, don't sling shit.

And if you are in their servers and read their announcements, they even admitted themselves:

There’s a expiration date on our storage, google has decided to crack down on everyone with our type of storage abuse. On **July 22nd** our storage will go into a read only mode. __XXX__ will not be updated from now on. __XXX__ will go on. hopefully the damage is not too severe. This also affects __XXX__ as well as __XXX__. we have a backup plan but it’s nothing like the storage we had before. I wanted to be transparent with you as I always have, and give you time to make your stash __backups__.

Edited to remove shop names

 

[mathew77]

1. them being against the good old ethos of open sharing
2. the insufferable nature of Discord mods and powerusers

Agreed, these pathetic 'shops' are the true cancer of our pirate Switch community. Practically closed for all but favs, non-open, non-free, toxic, with crazy psycho admins which bans for nothing in a blink of the eye, just a perfect example of full nonsense.

With all my heart I was (and will) make all my efforts to counteract their shitty monopoly of new Switch game dumps.

That's my considered opinion.

 

[ohman]

Agreed, these pathetic 'shops' are the true cancer of our pirate Switch community. Practically closed for all but favs, non-open, non-free, toxic, with crazy psycho admins which bans for nothing in a blink of the eye, just a perfect example of full nonsense.

With all my heart I was (and will) make all my efforts to counteract their shitty monopoly of new Switch game dumps.

That's my considered opinion.

They do not have a monopoly--they are just the only ones getting dumps out there for the community. Naturally they would have the files up on their own service first but files end up everywhere elsewhere in short time. Cancer is usually a negative term but fitting here what with the shops growing the content available for the community the most.

 

[Lumince]

Agreed, these pathetic 'shops' are the true cancer of our pirate Switch community. Practically closed for all but favs, non-open, non-free, toxic, with crazy psycho admins which bans for nothing in a blink of the eye, just a perfect example of full nonsense.

With all my heart I was (and will) make all my efforts to counteract their shitty monopoly of new Switch game dumps.

That's my considered opinion.

My main question is, what did you do to get banned? What amount of nothing did you do to get shunned from the dumping community?
You wanna know WHY they REALLY closed their doors? The shop owners wanted to keep the public part of the shops open for as long as they could, but they got sick and tired of people abusing the shops, reselling access to a shop that charged nothing, and grabbing the entire stash just to sell access to that data. They saw THOUSANDS of people just abusing it as much as possible for a profit. The other reason is entitled pricks like you that think you deserve to have access no matter how shitty you are. Go cry wolf to someone that cares about your "misfortune" and hatred.

 

[Deleted member 523475]

Some group got caught uploading dumps from shop and some of their releases got nuked -> all scene release groups are stealing from shop, that's how you "qualify" your statement?

Many other groups got caught stealing before, don't act like it's a switch scene problem. And release time? That doesn't mean shit. One group releasing something faster than others doesn't mean other groups are stealing from them. A movie could be released by a dozen of groups, by your analogy, all other groups are stealing from the first release? Take that to those private tracker's IRC, can't wait to see what kind of response you'll get.

Proven wrong, tell me what I said about those groups are wrong? That scene groups dump their own releases?

Wow, you really have trouble reading more than a few words, don't you? My very first reply to your posts was "And check out the Killer_Frequency_READNFO from your screenshot today. The real scene groups that dump cartridges with proof instead of just posting releases downloaded off tinfoil shops are taking a summer break..."

Obviously, there are a few real scene groups, like the ones that called out the many other groups getting caught stealing from tinfoil shops, and those three groups that got nuked last month had more releases combined than the three legit scene groups who called them out. That's why I said most and there's no reasonable way that you could have possibly interpreted my messages as all.

Each of your posts shows more and more that you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. You seem to be confusing different encoding groups posting their own variation of movies, and Switch Scene groups posting 1:1 identical copies of NSPs that are already available on web. Apples to Oranges, and the Switch SCENE has different rules. Read rule 3.4 and then tell me it's okay for these "scene" groups to post an NSP a year after a dump and titlekey for the game is already publicly available.

I'm not going to ask in any private tracker's IRC or forums, considering Scene groups do not use PTs and most groups either do not care enough to know about them, or consider them a joke, especially considering they have topsite access.

Regarding the PC Stashes, that's different from a Shop, and it sounds like you were in some other group's free education drive (which would have been nuked over a year ago, and probably went read-only and stopped getting new releases as early as 2020 or 2021). The T stash was always on a paid workspace account, which was advertised as unlimited storage at the time. And yeah, I guess you could call using 18 TB (or however big the stash is these days) as "exploiting" unlimited storage, since they now limit paid workspace accounts to 5 TB. So what's the alternative, were you going to upgrade your NAS storage and give us all access? Or can you try to focus about talking about one thing instead of grasping for a different community project to attack?

 

[TheDuck1234]

I see 3 different release groups nuked for stealing from tinfoil shops

Stealing, as in hotlinking to the a other shop and not hosting it themself, right ? because it's illegal piracy games we are talking about "stealing" here.

Anyway, have fun with your USB drive, maybe consider thanking the shops for a lot of the files you were grabbing from trackers/websites. Unless you'd rather just keep wishing that they would go away, and you'll be stuck waiting months for one of the few legit scene groups out there to upload a dump.

My problem with the shops is with the way the mods run it like they are robber baron and I don't think we should ignore this because of fast release of drumps they provide for us. I could always just buy the games, like we should, and support the devs that made them.

You even have a mod here telling you that you're off-base and yet you trolls continue to just ignore all of the facts showing that you are wrong

About what ? please do explain what facts i have ignored.
Because i think you are just refleting here and talking a big game since what i said hit to close to the truth.

 

[linuxares]

Stealing, as in hotlinking to the a other shop and not hosting it themself, right ? because it's illegal piracy games we are talking about "stealing" here.

The Scene got rules in place for taking for P2P sources. It's to keep it "clean" and "proper".

Also when I were in the scene back in the day. We had actually better PreDBs that didn't allow certain groups to Pre on. So the semi-public, "the lame ones" no one really cared about nukes on. Only the proper PreDB the nukes was something the topsites cared about.

So it was different back then, not sure if it changed now. I left kindergarten place ages ago.

 

[Deleted member 523475]

because it's illegal piracy games we are talking about "stealing" here.

Not sure why people keep bringing up "piracy", when the goal of these shops and projects is to preserve the eShop.

But, on the topic of the scene: read the NFOs I posted. Read the Switch Scene rules. There are a few concerns listed in those that would answer your questions.

Now my question for you would be: is it ok for people to download a copy of a game that is publicly available, whether through a free (public) shop like Pixel's, or one of the websites or trackers, and re-upload it to personally profit from it, without ever actually contributing anything towards the community or providing your own dumps?

 

[TheDuck1234]

The Scene got rules in place for taking for P2P sources. It's to keep it "clean" and "proper".

Also when I were in the scene back in the day. We had actually better PreDBs that didn't allow certain groups to Pre on. So the semi-public, "the lame ones" no one really cared about nukes on. Only the proper PreDB the nukes was something the topsites cared about.

So it was different back then, not sure if it changed now. I left kindergarten place ages ago.

ahhh, i see. thanks for the explanation

Post automatically merged: Jul 12, 2023

Not sure why people keep bringing up "piracy", when the goal of these shops and projects is to preserve the eShop.

I think nintendo lawyers would say otherwish, but I don't really care what we lable it, so let's go with that.

 

[Tomato123]

Not sure why people keep bringing up "piracy", when the goal of these shops and projects is to preserve the eShop.

But, on the topic of the scene: read the NFOs I posted. Read the Switch Scene rules. There are a few concerns listed in those that would answer your questions.

Now my question for you would be: is it ok for people to download a copy of a game that is publicly available, whether through a free (public) shop like Pixel's, or one of the websites or trackers, and re-upload it to personally profit from it, without ever actually contributing anything towards the community or providing your own dumps?

Stealing dumps and reuploading them has been seen as a taboo for a long time in public scene groups, so fair enough for shop owners getting angry about that.

But with the preservation stuff, of course it is important to preserve it. However, the vast majority of people don't see it as that and will just think 'free games'. I think the only way to get around that stigma would be to only offer files for download which are unobtainable otherwise. Though this also has the downside of a single point of failure for future files unlike having many people download the files (A bit like torrenting vs standard file hosts).

 

[randy_w]

The real scene groups that dump cartridges with proof instead of just posting releases downloaded off tinfoil shops are taking a summer break..."

And you really have trouble understanding a few words don't you?

One group taking a break -> all other legit groups are taking a break
Taking a break -> they'll be gone forever and we have to rely on shop releases

and Switch Scene groups posting 1:1 identical copies of NSPs that are already available on web

One/a few group(s) caught stealing -> all other groups are stealing
Some releases got nuked -> all other dumps are stolen and should be nuked

it's okay for these "scene" groups to post an NSP a year after a dump and titlekey for the game is already publicly available.

One group posts a game one year after the first dump -> all other groups are doing the same thing -> all scene releases are posted one year after they appear on shop

Switch Scene groups posting 1:1 identical copies of NSPs that are already available on web

Again? I'm tired with this shit.
Oh wait a second, shops are taking dump donations from users and release it as their own.
Oh wait a second, all those shops hosts the same 1:1 identical copies of NSPs that are already available on another shop.

Get your logics together. If you can't see the problems in your arguments, don't even bother replying back

which would have been nuked over a year ago, and probably went read-only and stopped getting new releases as early as 2020 or 2021

Wrong, they kept updating the drive till Ti shop went pro only last year, and Q shop, J shop closed due to the crackdown. Then the shared drive disappeared in my google drive. They kept using the edu drive till mid 2022.

And about the Google Workspace they are exploiting: $6 a month, you store 16TB of stuff and generate around 5PB of traffic per month (based on 2GB/s claimed by the mod), which would cost at least $100K/month if you use GCP:

And you think google should be ok with that? If you ever operated a website/VPS/GCP/AWS/Azure you should know storage is cheap, bandwidth is f**king expensive, even with CDN. I know a few friends using $6 Google Workspace instead of NAS and they are impacted by the upcoming changes. They may store more than 16TB but NOBODY generates 5PB of traffic per month, not even 5TB. That's why we can't have nice things, because of idiots like those shops owners.

And storing everything on google workspace? That's a brilliant way to "preserve" things and I wonder why nobody uses it before. Oh because one DMCA hit from nintendo or google bans them for abuse, it's all gone. That's the point I made since first post, shops are unreliable, use scene releases, use rom sites or torrents, set up your own shop, instead of relying on shops. Yet you keep yelling at me "sCEnE rEleASe stOLEn", you missed the whole point. Trust me, if you are not in the game nobody gives a flying f**k if a release is stolen or not.

 

[TheDuck1234]

Now my question for you would be: is it ok for people to download a copy of a game that is publicly available, whether through a free (public) shop like Pixel's, or one of the websites or trackers

Yes, that is the point of piracy, you can make a copy of anything.

and re-upload it to personally profit from it, without ever actually contributing anything towards the community

No, since it would go againt the free and public sharing of piracy.

or providing your own dumps?

that is irrelevant to me, people ether provide or they don't, im not going to pay them for it.

 

[that1pixl]

@UnderDev Thank you for all those arguments you are throwing against them, but they are clearly beyond help. They wont belive anything we tell them, because it wont fit into their view of "those bad evil shops"

Edit:
There is a german saying:

Diskutiere nicht mit dummen Menschen. Sie ziehen dich auf ihr Niveau herunter und schlagen dich dort mit ihrer Erfahrung.

Don't argue with stupid people. They pull you down to their level and beat you there with their experience.

 

[Deleted member 523475]

I'd buy it myself, just to spite you "shop" admins and users.

Practically closed for all but favs, non-open, non-free, toxic

I don't see why shop admins, and especially users, would care whether or not you use it. None of the shops accept any money, and they all have between tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands users (they must have a LOT of favorites!)

One thing I would say, there was one very toxic shop, in 2019-2020, but they are no longer relevant. The current shops have zero tolerance for slurs/harassment, which probably explains why the few people here complaining about being banned, got the boot. Fortunately, I've managed to stay in their Discords without spamming the n-word, so I guess I am one of their "favorite" 200,000 members.

I think nintendo lawyers would say otherwish, but I don't really care what we lable it, so let's go with that.

Lawyers care if they can make a criminal case against someone, that's why they've taken all the for-profit piracy websites to court over the past few years, and not any of the shops (there's been one running publicly for over four years now without having their domain seized or blocked).

No, since it would go againt the free and public sharing of piracy.

Scene groups don't publicly release anything, btw. But all of these fake scene groups, that are uploading NSPs from the web to get into topsites, are all doing it just for their personal gain, to be able to leech from the sites without actually contributing to the scene. And now why should any scene group dump games, when they can just grab an NSP off the web and gain topsite access much easier? Unlike these scene groups, that put their name on all of "their" release files and gain exclusive access, the shops gain nothing from their releases.

Oh wait a second, shops are taking dump donations from users and release it as their own. Get your logics together.
Wrong, they kept updating the drive till Ti shop went pro only last year, and Q shop, J shop closed due to the crackdown. Then the shared drive disappeared in my google drive. They kept using the edu drive till mid 2022.

Shops don't "release" anything as their own, that your original complaint about them!

Matter of fact I haven't seen one single release made public by the "missing dumps", and all switch dumps are released by scene groups:

My logic was: Most scene releases between several different groups, were nuked due to being stolen from tinfoil shops -> most scene releases were stolen from tinfoil shops. I am again not sure why you keep throwing "all" into my statements or acting like it was just one group and one release. Either way, YOU are the one who said "all". I only needed to find one dump not released by scene groups, and I found 3 different groups within 3 days that were not actually releasing any switch dumps, the shops uploaded all of those files for you to download. And at the end of it...you are now saying you don't even care, and it doesn't really matter. It should at least be a bit inconvenient for you when a p2p dump of a Switch game gets removed from your private trackers, and replaced with a scene dump of the exact same game, hurting your seed score or ratio.

Ti shop went pro-only over 2 years ago, so yeah, that would put it as they stopped updating it in 2020 or 2021. All edu drives, 100%, had to "disappear" in the first half of 2022 unless their IT department was going to pay Google a ton of money for storage.

You had to buy Workspace Enterprise to get "Unlimited" storage, which costs closer to $30/m, not $6. At this point, not sure if you are complaining about T's stash or Pixel's shop Definitely agree with you on the traffic usage, if Pixel is saying they use gigabytes per second...regardless of what CDN they use, they should really just shut down since they have zero revenue to even cover any operating costs. I am surprised that they have been able to provide that many downloads each second, for this long, for free. Shops should only let in the user's actually contributing dumps, like how scene topsites do, and everyone else can wait for someone in the shops to eventually upload a copy to a private tracker.

And storing everything on google workspace? That's a brilliant way to "preserve" things and I wonder why nobody uses it before.

The point of offering a google drive is so that others can mirror all of the releases to their NAS and make sure it is preserved. And that is what pretty much everyone uses: MarioCube, all your old edu stashes, everyone running their own Jellyfin/Plex drives off a cheap workspace (which use PBs of both storage and traffic--note that Google is cracking down on storage use, not traffic). All of these archive projects also have copies on their NAS and even dedicated servers, but it's bad for security to give a lot of people access to either of those. So yeah, it's a brilliant way to preserve things, by having a local copy, cloud-service copy, and private server copy.

I think the only way to get around that stigma would be to only offer files for download which are unobtainable otherwise. Though this also has the downside of a single point of failure for future files unlike having many people download the files (A bit like torrenting vs standard file hosts).

Pretty much everything that has been added to shops, was unobtainable otherwise. Sure, they could remove content from their library sometime later once a torrent tracker or site grabs a copy from the shop, but those sites are really bad to navigate, you have to click through several ad walls just to get a link to the free file host they use, and hope it's not a dead link or bad archive. Those sites have very poor quality control, and the free file hosts will constantly be losing any AAA titles due to DMCA, and any obscure titles would get purged from the file host due to inactivity (shame, since they have more than enough ad revenue to properly host files, but their only focus is on taking a profit). Torrents can run into the issue of low or no seeds, bad speeds, and copyright trolls sending notices to your ISP, so a lot of people tend to avoid that route or have to pay for a VPN (and most VPNs give pretty poor download speeds).

people ether provide or they don't, im not going to pay them for it.

The shops seem to be the main providers, and you couldn't pay them for it even if you wanted to. It would be nice if these scene groups or any other group could provide the community some new releases early, maybe @mathew77 can pick up a copy of Pikmin early and release it to the public before any shop gets it.