If I really couldn’t find something and I was really that desperate, I’d just try to buy it somewhere. Assuming it’s also difficult to buy, I’d be looking at online marketplaces and op shops. If pirates are going to keep hiding behind the “piracy is a service problem” line then at some point they do need to admit that paying for the product is actually the more sensible and straightforward option if they have reached a deadend elsewhere.
The majority of their servers support port forwarding. “Only available on paid tiers” is a completely meaningless crticism, because a) you wouldn’t use a free VPN for torrenting unless you were an absolute moron and b) very few VPNs support torrenting in the first place because it requires so many resources. If you want a good VPN with port forwarding, you need to pay for it. Nothing about this makes Proton VPN “fishy”.
As the other person said, the owners of PIA also own several other VPNs and their history prior to this was pretty bad. One of the biggest selling points for PIA, the “no logging tested in court” claim, also occured before these new owners took over so it’s questionable whether that is as believable today. A big part of trust in privacy-related software comes from financial incentives and motivations driven by the business model, and the parent company does not have a good track record in terms of prioritising security and privacy above financial gain.
I believe Private Internet Access also offers this feature if people need a cheaper alternative, although it comes with tradeoffs regarding trust and ethics.
Yes, Proton VPN is a better option if you require that feature.
It’s actually not a very comms heavy game now. Like some players definitely enjoy their milsim call-outs and coordinating more closely with their squad, but a lot of players like myself are just totally silent. It was added to Xbox Game Pass last year, and that has introduced a ton of more casual players.
I’m not sure if you meant literally no free time to play video games, or just not willing to make time for a perceived steep learning curve, but if it’s the latter then maybe you could reconsider. The basics can be learnt very quickly via YouTube and it’s possible to have quite a bit of fun casually playing an hour here or there as the Rifleman class simply treating it like a milsim Battlefield without ever diving into the deeper mechanics.
What is a widely-known fact? From the “uH yEaH” you sound like you’re trying to argue with me but I’m not really sure what your point is. I never said piracy can’t be a service issue, what I said is that people who trot this line out literally every single time to defend their pirating should follow through when piracy becomes more convoluted and time consuming than the legal alternative. Many don’t, the line has become a convenient catch-all cop out that people hide behind so they can pretend acquiring everything for free makes them some kind of morally superior consumer activist. I wasn’t having a go at OP specifically, but the logical conclusion when you get to their point should be to give up and pay or rent through a library or something.