I saw this tweet a while ago that was like "Piracy lore is crazy, there's only like 2 people who know how to crack Denuvo. One of them is a psychotic transphobe who speaks like a JRPG villain, and the other only cracks football games"
I'm paraphrasing, but honestly it's so accurate...
Edit: For anyone confused, here is a great writeup on the history of Denuvo cracking, and Empresses lunacy
I miss mostly anonymous people cracking games without running around screaming from the rafters about gremlins in their modems stealing their breakfast bars. I can't believe most if not all Denuvo releases are now only cracked by this person.
Empress is a neurotic narcissist who needs to be NUKED at every release and HARD MUTED, IGNORED, AND DEPLATFORMED by every sociopathic rant she makes.
We should not be giving her attention by talking about her; she needs to be SHUNNED into OBSCURITY. Let her fucking philosophize in her own damn isolation. Her behavior is unacceptable by most social standards and her contributions to society are not so significant we can't do without them.
I may or may not have done some cracking since the early 90s.
Back then three things were true for me to start that hobby:
Had a computer and lots of free time.
Had 0 money but friends that would lend me a game for a week or two.
Had access to burnable media.
This was mostly me trying to keep playing games after giving the disk (or disks) back.
However, once I might have cracked GTA (the original), the rush of finally understanding how a debugger worked and figuring it out, made actually playing less apealing than the whole figuring it out.
It made me rent games then just try figuring out how to crack them, but that was financially killing me as again I had nothing to begin with and I was now at minus some.
Granted that none of the early protections were anything similar to Denuvo.
In most cases, it was just a case of blocking a cd check here and there. Some had hilarious protections where the game would screw the player if detected: RA2 would be probably the most famous I remember. Often than not it made me paranoid if I had triped a trap and the game was being unfair or bugged.
Somehow I kept going until I shifted towards the Hackintosh scene.
Then when the first humble bundle appeared and people pirated it, it disgusted me to no avail and finally left this part of my life.
This reminds me of the conflict between Graphene OS's Dev and Louis Rossmann, and now Rossmann had to uninstall Graphene OS because he fears of the Dev injecting malware.
Edit: Video link, same one as the one in the replies below:
As crazy as that makes Empress sound, I'm definitely willing to look past this kinda stuff because it's best not to bite the hand that might feed you.
Also, we definitely need more crackers (especially of the d€nuvo kind) to step up and train the next generation of crackers instead of just ranting online about their torrents being removed from popular sites.
With CPY and Codex gone the PC cracking scene is dead and gone as far as AAA games are concerned. Denuvo is too difficult and time consuming to crack. The scene lost.
I don't mind the rants, it's fun if you take it as it is: Part of the Spectacle. I don't believe empress is a single person with schizophrenia, most likely a group of people with a specific sense of humor
Pretty sad that this bitch is getting paid to crack things. I don't know what's stopping a band of people to just hack her shit up and take what's been helping to crack denuvo so it isn't bottlenecked by unchecked individuals such as she.
OMG, its like being at the point in your RPG game where you are tasked to retrieve the DRM-free game, but you know the price from the crazed troll is going to be your rogue's head and all your gear, else more violence.