I had a true life story that related to the quote I replied to.

Out of context yo.

You really gotta stop with the ad-hominem attacks based in psychology. I'm still not convinced you know what logic and reasoning are anyway. You throw those words around, but I doubt you've ever picked up a logic textbook. Oh and here's the stats to back it up by the way. I was just about to post them. 

This is an exerpt from a post on another "emulation" thread. 

The majority of respondents to the poll were from developed countries such as U.S, U.K., Germany, Australia, etc. You can see this here. 

It's hard to tell from the pie chart, but if you add up all the developed countries together I'm pretty sure we'd wind up with over 75% of the respondents being from developed countries. Your (Zero's) theory that most of the pirates are from developing or underprivilidged countries doesn't reflect the data. 

If respondents  from your (Zero's) listed countries were weighting the average we would see a much lower rate of piracy than 35% in developed countries. But as we can see below we don't see that. The U.S., U.K., and Canada still sit around the 30% mark for piracy. Countries such as France, Spain, and Italy sit at 40% to 50% piracy rates. Also, do you see those little numbers at the top of the bars? Those are the number of respondents per country. With a little math it's not hard to get a fairly accurate number of the percentage of respondents per country. Expect an edit of this thread in the next day or so showing the results of that math.

Edit: I did the math. 39,506 or 79% of the respondents were from the developed world. 6,795 or 13.5% were from developing countries. That leaves a little under 7% of the respondents being from countries with fewer than 250 responders. 2134 or 4% were from the countries you (Zero) listed with high piracy rates. So, again your (Zero's) theory that countries with high piracy rates are skewing the results, doesn't reflect the data shown. 

This was information was taken from a PCgamer article, where 50,000 pcgamers from around the world were polled on why they pirate, and whether or not they pay for their games. Around 43% of the respondents stated that they never or rarely pay for their pirated games. Keep in mind this is on PC where somebody can pirate a game, wait for a steam sale, and buy the game at a massively discounted rate, all while technically being able to check the "I paid for my pirated game" box. But there's no steam sale of either BotW or Persona 5, so they can't do that sort of thing. This drives piracy rates for these games up significantly. Also, keep in mind that if you pirate a $60 game on release day, and then pay $10-$15 years later, you are still a theif, because you didn't pay what was asked of you at the time. So here we have a poll which asks incredibly softball questions, giving people every out imaginable, and we still get around 43% of pirates admitting to not paying for their games. 

So my argument is as follows.

1. The majority of people who pirate, (or torrent game files) on PC don't pay for their games, or if they do they don't pay the initial asking price, opting to wait for a massively discounted steam sale.

2. There are no steam sales for Persona 5 or BotW, so the second part of the or statement from premise 1 does not apply for those games. 

3. Therefore the majority of people who torrent Persona 5 on PC for the purposes of emulation do not pay for their copy. 

I'd put the other argument out there, but I think it's pretty obvious. I shouldn't have to put everything into propositional logic but oh well. 

Well, it's very fun playing Thief: The Dark Project, so I can understand why people would want to try to replicate that

Emulation doesn't mean you are going to be running any commercial software.
It is literally just replicating the hardware environment in software on a different platform, thus it cannot be tied piracy.

It's like someone buying a car, the car manufacturer cannot be blamed for someone going over the speed limit, they built and provided the vehicle, the onus is on the end user to trend the legal line.

So you should. Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Atari, Sega, Apple, Google and more all use emulation to suit their own ends.
Even companies like GoG use emulation to repackage older games and resell them to consumers.

Nah, I don't suspect you of anything man. I've known you were a multi-platform user for years now. It's obvious from your posts. 

As far as legally providing the emulation ROMS, I actually do that. I ripped my Wii games off my discs, and I ripped a lot of GBA games.

By the way, Idk if this is the best place to discuss this, but is anybody aware of a good alternative to the GBA SP for playing GBA games? It's really hard to track down the AGS 101, so I was thinking of basically making my own little emulation device via a Raspberry Pi Zero or something, but I can't find a good resolution display.

And buying lockpicking tools doesn't mean you're going to go breaking into people's houses, but they are still illegal in the U.S. to own unless you are a locksmith. In fact I'm pretty sure it's a felony. 

But anyway, I completely 100% agree that emulation has it's uses, and is legal most of the time. If Zero hadn't mentioned BotW or Persona 5 in the topics of all his emulation threads in a sad attempt to get more people to view them, I wouldn't have a problem. You want to emulate games that are on a defunct console, and aren't available in stores for a modern system? Knock yourself out! Hell, I even emulate games that I can't get stateside with repro carts. Before I jumped into this topic I was playing a repro version of Terranigma (excellent game btw!) on my SNES. 

 My stance on whether or not you should pirate a game is practically identical to these guys' stance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfZv_lPwBFI

Oh boy ... 

This is the problem with the internet. Ever since people started pointing out bad arguments by saying "fallacy!" or "ad hominem!" now all they focus on is repeating those words to discredit a reply. Hey, Cerebralbore. I don't know if you know this, but pointing out your bias wasn't an attack on your character. I didn't call you names, I didn't say you were stupid, I didn't do any of that. It's not Ad Hominem. Take a chill pill. You know what is? 

" I'm still not convinced you know what logic and reasoning are anyway. You throw those words around, but I doubt you've ever picked up a logic textbook. "

Not only is this a personal attack(whether you want to admit it or not), but it sounds elitist as fuck, and given context it not only makes you sound like an ass - but it's terrificly ironic.

My entire problem with this idea that i'm actually the one at fault for our prior discussions, that I actually suck at argumentation and that my logic is flawed - is that you never brought that up, or properly criticized me, until I went to you and told you how bad you were at arguing. We argued four times prior to that fun little Wall exchange, and out of those you only brought up issue with my discussion once - and even then it was because you took "Ip of this generation" as "all games released from an ip of this gen", when it could clearly be interpreted as a new ip. 

Besides that one point, which I won't even concede because in context I think it was pretty obvious I meant new ip, - you've never pointed out a logical issue with any of my arguments. It always ended with me and another user correcting you, or you going "Oh dope! I didn't read your comment right" or "Oh wow .. I didn't know that was the case, interesting, I guess you might have a point!"

But all of the sudden, concidentally, when I talk to you personally on your wall post ... you bust the "it's actual your fault!" argument? Even though you've continued to fail basic reading comprehension and make terrible arguments, all the time? I'm just going to guess you felt attacked when I contacted you, and have wanted to stick with this narrative because you felt like I was an ass. Which I was. But that's not the point. 

The moment you start attacking me over stuff that isn't even about my replies in this thread, I no longer care about "ad hominem" this or that. You started it, I wasn't attacking your character by saying you were biased. Who even cares if you're biased towards Persona 5 and BOTW? They're great games, I just don't think that you can use them for a logical discussion about Emulation legitimacy. 

But hey, that's off topic! 

So I'm glad you did your research, although that's from someone elses reply correct? 

I will admit, I am slightly confused about the polls. 50k? Is that how many people were surveyed? That's a pretty small poll, although maybe in relation to most other research polls that's alot, I don't know. Are the bars reading a percentage out of how many were polled? Because if i'm reading it correct, it shows that in countries where a majority of sales occur like Canada or the U.S., there is already less piracy than say in Spain or Russia. Maybe i'm reading it wrong though. 

You did say "majority" yet this doesn't show a consistent majority. Also this is general piracy, right? What about emulation.

I will say this though ... it doesn't really address anything I said. I mean, I did ask for stats. So it's nice you gave them to me, whether or not they're reliable I'm too lazy to find out. But I'm asking why this means that discussion about Zelda or Persona 5 should be banned? You still haven't proven that every person on the emulation thread has illegally obtained their games. Prove that to me, will you? Because the problem you had is that you think these games were taken illegally or are current gen games proving tha they were illegally obtained. 

Also "Keep in mind this is on PC where somebody can pirate a game, wait for a steam sale, and buy the game at a massively discounted rate, all while technically being able to check the "I paid for my pirated game" box. But there's no steam sale of either BotW or Persona 5, so they can't do that sort of thing. "

This isn't the fault of the pirates. If a supplier isn't supplying you a game I think it's morally fine to pirate it. 

Now do I pirate? Nah. Do I emulate? Well to be honest I did download a PCSX2 emulator for Shadow of the Colossus, but I haven't used it and will delete it soon because I don't want to emulate. So no, I don't  emulate. I'm going to just buy the game on my PS4. So i'm not biased towards emulation. I just think that it's not necessarily wrong.

Emulators aren't illegal.

Piracy,noo matter how you look at it, this topic should be closed.