Dark and Darker is still kicked off Steam, so Ironmace is 'going old school' with BitTorrent for the latest playtest and fans are loving it

pcgamer.com:

Back in February, Ironmace promised that there'd be one more Dark and Darker playtest(opens in new tab) before the game went into early access release. The situation became unexpectedly complicated shortly after that, though: A legal beef with Nexon flared up, and Dark and Darker was deslited from Steam(opens in new tab). 

But Ironmace wants to push ahead with that final playtest, so it's doing things old-school—and I mean literally.

«Rest assured that we are working around the clock to safeguard the continuance of Dark and Darker,» Ironmace wrote in a message on its Discord server(opens in new tab). «Unfortunately, due to the complexities of our situation, especially across international lines, it is taking time to resolve the Steam situation. In order for us to keep our promise to our fans we’ve had to go old school this time.»

In practical terms, that means that if you want to take part in the playtest, you're going to have to torrent the new client. This has resulted in two things happenings on the Dark and Darker subreddit:

1. Memes.

2. Requests for help figuring out what a torrent is (opens in new tab) .

For those who weren't around for the glory days of peer-to-peer piracy in the early 2000s, BitTorrent is a communications protocol that enables decentralized file sharing. It's a bit like FTP (you know what that is, right?) except that instead of downloading files from a single source, you're getting them from multiple sources, called «seeds.» If you're the considerate sort, you'll also seed the torrent yourself, because the more seeds, the better it is for everyone trying to get the file.

Torrenting was huge for a brief time in the early 2000s, but its use has fallen off dramatically in recent years, which is