Yup, same. Your options are usually either “pay for fake ratio bonuses” or “seed dead torrents for six months in order to get enough time credit to convert into ratio.” If you’re trying to chase the freeleech tags, then you’ll never hit decent ratios because now you’re seeding a torrent that has 1000 other seeds and only 5 leeches.
And if you have to pay for fake ratio to get started, just fucking pay for Usenet and skip the hassle instead.
Go buy a garage sale DVD of something that is semi-popular and doesn’t already exist on the private tracker, rip it, and post the torrent yourself.
'S what I did back when Underground Gamer still existed; I had a version of Mechwarrior 2 that didn’t already have a torrent, so I spent some time making a nice summary and uploaded it myself. Worked a treat; I had enough ratio to get me through my rough early weeks and never looked back. Until the site shut down, of course.
IPtorrents is the best. You should try to keep a 1:1, but you just have to seed for 2 weeks, and you get points for 15 torrents to use as upload credit, even if you don’t upload a single byte. I’ve never had to think about my ratio.
I’ve always found private trackers to be almost unusably bureaucratic
Yup, same. Your options are usually either “pay for fake ratio bonuses” or “seed dead torrents for six months in order to get enough time credit to convert into ratio.” If you’re trying to chase the freeleech tags, then you’ll never hit decent ratios because now you’re seeding a torrent that has 1000 other seeds and only 5 leeches.
And if you have to pay for fake ratio to get started, just fucking pay for Usenet and skip the hassle instead.
Some yes, but some no. A few I’ve been on are downright absurd in how most of the things are free.
I agree about not having to pay etc too.
I suspect I’ve just gotten lucky but several of the trackers I’ve found are easy to just let the ARRs do their thing.
There’s an easy solution to that.
Seed something yourself.
Go buy a garage sale DVD of something that is semi-popular and doesn’t already exist on the private tracker, rip it, and post the torrent yourself.
'S what I did back when Underground Gamer still existed; I had a version of Mechwarrior 2 that didn’t already have a torrent, so I spent some time making a nice summary and uploaded it myself. Worked a treat; I had enough ratio to get me through my rough early weeks and never looked back. Until the site shut down, of course.
IPtorrents is the best. You should try to keep a 1:1, but you just have to seed for 2 weeks, and you get points for 15 torrents to use as upload credit, even if you don’t upload a single byte. I’ve never had to think about my ratio.