(THIS IS A PCVR AND QUEST PIRACY GUIDE) submitted by imlife1102 to QuestPiracy [link] [comments] So you wanna sail the seven seas of virtual reality? Last Edited: 15/01/2021 ^ I think i've accomplished this mission now :] This guide shows you how to download and sideload pirated games on the Oculus Quest 1/Q2 as well as the best place to find pirated games for PCVR headsets or Quests connected through Oculus Link or any other wireless streaming solution. Just to reiterate and stress this, DO NOT PUBLICLY POST LINKS TO PIRACY DOWNLOADS. BY DOING THIS YOU ARE RISKING THE SUBREDDIT AND ENTIRE PIRACY MIRRORS TO BE DELETED. I'm thankfully able to circumvent these rules by not providing *direct* links to downloads, but just pointing people to where they can access these downloads by themselves :) I am not affiliated with any of the hosts of these links. Just someone in the community who knows the ins and outs trying to point noobies in the right direction and to (hopefully) slow down the subreddit becoming nothing but a cesspit of people asking the same question over and over. This also means don't come to me for help, I don't run any of this stuff. Either leave your problem in the comments for help or ask the Discord. AND I DO NOT ANSWER DIRECT MESSAGES QUEST 2 USERS: Not all Quest 1 games currently work with the Quest 2, please take a look at this spreadsheet before installing any games. if you're here looking for a cracked version of Virtual Desktop, there isn't one. VD is uncrackable as far as I know. If you want a PCVR streamer for Quest, here is a free alternative. WILL I BE BANNED FOR PIRATING GAMES? As it stands right now, you won't be banned for pirating games. As of right now, Facebook has never issued any form of punishment to anyone for piracy. If you feel weary when it comes to pirating games, you can take some precautions just to be safe. "LVL 0: Do nothing, play cracked games online and offline LVL 1: Play cracked games only when your wifi is turned off (still not safer since oculus sends logs) LVL 2: Spoof games as random packagenames and only play with wifi off (safer, but still not 100% safe) LVL 3: Play with wifi on but block all oculus and facebook domains through pihole or your router (even safer, still SOME game developers will see your ip trying to connect to their servers, using a fake dns does work) LVL 4: Block quest external access to internet from your routepihole (only allowing stuff vd and file transfer between devices on LAN)" - Zale Anderson, VRP Discord PLEASE READ THIS GUIDE CAREFULLY TO NOT MAKE ANY MISTAKES Also, if you're manually sideloading, DON'T USE SIDEQUEST. THEY HAVE AN APK BLACKLIST AND WILL NOT LET YOU SIDELOAD PIRATED GAMES. YOU CAN USE AN OLDER VERSION OF SIDEQUEST TO SIDELOAD BLACKLISTED APKS THAT CAN BE OBTAINED THROUGH RCLONE BROWSER, WHICH IS MENTIONED LATER IN THIS GUIDE YOU WILL NEED: Oculus ADB Drivers An Oculus developer account with the Quest in developer mode (Tutorial) EDIT: I've heard about recently that you now need a Credit Card to get a developer account for verification purposes. I don't know any way around this so I apologise if you can't make a developer account for this. A Telegram Account (requires phone number, if you don't have one that's on you) EDIT: you can use various websites that provide free phone numbers online, namely TextNow (US only but VPNs work) and FreePhoneNum. thanks to u/FlowV4 on this post for reminding me that these apps existed lol Any device capable of sideloading to an Oculus Quest/Quest 2 (this guide will be directed to Windows 10 users as that's the main use case here, if you use something else then I think there are downloads on the Telegram for other operating systems. Keep reading to know how to get to the Telegram) A USB Type C cable routing from your PC to the quest (to sideload games to the headset) A Discord Account (NOT A BRAND NEW ACCOUNT: using a new account will get you instantly banned from the VRP Discord. This is a measure to prevent raiding/bots. I do not know how old your account has to be to join and I apologise for being unable to figure it out. I'd give it 14-30 days maybe.) Step 1: Join the VRP Discord server. The invite link is a PINNED POST on this subreddit. When in the Discord server, head over to the #rules channel, read the rules and react to the bottom message to gain access to the rest of the server you may use the #vrp-updates channel in the server to be notified when new games are added or games are updated on the download mirrors. Step 2: Go to the #faq channel, scroll to the top and JOIN THE TELEGRAM (Telegram link is underneath " How to sideload with AndroidSideloader: " section. You'll have to download the Telegram application on your PC and make an account to get into the VRP Telegram. Step 3: If you needed to download Telegram, revisit the Telegram link in the VRP Discord and using your account you just made/logged into, join the VRP Telegram chat. At the top of the Telegram interface you should be able to access the pinned message. So at this point there are multiple methods here for quest piracy. I'm going to go through them here. ROOKIE'S SIDELOADER VRP EDITION (AUTOMATIC SIDELOADING, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED FOR NOOBIES) On the Telegram's pinned message is an exe file for the Rookie's Sideloader VRP Edition installer. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND USING THIS TO PIRATE GAMES. It's a simple application that when downloaded and installed (IF WINDOWS/YOUR BROWSER SAYS IT'S A VIRUS, THIS IS A FALSE POSITIVE AND MEANS YOU NEED TO UPDATE YOUR VIRUS DATABASES TO STOP IT FROM APPEARING OR JUST ADD IT TO YOUR EXCEPTIONS.) and when launched, you can connect your quest to your PC, Select from a huge drop down menu of games and easily, with a couple of clicks, automagically download and sideload games to your quest. If you get Rookie's Sideloader VRP and are prompted with an update on launch, accept the update and it'll be downloaded and launched on your PC. Games on the list are automatically added and updated at the rate they're cracked by the pirates. RCLONE BROWSER (MANUAL SIDELOADING, RECOMMENDED IF USING ANY OTHER SIDELOADING METHOD, ALSO FOR PCVGEARVR GAMES) On the pinned messages list, find the rclone browser part and click the link corresponding to the operating system you're on and (for Windows) you'll be redirected to a message containing a RAR file. Download that file, extract it and run RcloneBrowser.exe. You'll then be presented with 2 or 3 VRP mirrors, double click one of them and you'll be able to access and download APKs and OBBs under the Quest Games folder for manual sideloading, if thats your thing. If the UI for rclone browser is confusing to you, refer to this short tutorial video. (when the game you chose is showing as running, wait until it says finished before sideloading) WHITE WHIDOW SIDELOADER - NEWER, PRE-ALPHA ALTERNATIVE TO ROOKIE'S FOR MAC, LINUX AND WINDOWS all info regarding WWS can be found here. includes download and installation guide EXTRA, LIKELY NECESSARY INFORMATION To manually sideload, use sidequest or rookies sideloader to access the quests file system and drag the "com.xxx.xxx" folder to the directory Android/obb then sideload the apk using the sideloading method of your choice. Not all games need obb files so they won't come with them. To access sideloaded applications, go to your Quest's library screen, on the top right select the drop down menu that says "All", scroll down and select Unknown Sources. From there you can access your sideloaded games and apps UPDATING QUEST GAMES To update your pirated Quest games, while keeping the current version of the game installed, download and sideload the new version of the game using your preferred method and your save data should stay intact with the new update installed OTHER rclone browser also provides downloads for other tools and options regarding your Quest and games. This includes: App launchers spoofed as legit apps that can be launched from your regular library screen, eliminating the need to go to unknown sources Method(s) to disable Telemetry tracking Alternate sideloading methods such as older versions of sidequest that allow blacklisted apks, total commander for local sideloading and rookies sideloader vrp edition. All the old Quest firmware versions and methods to downgrade Previous versions of games DLC for games Modded/maxed out save files for games GEARVR AND PC TETHERED VR Rclone browser also provides downloads for GearVR and PCVR games. The GearVR games should sideload fine onto a Quest but there is no guarantee that they will fully function. However I don't know how to play GearVR games on a PC using a PCVR headset THE PCVR GAMES ARE TO BE DOWNLOADED AND PLAYED ON A PC WITH A PCVR TETHERED HEADSET OR A QUEST CONNECTED TO A PC WITH OCULUS LINK/VIRTUAL DESKTOP/ALVR. YOU CANNOT SIDELOAD PCVR GAMES ONTO A QUEST 1 OR 2 AND PLAY THEM STANDALONE. To play pirated PCVR games, download one using any of the rclone mirrors. Some may be packaged into repacked installers to make downloads smaller, so follow any instructions that are (hopefully) provided alongside the repack files. PLAYING WITH STEAMVR In my experience, the easiest way to run these games is through SteamVR, being only a Quest owner i've found running games through the Oculus PC app with Link very unreliable due to their software just being a MASSIVE processing power hog so only use Oculus Link if you have no other way or you think your PC is beefy enough for it. More on this a little bit down the line. So, if you're on an Oculus headset (Quest with Link^, Rift) enable unknown sources in the settings for the Oculus PC software so you can run SteamVR. Find the executable (.exe) for the game you've just downloaded and installed/extracted (you may have to look around in the game directory depending on what game) and add it as a Non-Steam game shortcut within Steam. Then go to properties for the shortcut you have just created within Steam and enable "Include in VR Library" Then when running SteamVR on launch you'll be presented with your VR library where your shortcuts should appear and you can just launch the games from there and enjoy. ^If you do Quest PCVR exclusively on Virtual Desktop, you do not need the Oculus software at all (correct me if i'm wrong) POSSIBLE SETUP IMPROVEMENTS (IN MY EXPERIENCE) Here i'm just gonna dump a few things that have enhanced my PCVR experience on a Quest over time in hopes that it'll help out others. I play games on a budget ass rig (i5-4590s, 8gb ram, gtx 1650) so running the Oculus app and playing with Oculus Link is a MASSIVE MASSIVE hit on performance in games. So if you're able to, use Virtual Desktop instead of Oculus Link as long as you've got a nice connection (preferrably ethernet) and at the cost of a bit of pixelation in display or some higher latency, you will run games WAAAY smoother. I am incredibly below spec for Half-Life: Alyx but by running it with Virtual Desktop and not the Oculus app bloating up my CPU power it sat at more than playable fps (50-72fps) for me at all times on low fidelity. Along with that, close anything else you have running in the background like any web browser or Discord. Sure VD is $25/£20, but its worth it not only for the experience improvements but for supporting the developer because this guy is doing a better job than Facebook when it comes to this stuff. This post will be updated for general improvements (i suck at writing guides) and if any changes come along to the process. I hope this helps those who want to try before they buy or the many clueless people who just want free games on their shiny new VR headsets. But remember, please support developers and their work by buying their games on legit marketplaces, maybe wait for a sale or something and buy their games if you enjoy them. They absolutely slave away to bring us these incredible experiences and we are responsible for making sure they can afford a tin of sardines to ration for the week and maybe buy more models off the asset store for their next game I know this is coming from the redditor who just taught you how to pirate every single VR game but i still like to support developers by buying their games if i enjoy them and it goes way further than you think when you buy a game. Except for Bethesda and Rockstar, please pirate their games to your hearts content as they are shitty companies releasing low effort VR ports for a quick buck from the small but growing amount of VR enthusiasts and gamers. Thanks for reading and enjoy! |
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PC Part Picker. Where do I start. First of all, thank you so much for all of the help you guys have given me. If not for your team and your website I might not have built the PC I have now. I am very grateful to you guys for making such straightforward software with so many options. You guys are on top of everything, and I’d just like to thank you for all that you’ve done for the PC building community. That being said, onto the questions! 1. What are your favorite PC Parts? What’s your ideal/dream PC part list? 2. I’ve been having this problem recently because things are out of stock. When I make a parts list I often have to go into the page for the part to determine the actual cost for the part when it comes back in stock from the major retailers. When displaying the price, could you also add in parentheses something like: Price: $265 (Lowest: $200) | Thanks for the kind words! I'll defer to Alex/Ryan on their favorite parts. For me I'd just like to get hold of a 3080 one day but I'm not in a rush. I'm still happily running this build: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/c99djX |
On the stock / pricing issue, we might be able to look into something like that, but I can't make any guarantees. | |
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Downmented: It's a bad time to be GPU shopping when the founde owner of PCPP can't even score a 30 series GPU BDsBiggest: This was my thought, how does he not have one? | I honestly don't really need one and there are people who play way more intensive stuff than I do. I'm ok to wait. |
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On that note, what do you play?!! | I still really enjoy Minecraft of all things. My oldest son started playing Skyblock and so that became a bit of a time sink. Used to play a decent bit of Civ and other Sid Meier stuff a long time ago. I'm just not that much of a gamer though. I'm legitimately terrible at FPS games, so I don't really enjoy them all that much. Minecraft lets me just piddle around and experiment with different creations, architectures, etc. And it's something I can play with my kids which is great until they trash my island. |
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As a fellow Minecraft buff, what are your thoughts on the best CPU for Minecraft at the moment? I know it depends more on CPU performance than GPU, at least in Java edition. | I'll have to defer to the other guys on staff or the community because I honestly don't know. I'm playing on an i5-6600k/980 ti which has been more than enough. |
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Thanks for the response! How long have you had that build for? | Roughly four years. I need to upgrade the GPU though because where I work in my house it's getting cold and ThoughtA is outpacing me on Folding at Home. |
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Do you have a rebuild planned for when the 3080 is back? Or just upgrading the current rig? | It'll probably be a new build, but I'm not sure what it'll be. If 3080s come back in stock where I can get one, then I may start with that and plan the rest around it. Especially if it's something with a particular aesthetic or color scheme that I want to match. |
Thank you for your site and all the countless hassle it saved me from. What do you guys and gals think is a thing our community could help you with ? Is there something like a roadmap for pcpp and what are you personally most excited about ? How should people give feedback to you and the other team members? Which channels are you preferring ? On which channels can I send my monthly thank you very much for your service messages ? | Re: what buildapc can help with - this community has helped us so much over the years that I have no asks whatsoever. Just thanks. Thanks for letting us be a part of the community. |
We don't have an official roadmap - I run the dev timeline like a software engineer who is terrible at time estimates. Things I promised eight years ago are still undone while other stuff jumps ahead. I'm most excited for benchmarking. I love performance analysis, and what we're building should be super cool. Lots, lots, lots of data, all in tightly controlled environments. The hard part is how to present relevant bits without overwhelming people with data. | |
For feedback, feel free to ping us on our site forums, our contact page, or on our discord channel. Discord is probably the least formal if it's something small, though I'm not on discord all that often these days (Ryan and Alex are though). | |
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Ah, "agile" development. | Nope! None of that. No agile practices here thanks. Just software development structured along my capricious demands... |
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IMHO, "we don't have a project management philosophy" is the best project management philosophy. As long as progress is being made and people are happy, management theory would just get in the way. | For a while I was working on a codebase of several million lines of C++ in an org with 100+ other really smart engineers. I participated in an effort to modularize part of it, and I failed pretty badly. One of the most important things I learned was from an old Windows NT dev presentation that talked about Conway's Law. That really reshaped how I viewed architecture, teams, responsibilities, and communication patterns. |
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Did you consider licensing/sharing benchmarks from other hardware review sites, rather than developing a (presumably not-profit-generating) benchmarking competency? Alternatively, if you do want to generate benchmarks, have you considered monetizing them via a blog? | We're planning on benching at a scale that most review sites don't do. Like an order of magnitude more pairings, runs, etc, with a bit more detail on each as well in terms of current consumption, temps, etc. All that all recorded on identical software setups for comparability. No one right now is doing that at the scale we want. |
It's definitely not a profit center, and that's ok for me. I love benchmarking. Before PCPP I was part of a team working on optimizing compiler stuff. I loved writing compiler optimizations and testing the performance changes. So that whole side of things - determinism, accurate measurements, etc, I just really enjoy it. So PCPP in a way helps fund my desire to do that work whether it is profitable or not. | |
That being said, I do think it's a complementary feature set to add. While it may not monetize directly, I think the value it adds to the site will (hopefully) result in an incremental change in traffic/revenue. | |
So how does it feel to have a side project or yours become as popular in the computer world as google? You've become the only place I recommend newbies to go (other than reddit) for pc building help, and your site has become the most useful tool I've ever used outside of my daily IT work. You've created something not only powerfully useful, but well designed, smoothly operated, and pleasing to the eye. I don't really have much of question more just taking the opportunity to say thank you for creating a fantastic tool for the community. If a bigger company offers you millions to sell it I'd understand if you did, but please don't, I can't imagine the site being run any better than by it's original team! | Thanks for the kind words. I gave my mom a shirt. A couple years ago someone recognized the shirt in rural east Texas. Like, she lives 30 minutes from the nearest town of 5,000 people. That was pretty wild. My mom was pretty excited lol. |
I love having something that I helped build be a useful thing for people. That's immensely satisfying. (And it's a team effort, not just me by any stretch at all. The whole team helps every bit of what you see on the site). | |
On the other hand, I don't want or like to be out front. I'd rather be behind the scenes working on something and not really be noticed. I think that gets reflected, probably negatively from a business-first standpoint, in how I run things. I don't really push branding hard, don't push social media (Twitter, Instagram, etc), because I personally don't want to be out front there. I can engage here on reddit because I feel like I'm a part of the community here rather than some corporate/redditor relationship. From a business standpoint, I think there's a lot of growth possibility that PCPP hasn't tapped into because I want to avoid various social anxieties and whatnot. | |
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Just know that if a company offers big bucks (and they probably will eventually) it is because they see an opportunity to leverage the base you built to make money and it most likely will be by selling the customers who trust you. They will probably do something like partner with large manufacturers or sellers and push their own products while if ignoring what is best for the people looking to create their own best build. | Yeah that makes sense. We've made some decisions that probably wouldn't last long - not running ads, not selling user data. So really there seems to be two options: either we run this out until it dies on its own and we get to keep our ideals/positions, or we run out of energy and sell. I don't want to sell. I don't plan to sell. But I'd be lying if I said there weren't days where I feel so tired and just want a break for a bit. It's trying to find the balance of doing a job I love maintaining principles I value and also not destroying myself physically/emotionally/etc in the process. |
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Oh cool! If you don’t mind me asking, what area of East Texas? Did you grow up out here? I’m from out in Van, approx 30 min from Tyler. My close friends and I love PCPartPicker. I just used it to build my upgraded rig a couple of weeks ago. | Nice! I grew up in Tyler (edit: but my mom currently lives 30 minutes east of Center, TX - basically on Toledo Bend reservoir and the TX/LA border). My electronics teacher in high school (Mr. Ray) was from Van. He was formative for me in pursuing electronics seriously by introducing me to VICA and electronics competitions. |
Benchmark integration timeline when 🍿 | Probably mid-2021. We're almost done with a building renovation where they bumped our building service from a 400A service to a 1200A service. Added AC capacity. That 800A is going toward bench... it's going to be fun. This is what I'm talking about https://imgur.com/a/rffuVin. Can't wait to get this all up and running. |
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I have a massive transformer that’s the size of a fridge I can’t seem to sell if you guys want it. It was meant for a Bitcoin farm but was never used. Cost $5000 I just want it gone it’s so heavy lol | LOL thanks but we're good. They actually delivered the 1200A from pole mounted transformers. MEP guys were surprised, but the power company said they could do it. Sure enough they did. Old vs new pre-hookup: https://imgur.com/a/ODQlACV |
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Dude, you do AWS, dev, hiring, project direction, and building management? Your operation must be crazy efficient. | Oh no I offloaded all the building management stuff to Jack. He's handled almost all the renovation work, which has been an absolute life saver for me. I just come in and throw wrenches in things by adding last minute requests for extra conduit runs from here to there, replace those windows, change that paint color, etc. Jack handles all communication and followups with the GC, subs, etc. |
The other stuff I do do though. AWS (our infrastructure isn't that big really, a couple dozen EC2 instances, RDS, Redis, CloudSearch, Cloudfront, etc). Daniel handles the bits of Lambda that we use. I kinda enjoy the deployment / devops side of things, and I think it's important to have my fingers on the pulse of that whenever I'm designing new features. Helps me have a better feel for what kind of query impact different code or modeling decisions will have. | |
The hiring isn't much - we've averaged about one person a year and that's usually someone in our existing network of relationships. And project direction is pretty small right now since we shut down our cycling site. Back down to just one website makes it a lot simpler. We talk about what we want to do as a group a lot, so (I think) everyone has a pretty decent picture of where we're headed despite timelines not being nailed down strict. | |
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What kind of benchmarks would you be running? Have you considered pulling data from places like passmark? | Anything we can run deterministically and automated and that has license terms that allow unfettered publication of result data. We won't be pulling data from anywhere, passmark included. All the data will be from runs we do in-house. |
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May I ask why the focus on internal metrics vs just pulling them? | Mainly because we can control all the variables and make them consistent across all our result pairs. We have some absolutely phenomenal performance analysis engineering expertise in house. |
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Unfettered publication of result data. Wow. Nice. As someone who likes playing with freely available datasets, I really appreciate this. Hard to learn data science without freely available data sets that regular people can have some level of subject matter expertise over to start to learn how to put data-driven stories together. | Sorry, what I meant was that the license terms of the benchmark software have to allow us to publish the benchmark results without restriction. There is a popular benchmarks out today that requires the benchmark results be vetted by them first before publication. We'd have to manually send over bench results if we weren't using their bench platform (we're not, we have our own). Then wait for them to approve, and then we could publish. That's not viable when we're testing at the scale we plan to - it'd need to be automated at least but they couldn't offer that. And for benchmarking prerelease hardware under embargo, it'd mean that we would have no ability to publish data right when the embargo lifted. We'd have to wait however long for their manual review. |
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How will you be able to benchmark hard-to-get hardware? e.g. RTX 3090, Radeon 6800xt, and Ryzen 5000? Will the manufacturers send them to you? Or do you have to buy them? | I think it's a mixture of both. On new release hardware it's helpful to have bench data when embargoes lift. But I also want to have store-purchased hardware as the main part of our hardware pool, however long it takes to acquire that. We can flag the benchmarks that come from manufacturer review samples - that way people know the source and can factor in review sample binning. |
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So once upon a time, I was gonna write a program that would pull benchmark and pricing data to build a list of best value parts, such that no part in the list had a better performing part at a lower price. A sort of definitive do-buy list to make it easier to pick parts. Once benchmarks are done, pcp would have all the infrastructure in place to make that happen in some form on the site, perhaps as a filter for picking parts or as a warning on the part/build pages? | Yep. |
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sorry, I'm not sure what you're saying that to, I should have actually posed a proper question: Will you be implementing that? | That's our intent, yeah. It may take us a bit to get there though. |
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There is...a lot... of metal shavings in that box. Ah I’m sure it’s fine it’s only 1200A. | Oh at that point it was still all being hooked up. It's cleaner for sure. |
Check this out - relative size difference between old and new... | |
https://imgur.com/a/xQD1fEY. (That's one Barry for scale.) | |
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But how do we know how big Barry is if he's not holding a banana? | Barry is approximately the same height as one marinelli. |
A lot of people seem to think that you only host sellers that provide you affiliate kickbacks. Is there any truth to that? Have you ever allowed or disallowed a seller on the basis of affiliate money? How do you decide whether to host a seller or not? | That's not true. We list several retailers without affiliate agreements. Affiliate relationships are often much much easier because they almost always already have price data access. That's the main thing we need. |
Our choice on hosting a retailer largely depends on whether we feel they are good for users or not. If a retailer is being abusive to users or doing highly manipulative stuff, we'll remove them even if they're profitable. We've done that several times in the past. If a retailer also has highly inaccurate pricing, we'll delist for that too. | |
Yaaatttttt: Not sure if you are allowed to reveal this but what retailers have you delisted in the past? LightningProd12: They delisted MicroCenter in the US | ThoughtA: This isn't true at all. We want to have them on the site. We had some discussions with them, but they stopped responding. |
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Oh ok, I remember suggesting it a few years back on the forums and getting told they were delisted. EDIT - Forum post link: https://pcpartpicker.com/forums/topic/309304-request-add-microcenter-to-the-list-of-merchants I falsely remembered there being a reason but was told they were removed from the site. | We did actually list their in-store deals. I put in a decent bit of code for that so that they only showed up if you were within a configurable radius of one of their locations. |
It's a long story, but the gist of it is that we were waiting on some stuff that never came and things went silent. We reach out from periodically but nothing. It stinks - we'd be happy to list them. | |
You never know what you reception you'll get from retailers. Some are beating down the door to get on board - that's awesome. Others we have to prove that we're worth their time - that's not unusual. A few will say they want to work together, we get 80% of the way there, and then... silence. Or the key person you were working with takes a job somewhere else. And then some retailers basically say not just no, but h*** no. I'll never forget that one. For some retailers there's a strong aversion to something we do, whether it be price comparison or something else. But just know that if there's a retailer that is reputable and treats customers well, we're more than happy to work with them and get them listed. | |
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Ohh ok, that sucks. On a side note, is there a story behind the "h*** no" retailer? | They're, eh, no longer in business. Honestly probably dodged a bullet there. |
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Maybe this was asked already but still: are there any timeline/plan to add more countries to the country list? I am leaving in Austria and I have to use Germany to see the prices and availability of the parts. Moreover, I see German retailers and prices but not Austrian ones. | We're continually adding new countries and retailers. Adding a country is just a few lines of code on our end - we do that when we have a retailer to add in a country we don't currently support. So really it's a matter of finding and adding retailers. If you have any you'd like to see, send us a note on our contact page and we'll take a look at it. Jenny reaches out to the retailers to see if we can get them on board. It usually takes a while to get in contact and get good data access. |
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I already raised this issue to him several years ago - because it was blatantly in the open for users in Germany. You would get amazon affiliate links as "lowest" price, even though there are several other stores that are cheaper... He got angry quickly and gave me the same bs excuse. The top sellers with the top user ratings were never listed as cheapest even though they were. | We list the buy box winner for Amazon. If you're saying we prune results for various marketplace sellers, well, you're wrong. |
How's the team handling COVID? Is everyone working from home? What kind of challenges are arising? | I sent everyone home in March. We haven't met as a group since. It's been ok - we just meet on video conferencing when we need to. Jack and Barry are up at the office overseeing the renovation which should be done mid-January. I'll probably be up there from January to April to do the benchmark network cabling and office rewiring (from cat5 to 6a+fiber) because I kinda enjoy cable crimping and punch downs. :) |
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The transition from cat5 to cat6 is worth? | Yeah. We're not running 5e, just 5. It's what was in there from when we bought it. So that's not where I'd like it to be for good 1Gb. |
Any chance we'll ever see some more filtering options for SSDs? It would be really handy to have the following * Filter by the primary storage type SLC/MLC/TLC/QLC/Optane/etc * Filter by whether the drive has a DRAM cache or supports Host Memory Buffer (HMB) | I'd love to, but I think it'd cause a fissure I'm not sure how to fix. Right now we have SSDs and platter drives in the same category, but the specific filtering for each is different. To apply the really detailed SSD filters, I think they need to be their own category. Same with the HDD types. I don't know if splitting them up is the right path though, so I've been continually punting the issue down the road until we're forced to decide one way or the other. |
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Tsk tsk, don’t accumulate technical debt there | Oh, no, it's quite the opposite really. Parametric part additions record the type and filter selections. Those added to a part list stay there forever - we never throw them away. So any filters we add never get removed even if we don't show them. Because of that, I try to be very deliberate in what we add and what we don't. Once I add a new part category or filter type, if I decide later it was a bad idea then it means I get to write lots of migration code. That's no fun. |
Super excited for the an app version. Are you guys considering price tracking so that users can set alerts for when hardware drops to a desired price? | Yeah. We have that on the site already with email alerts. But the PWA provides them via browser push notifications (on platforms that support that). I have that all working in a beta test mode (for staff only) right now and it's feeling pretty solid. |
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As a front-end engineer, what's your stack look like for the PWA? | Basically built on top of our existing responsive site (Python, Django). I didn't want to spend a lot of time migrating to another framework, so instead spent the time kind of standardizing our own API-ish setup and then handling the caching or offline modes for that as needed. We went responsive with PWA to avoid maintaining three separate codebases (web, iOS, Android), but it's looking like we may go native in the end anyway. This buys us some time at least. |
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So not iOS? | Right. :(. I understand there are some workarounds to get push notifications through wallets and whatnot, but that feels pretty hackish to me. We might end up going native on iOS at some point to get good notification support there. |
How hard is it keeping up with and adding new item releases (not only the new 3000 series graphics cards from nvidia but also possibly unknown stuff like network cards, etc)? Are there any items you decide not to add or do you try to list everything you can? | New GPUs are pretty easy. CPUs are ok, sometimes a pain depending on the chipset/bios situations. Motherboards are terrible, especially the last few years. Cataloging all the M.2 ports, their constraints (PCIe in this slot disables that SATA, etc) is a major pain. |
There's some stuff, particularly on cases, where there are compatibility constraints that are not economically viable to model. We know what the constraints are, but to model them all across 30k+ parts would make data entry so slow that we'd never finish. | |
We try to hit the main product categories, but we'd love to expand that. It's really an issue of how time consuming and costly it is to do the data entry for it versus how often it's used. | |
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So Wikipedia seems to be crowd sourced, and works pretty well. Maybe some of the more laborious data entry parts could have a crowd source entry option, but be flagged as such when people bring up anything containing those results (a disclaimer).. | It's just not reliable enough. It has to be super accurate, and it's not something I'd ever feel comfortable outsourcing. |
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Have you tried asking the manufacturers to get involved? You might just be big enough. | When new releases are coming out we sometimes get data ahead of time. Cases are pretty common. Motherboards are a lot harder, because of embargoes and even BIOSes and manuals not finished days before release. Some of the constraints we see are pretty one-off situations that make it hard to provide some sort of standardized input form for though. |
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what if you let companies input their own data for their products. | I don't trust that to be accurate enough. We routinely find bad spec data even on manufacturer sites. |
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I imagine that PCPP is large enough now to direct traffic to or away from various retailers in volumes they will care about. Like how Google went from small to large. Given that, probably PCPP should begin leaning on retailers to provide product data in an ingestable format, making data entry moot. | We work with retailers to provide the right data in feeds for sure. But the hard part is that not all retailers have the technical expertise on hand to do it (or for smaller retailers, the margin and profitability to pay for that expertise). The back-and-forth to get updated feed frequency, proper part numbers, stock status, etc - it's non-stop. Brent and Jenny bear the brunt of that. |
I know you've been vocal about not opening up a merch store for personal profit, but would you ever consider a merch store where all proceeds go towards your well building charity? | We did this once. My accountant was like, "please don't." |
Basically if we buy a thousand shirts and give them away it's super easy - they just get marked as a marketing expense and we give them out however we see fit. But as soon as any of them are sold, you have to track inventory, cost basis, etc. It's a lot more tedious and last time it was maybe a couple shirts a week - enough to invoke packaging and transport overhead but not enough to be efficient. So we instead just give them away at various bapc milestones and donate from our affiliate income instead. | |
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Kinda funny reading this while wearing the hoodie! It’s easily the comfiest hoodie in my closet. | Oh, major props to Phil for that. He picked it out. I love mine too. We printed some smaller ones for kid sizes and my oldest son tries to sleep in his. |
transam617: Philip, Thank you for 10 years of your indispensable help. Over that time, there were probably millions of visitors to your website who have had their PC building experience improved or made possible through the use of your wonderful tool. But specifically: Since 2014, our little corner of reddit (now 10K subs) cabalofthebuildsmiths, has been more effective, and has helped more people as a direct result of your website tool, than from any other tool we have available. We pride ourselves on giving builds to customers where they can reliably buy every part we pick, and be sure they will work as expected. This process takes research and a lot of effort, but the highly accurate, effective communication of pcpartpicker (for all the countries you cover) is the foundation of our process. Thank you for making the messy world of PC parts a little more bearable, thank you for making it all possible, and a big thanks from us, cabalofthebuildsmiths. transam617 kokolordas15 dmz_dragon danyulz bramblexd | Thanks for your kind words, and thanks for all the work you all do to help builders! |
What happened to the youtube channel? Loved the build videos and interviews you had while it was still running. | We moved buildings a couple years ago, and decided to pause on them while we renovated the new space for filming and benchmarking. The renovation is finishing up likely mid-January - it took waaaay longer than we originally thought. If we had known it'd be that long we probably would have figured out some interim plan. So once that reno is done, we'll probably start ramping up content again. I'd guess mid-2021 or so. |
[deleted] | My first computer was a an AMD K5-133. That was late 1996 I think and I was in college. My friend and I ordered our mobo+CPU off an ad on a magazine page. I bought his old case and an 80MB HDD off of him. Ran Windows 3.1. We played Warcraft 2 across a null modem cable - that was probably the most fun I've ever had with PC gaming. Floating point on that thing was terrible though. Playing a 64kbps MP3 chewed up like 60% of the CPU. |
My roommate introduced me to Quake 2, specifically Action Quake 2. Loved that game. I started running a website on the dorm network on it that got pretty popular. But queries on the db would tank my Q2 framerate so I put in code to disable queries while I was playing. | |
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tiger direct? | No, it was some small place out of the northeast. I mean, that was pre-internet-shopping days. Wrote a check, hand wrote what we wanted on the order form, mailed it, and waited weeks. No phone calls, no email confirmations, nothing. My kids have no idea what that was like. |
Fun fact, I got banned from PCPartPicker for adding a purple dildo from Amazon to my build. | Yeah that'll do it. User code of conduct / ToS and all. |
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Boooo. Thats kinda weird, especially for private/personal builds. | Most of the retailers we partner with have as a part of their terms that our site not contain NSFW material. I get some people think it's funny but it can get us shut down, and I'm really not ok with that. |
I've used your site so many times and I even met some of the team in Austin outside Dreamhack. Thanks for all you do! Who has the most powerful computer on the staff and what are they running? | I think most powerful computer probably goes to manirelli right now. |
Do you have any career opportunities at the company? I have a couple years of marketing experience, but I can’t find a job in these tough times. At least I’ve been learning python so I can get better at data management. | Unfortunately we're not hiring right now. :( |
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Mind if I ask where you typically post jobs when you are hiring? Greenhouse.io, LinkedIn, Indeed, all of the above? | Usually it's someone we have an established relationship with. We haven't ever posted a job listing to date. |
Are you going to work on an official PCPartPicker API so people don't have to break ToS by scraping? | No. I'd prefer to offer sufficient service that people don't need to scrape. |
Most scrapers use up a lot of resources or don't even do cursory things like follow robots.txt crawl delay specs. It's really frustrating. I'd like to spend my time focusing on user benefitting features than blocking abusive crawlers. | |
gordonv: A cached CLI/SDK that draws from a CDN (not your web server) would be cool. You'd provide sufficient service, reduce processing cost, and get usage stats. The best way to defeat crawlers is to defeat their purpose. Make scraping look idiotic. Heck, mock scrapers in your HTML with an URL to your API. Add a little wit to that wisdom. Add AWS Cloudfront and now you have 200+ servers in the USA distributing your CLI with authentication to 3 million calls for $20 a month. Some leet stuff. Just noticed a sprinkle of posts calling for an app. If you spec CLI/SDK along with app development, killing 2 birds with 1 budget stone. | We're rolling out a PWA (hopefully) before the end of the year. |
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invisi1407: Perhaps a better question is, why is there a need for scraping? Could that need be satisfied by new/improving features on PCPP? MLG_G0D: Because integrations with PCPartPicker would greatly benefit the PC building community. Constantly navigating to websites can get tiresome, especially on low spec machines. Automation is great. invisi1407: I understand, but exactly which integrations are people looking for? I get it, but I also understand why PCPP isn't interested in having a public, free API. MLG_G0D: I was thinking about integrating PCPP functions into a reddit/discord bot. invisi1407: Not unresonable, but you do understand how it takes away any earnings from advertisements and what have we on their website, yeah? It seems like they are a small company spending an enormous amount of time on the data they are presenting, so I don't think you'll ever see a free public API anyway. Perhaps a paid one, but I don't suppose many would be interested in that anyway. MLG_G0D: Seems reasonable. I'm just a massive fan of companies being open to their userbase, but I guess PCPartPicker hasnt quite grown to the point where thats economically feasible. | There's more to the picture. On pricing data: We're not the source of pricing data as that comes from the retailers. We have various agreements in place where they give us that data to display on our site or to market their products in ways they allow us to. We don't have permission to then hand that data to a third party to do whatever they want to. If we make it available to someone else via an API, we're breaching terms of our agreement, which in turn makes us lose our affiliate deal and price access. Boom, business is dead. Basically if you need that data, go to the source (the retailers) and negotiate with them. |
For product data: We've invested a lot of man years to build our data set, and some of that data helps us maintain a competitive advantage over copycat sites. Making it easier to retrieve that data isn't something I'm keen on. There are other sources of product data available that are more expansive than what we have anyway. I'd suggest pursuing that if you want to build your own hardware related site stuff. | |
On API stuff for partlists and markdown: If you just want a discord bot, I'd be happy to chat through what it is you're looking for to see if that's something we could support officially on our end. We have our own discord server bot that uses an internal API to do partlist embeds. | |
Last bit - publishing an API adds an additional thing for us to maintain. It's a maintenance and support burden. Even an unofficial API is. It becomes something that I have to test and not break any time I refactor code around it. We're a small company, and that's not really an area I want to allocate resources around if it's not a revenue generating thing. | |
Thanks a lot to you guys! With your site, I managed to make 3 separate lists, and now my dream of building a PC is coming true. Maybe you could add recommendations based on what the person has on their list, such as a cheaper but better graphics card, etc | I think recommendations are a possibility once we have our in-house benchmark data in place. But that'd be a ways down the road. |
Thanks for your work, and since this is an AMA, simple question: Which is the best flavor of ice cream and why? | Amy's Ice Cream here in Austin. Belgian Chocolate. It's just wonderful but I haven't been there in almost a year now. |
manirelliPCPartPicker: I will second Amy's but I'm partial to the Mexican Vanilla flavor. | |
Wow. What a cool thing to see on Reddit. This is the first AMA I’ve ever replied in/commented on. I’m brand new to PC (3 year macbook user here, and besides a brief stint with a windows Hp laptop on which I played Rollercoaster tycoon and club penguin with “back in the day” I have never had need for the site. Until last month). I’m grateful the site exists, and it’s quite intriguing to me how you manage to create and maintain (emphasis on maintain) such an EXTENSIVE database of parts. I know it’s part of your life, however it astounds me to see these parts that seem so very minuscule, always appear. Have you considered, or maybe there already is and I simply am blind or don’t know about it. Have you considered adding any sort of personal or user based rating system regarding parts? Or a warning system for parts with known issues out of the box? | Our ratings are from users, but we only allow ratings/reviews from completed builds. That way we know that the review is from someone who actually built with it (versus say a 1 star review from someone mad they couldn't buy it). |
We do offer some warnings on known issues, but it's something we may expand in the future. |
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