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I'm looking for a good tracker for console games. I have a flashed 360, ps2 with free mcboot installed, a flashcard for ds and a psp running CFW. I'm hoping to find a good private tracker for my games. Hopefully somthing with 0 day releases and ect. Hopefully open signup, currently the only private tracker I have invites on is demonoid so I doubt thats worth anything. Thanks everyone!
What you really look for is called blackcats-games. Check for more info on our tracker's reviews section.
In some days you will be able to access our request section, and if you're lucky someone there can hook you up with an invite.
Take this advice from me: Don't start trading. It will be the worst mistake you make as a "new torrenter". If you want my opinion, just request invites when you have the opportunity to. Hold off on your trading tendency until you understand what you're getting yourself into better (I'm not going to make this decision for you, whether you want to trade or not - as it's forbidden by trackers, but it comes down to personal decisions, however, I will try to help you stop making a mistake you may regret in the future).Quote:
Originally Posted by ShadowMan
Learn how the tracker world works, become a member at a few more trackers, understand their rules and then trade if you find it acceptable for yourself.
That's what I was getting at with my question in the hello thread...Quote:
Originally Posted by Darth Rings
That and BCG opens signups pretty often. Keep on checking.
Here you are
http://pwnnetwork.net/register.php
we are open.
Month Users
2011-03 304
2011-02 1173
2011-01 1787
2010-12 1982
2010-11 2996
if thats not open then i dont know what is lol
PS: we prune members all the time, just keep trying the signup page, and its going to be like this for at least another month (forever for me but we will have to see how its going after this month).
I thought all Canadians were honest and that's why we can get away not having guns.:unsure:Quote:
Originally Posted by Darth RingsTake this advice from me: Don't start trading.Quote:
Originally Posted by ShadowMan
Thanks everyone. I'm going to give pwn gaming a try and I've been trying black cats for a while, to tell the truth I kind of gave up. But thank you very much for the list. I have been wanting a membership for a really long time.
P.S. I forgot to mention I have a modded wii as well. lol
P.P.S Stoi what time of the day does the pruning take place? I might just hover the signup page around that time.
I think the pruning happens all the time. Keep checking and you'll get in.
Correct me if I'm wrong stoi
Put the effort in to try and get into BCG. IMO you won't regret it, its one of those trackers worth the time to get into.
BCG or bG
someone gets pruned every 30 minutes, that may be 1 person or 100 at a time its impossible to say. all i can suggest is to just keep trying.
2011-03 436 so 120 new members in 16 hours, but like i said it can vary greatly.
Quote:
Originally Posted by stoi
Thats good to know. :D What warrents pruning? I'm guessing inactive and poor ratio, any thing else I'm going to have to worry about?
Ah ha! Sweet I got an account. Thanks Stoi, I look forward to useing your tracker. :D Now to get some food.
I mentioned one point earlier, & again mentioning this point::Quote:
Originally Posted by stoi
members who get 'banned' will get chance to join again & repeting same mistake again & again. Kinda useless, and it eat up some places too.
yep thats the 1 drawback, the other is making dupe accounts just incase we close again, so they can sell/trade them, and they will cheat more easily now as well, get banned just re-sign up (even though there is no need to cheat on BCG)
but its either that or ppl getting bored and selling their accounts anyway (for a lot greater price) or selling invites/referrals, and the tracker getting boring and going stale. not the opening up makes it liven up that much.
its catch 22 for me really, invites/referrals no one used them, and the vast majority that did, couldnt give a toss about who they brought in, members still cheated when we were closed tight, so....
Really? I m sure that if some1 have resources and connection to get into Invite only tracker for once he can do it again after getting banned.Quote:
Originally Posted by bijoy
And btw stoi i fully appreciated ur view and hope that other tracker also staff also realize that..
Your point of thinking is right considering one case, trading.Quote:
Originally Posted by stoi
Opening site time to time decrease chance of account trading, but it do not stop them. For example, look at trading section. I'd seen 2-3 threads for bcg 'invite'. :P
And for cheating, there is no need to cheat there just because of seed point system, but some people do it, and nobody can stop them. (although they are very small bunch of people, so who cares? :huh: )
What I was pointing out: "Is there any improvement in average number of snatches (site activity) after bcg stopped invite system?"
If the answer is yes, then the present system is good. Otherwise it is useless.
But I don't see any improvement of number of donations (which is most imp to run a tracker). So, I wonder whether opening a site time to time by auto deleting accounts is good or not.
P.S. the best way to get new users is neither invite system nor open signup, but it is irc interview. For example, look at what's system. They have invite system in place but the main way to get in is irc interview. I think its worth trying for your site. :)
BCG's staff, obviously. :PQuote:
Originally Posted by bijoy
That's also very time-consuming.Quote:
P.S. the best way to get new users is neither invite system nor open signup, but it is irc interview.
We dont keep track of snatches like that, so no idea. but this hasnt changed much at all
Unique Peers 13,037
Peers 150,591
Seeders 148771
Downloaders 1820
but then we have lost 10,000 members (used to be 50,000 now its 40,000) since christmas so that may have something to do with it.
Problem with IRC interviews.
Time Consuming
Language barriers
we are a games tracker, what can we ask, we cant ask about Flac/V0 or how do you encode movies, a game release is the same realease 99% of the time (only the cracks may be buggered/different for PC games) so we are very limited on the questions we can ask.
and i want more than 3 new members in a day.
tbh we have (nearly) gone full circle.
Public tracker (no retention, hit and runs)
Private but open (dupe accounts, hit and running just to sign back up again)
Invites (trading/selling them, good members were too scared to use them, members that couldnt give a crap traded/sold them)
Shut completely for 2 years (Boring, account traders/sellers)
Referrals (see invites)
Private but open (lets wait and see this time)
and in all honesty, none of them has worked lol, there are problems with all of the above, nothing is perfect and nothing ever will be (btw when we were shut completely, we did get members in from IRC and here, still didnt work).
PS: our latest member # is 427,910 so if we never pruned an account, thats how many members we would have since dec 2006, but whats the point of having 380,000 members that would never use the account again? (and if they did decide to, the servers would probably have a heart attack and die a very fast death lol)
I think more people would use the referrals/invites if the punishment was a little less harsh for inviting a bad guy. Lets face it, most of us dont have many real life people we would care to invite, so that leaves random people on the internet that we barely know. Even if you think you know some one online, you really dont...
I'd use referrals more if the penality was something like docking upload amount instead of warning/banning me. Say I invite a cheater, ban the cheater, and take 10GB (random number here, just an example) off of my upload amount. It would make me seed more, which isn't a big deal, but would send a message to me without discouraging me from using another referal again once I was OK on my ratio again.
Cheater is banned, i'm encouraged to seed more to fix my ratio, win win for the tracker and community!
Putting my account at risk of banning is what keeps me from using invites on all my sites. Its just too harsh of a penality to risk IMO.
BTW, I'm not sure what penalities you had for referrals, i'm just using a general example, so if I'm off base here, sorry!
P.S. I much preferred BC being closed. I was much more comfortable downloading new big game releases then since i am in the USA. May have been a false sense of security, but since you have gone 'open' I only download older games from there now, which is a bummer to me...
Excellent point. Let me also add the flipside of the coin: Not only do you have to be careful about who you invite, but who you get invited by, too. What use is an account if the person who invites you isn't reliable, trustworthy, whatever, and gets banned for any kind of serious misconduct, resulting in your account being deleted, too? That's why I prefer to be invited by admins / staff or use open registrations.Quote:
Originally Posted by Tokeman
I can only applaud BCG / stoi for handling this issue the way they do. They've basically been there, done that, tried all approaches and settled with a solution that seems fair to all. Not perfect, of course, but working.
P.S.: About the interview questions, what about asking specific questions about game history, characters, series? Example: What's the name of the classic Nintendo Metroid series heroine?
Well, could use easier ones, but at least you'd only get people with serious interest in games. :)
well you just said what we did do the adding download (as download is a lot harder to get back up in ratio terms than upload), when we had the invites years ago, we did say we would ban both, but it was more of a deterant that anything (dont think we banned many inviters if any at all) but for some reason when we opened up referrals ppl still remembered it, and it was to harsh punishments, but we only banned on very extreme cases (most of your referrals were cheaters). but the vast majority it was download added to your ratio.
as for being open is less secure, i dont buy that at all tbh, referrals were traded/sold (on all trackers) who is to say who you dont want in, gets in that way, and you are ruining it for 1000`s of members that do want in, just to stop 1 or 2 you dont (if its for security reasons). But in 7 years of running a tracker, i have never heard of anyone getting an email saying they downloaded something from BCG, thats not to say that its never happened, or it wont happen in the future, but I have never heard of it.
The interview thing, that means you have played the games and liked it, I havnt played metroid prime since the 1st one, and i wouldnt be able to answer that, but any ? can be circumvented by a simple google search ( 2 seconds and its samus aran) so do i get an account lol
Real time chat! 2 seconds? No account for you!
Didn't realize you did the download addition thing already, here I thought I was original!
As far as security, I said it may be just an illusion, but I like my illusions :)
Makes me feel all safe when I think its harder to get in somewhere, since totally open trackers DO in fact get letters sent every which way, and I have many friends that can back that fact up. So by that logic, its only a matter of time for BCG since it is basically open at this point. Maybe I'm wrong, and I hope I am! AFAIK no private trackers have letters sent, with the exception of the huge userbase ones like torrentleech where another friend of mine got a letter for downloading.
Either way, your tracker still rocks, and is the best for games hands down, old or new. Keep up the good work stoi!
but then you have the language barrier. and the fact the staff member has to take time doing the interview, and then making the account, and last time we done tht, staff were gettings lots of IRC PMs all the time, it was annoying, so we scrapped it, now if you are in the waitingroom, if you chat a bit we may very well come to you (well not now but when we were closed)Quote:
Originally Posted by shipwreck
Just kidding. Was just a suggestion for a time when you're bored and want to try interviews. Not really feasible and very time consuming indeed, although I really like how what are doing it. I prefered doing the interview there instead of getting invited by someone for the reasons stated earlier.
In that case, just some account 'proof' from other tracker will do the work. :yup:Quote:
Originally Posted by stoi
well saying as though i am not a member of any other tracker, its pretty hard to verify any "proof".
and i really dont see the point of that anyway, high ratio could be a cheat or a prick with a seedbox, i would rather have noobs from isohunt tbh.
your other staffs (admins & mods are). they will do the job. :PQuote:
Originally Posted by stoi
sadly, you acn't say all those 427,910 accounts are from unique members.Quote:
Originally Posted by stoi
Say, 427,910/4 = 106,975 uniques, sounds too good for a gaming tracker. May be less. So, what are those? Some members creating multiple accounts. (count total number of accounts 1 less, as my present account is 2nd there ;) ) And this practice increased largely between 2008-2010 may, when open reg was completely closed.
Another point to consider, many peoples are there like this: 'I want to see the what is actually Black-cats Games!! So, I should become a member there.' As long as good & active members keep coming back to any tracker, is good for that tracker, neither me, nor anyone can oppose that.
How many times, accounts with hit & run are purned? and that particular member came back to the site by marely creating a new email ID, and with a new nick. Users with dynamic IPs have an addedunfairadvantage with that. They again hit & run in some torrents, just leeching them, doing nothing to the site other than snatching (& obv total seed-time=0 ).
As, you are saying that bcg came through all posible states (I know all of them except for the public tracker part :P ), you know that no precess is best for any site to gain best members. But to prevent that one other way (the last way) is there. i.e. hdbits :)
Its better to have 20,000 parmanent active unique members rather than having 45,000 members among with at least 5,000 tend to come back again & again when site opens for signup.
But exclusivity, let alone elitism, isn't the original purpose of torrent trackers. The first private trackers like Torrentbits and Elitetorrents were great places, but their purpose was not to create an 'exclusive' club that is completely shut off. Filesharing and elitism are contradictory anyway. If status is what you're after, the 'traditional' scene is a much better choice. Traditional sceners look down upon filesharers of any kind, no matter how 'exclusive' those trackers are. It's all relative: 20,000 members don't seem a lot for a tracker, but how does that compare to the 200-300 users on a scene FTP topsite / release headquarter?
So if e-penis is what drives you, you better try joining the 'real' scene.
So you're saying BCG should be as shut down as HDBits.Quote:
Originally Posted by bijoy
Yes, that will not make invite/account selling skyrocket.
Quote:
Originally Posted by stoi
Too much talking, not enough fixin' the site
Quote:
[2013] dbconn: mysql_connect: Lost connection to MySQL server during query
The whole site is dowm. I'm pretty sure someone has noticed that by now, and that they're working to restore functionality.Quote:
Originally Posted by EyeCandy
Also, stoi wrote that post before BCG went down, I think.
some active and so called good members make a successful torrent tracker. If there are already enough good members, then very small amount of traders do not count towards site's main goal, which is sharing.Quote:
Originally Posted by anon-sbi
FIXEDQuote:
Originally Posted by bijoy
By any sense i can say that half of member of ANY tracker weather closed or invite only are traders or sellers.
Half of the members on any (private) tracker are traders and sellers? There are private trackers out there with 200,000 members. Most of those users couldn't care less about trading and selling, it's probably the only tracker they have for many of them. All they do care about is leeching the content. Most of them are honest and stick to the rules as they want to keep their accounts. But that's about it. A tiny minority is actually interested in bittorrent as a 'hobby', let alone e-penis enlargement. For most, it's a way to get stuff, nothing more, nothing less.
Traders and sellers are an annoyance for siteops, but in no way such a dramatic problem as you describe. It's actually the smaller, more exclusive trackers that are targeted by them foremost, naturally that is.
That's, simply put, an exaggeration...Quote:
Originally Posted by Cut-Copy-Paste
I'm starting to like you.Quote:
Originally Posted by shipwreck
That's awesome, I like to be liked! I like you, too. I like most people, bar a few cretins that deserve to be vivisected, roasted and eaten by disease infested rats, but those are few and far between.