*latest rant*
Well, I see I was misunderstood a tad bit. I don't care in the slightest what you think of my actions. I'm not justifying anything I do, simply stating I'm perfectly fine with doing it. Reviewers can be bought, demos are not always commonplace, and sometimes I just want to give a game a try that I have no intention of ever buying. I run the gamut of reasons, "right" and "wrong". You can see going against their release wishes as disrespectful; that is a decent point, but I see it as no more disrespectful than them pushing back the release date for marketing purposes. And I don't really care either way, which is the opinion you seem to respect. If I bought a Mercedes from a dealer and got it home only to see a news release from the company saying they didn't mean for anyone to have it for five more days... I'm driving that Mercedes.
You can spend/throw away your money however you like, more power to you, but the self-righteous tilt just makes you look silly.
It may be a marketing decision, but it also means the game is releasing as 1.03. The leaked version is the shitty, pre-release version, with a pretty big bug (that has been fixed).
You may consider that a shitty, pre-release version, but I consider it veritable gold. I've been playing Paradox games for many years, some have had release-day patches, others not. This is like the immaculate conception compared to a majority of their releases.
And if you do insist on doing so, I proclaim that you hereby must call it "looting Byzantinum" rather than "pirating".
Yeah, was never the intent. I think it mostly started with people joking about how Chattox is staring longingly at a disc. Then someone decided to kick it up a notch.
Edit: And to have an actual gameplay slant to this post... has anyone seen an option for an adult character to convert religions? I've read there is an event chain if your liege is of a differing faith, and of course the option to force your vassals to convert. Anything like a "Bam, unleavened bread ftw!" decision, though?