Screw client side anti-cheat, fix your goddamn server code.
I’m reminded of a case in Apex Legends where cheaters started dual wielding pistols, despite dual wielding not actually being a game mechanic. That should be something you can easily detect on your server and block.
Client side anticheat is just smoke and mirrors and lets developers think they can get away with not doing their job of writing secure code.
I’m honestly surprised that with all this concern about privacy against Google, Microsoft, Epic, and so on, gamers are willing to just let these games have unrestricted and unchecked access to all your internet, microphone and camera data.
Likewise, despite how much gamers call games “broken glitchy messes”, they are perfectly willing to give them enough hardware access to literally destroy your computer.
Server side anti cheat can’t distinguish good players from aimbots.
I’ve been thinking about this, and I wonder how accurate this is. I think overuse of all this modern AI nonsense is a problem, but wonder if this might be a good use case for it.
A big game will probably have huge amounts of training data for both cheaters and non cheaters. An AI could probably pick up on small things like favouring the exact centre of the head or tracking through walls.
If a user has a few reports of aimbotting, just have this AI follow them for a bit and make a judgement.
It’ll get it wrong sometimes, but that’s why you also implement a whole appeals process with actual humans. Besides, client side anticheat systems also have a nasty habit of mistakenly banning people for having specific hardware/software configs.
However, I would like games to come with servers again so you can play games on your own terms
Please! Not just for anticheat reasons, but also for mods and keeping the game playable when the publishers decide it isn’t profitable.
However, I would like games to come with servers again so you can play games on your own terms
Please! Not just for anticheat reasons, but also for mods and keeping the game playable when the publishers decide it isn’t profitable.
The problem is that having an essential component of the game run on servers that only the publisher has access to is also a pretty effective way to do DRM, so they’ve got a pretty strong incentive not to do that. It’s a lot easier to ensure that someone paid for an account on publisher-run servers than that someone paid for a copy of the server and client binaries that they are in possession of.
I’m a Linux gamer, every few weeks there’s a story in the news about how some random update to anti-cheat ending up banning Linux/Steam Deck users, it’s not a problem unique to AI. AI finding false positives will happen, but that’s where the “human in the loop” appeals process happens.
Some games do employ new tactics. For example, when the game suspects you’re cheating, it’ll spawn fake opponents only you can see and check if you try to interact with them. This will defeat most wallhacks and maybe even a few aimbots.
This is the kind of cool things that they should be doing! Try new and interesting things instead of trying to brute force anti-cheat by putting restrictions on what people can do with their computers and forcing a narrative where cheaters only exist because you weren’t strict enough.
In case of CS2, it doesn’t even ban people who teleport behind you at the first second of the round. Or killing everyone through the whole map like here (Reddit): link
Server side anti cheat can’t distinguish good players from aimbots.
Neither can a rootkit, which should be unconditionally illegal and send CEOs to jail for putting in their product. There are no exceptions and no scenarios where it can possibly be acceptable for a video game to access any operating system anywhere near that level. Every individual case should constitute felony hacking, with no possibility of "user consent" being a defense even if they do actually clearly and explicitly ask for "permission".
If you want that, I kind of feel like the obligation should be placed on the OS (or maybe Steam or similar distribution platforms) to do sandboxing. Generally-speaking, in the computer security world, you’re better off just not letting software do something objectionable than trying to track down everyone who does it and have the judicial side handle things.
Mobile OSes and game console OSes already sandbox games that way.
PCs could have the ability to do that, but they don’t do that today.
I do think that they’re heading in that direction, though, at least relative to where they were, say, 30 years ago; at that point in time, permission tended to be really at a user level, and if you ran software on your computer, it pretty much had access to anything that the user did. Web browser are generally available and act as a sandbox for some lightweight sandbox. On Linux, Wayland’s a move towards handling isolation of apps at the desktop level – for a long time, desktop APIs really didn’t permit for isolation of one graphical program from another. Also on Linux, Flatpak and the like are aimed at distributing isolated graphical applications.
If you don't physically control the hardware, it is not secure.
The only valid approach to preventing cheating that matters is to have authoritative servers. Nothing else works, nothing else theoretically can work, and nothing else can possibly be described as anything but malware. There is literally no possible scenario where any entertainment company knowing anything about what else is happening on your computer can be justified.
I’m not smart enough to see a world where Linux and effective client side anti-cheat can cohabitate. Nothing can ever stop someone running a custom linux kernel that hides any nefarious code from the games they’re targeting. PC gaming can only head that direction to the degree that they take kernel-level control away from the user.
When it comes to windows, the devs working on kernel-level anti-cheat systems are working closely with microsoft on the implementation. To the point that, if you were to try to reverse engineer it on your own machine, in all likelihood msft could convince a court that you are hacking their system, not the other way around.
I made an anti-cheat for vanilla minecraft once, it’s REALLY easy to tell if someone is cheating it’s just developers are grotesquely incompetent when it comes to detecting that sort of thing or (more often) just don’t give a shit. They’ll just create a naïve solution then never test it. For example: minecraft’s god awful anti-fly and anti-speedhack which is just “is the player in the air for 5 seconds” or “did the player go too fast” which is notorious for false positives and doesn’t even stop people trying to cheat, just punishes players for its own fuck-ups.
It really is as simple as creating a model of what the player should be able to do, and then nudging clients towards that expected play. Normal players will not even notice (or will be pleased when it fixs a desync) but cheaters will get ENRAGED and try to cheat harder before eventually giving up. The point of a good anticheat is not to punish players for cheating, but to make it easier and more fun to play within the rules.
It’s like piracy: We had years of systems built on punishment and all they do is create resentment and people trying to break your system, but you build a system on rehabilitation and you become one of the biggest platforms for PC gaming with people willingly downloading it.
Yeah, I agree with that. Installing freaking rootkits on people’s personal device, with the express purpose of identifying them and knowing what their machine contains, is not OK. A multiplayer client should be as lightweight as possible and shouldn’t be able to fuck with a game.
Even if they agree not using your data for anything else, the next security breach on their servers will make that promise useless.
And I am not sure why one would trust big publishers to have any kind of ethics anyway. Do you remember Activision’s patent to manipulate matchmaking? That would specifically match players to reward those who buy microtransactions and create pressure on those who don’t?
Yeah, totally trusting those manipulative snakes with my private data with a big “do not watch” sticker on it.
Installing freaking rootkits on people’s personal devices
If Valve is gonna do anything, I’d rather have them sandbox games from screwing with the environment, not the opposite. I’d like to be able to install random mods from Steam Workshop without worrying about whether some random modder might have malware attached to their mod that can compromise the whole system. I don’t care if a malicious mod dicks up the save games for a particular game, but I’d rather know that it cannot go beyond that.
That doesn’t solve the cheating problem, of course, but it’s a case where anti-cheating efforts and security concerns are kind of at odds.
I mean AI sounds like a legit idea. In the past e.g. battle.net from Blizzard was also just looking for “patterns”. And AI could be much better at that. The question is, how do you get the required information without having any clientside info? To distinguish between a good player and a bot would be very very time consuming to train an AI on that level.
All you really need is where the character is looking, their location and the terrain map, all of which are things the server has authority over or can check easily.
Distinguishing between a good player and a bot probably won’t be that hard. A simple aimbot would probably fire exactly at a target’s (0, 0) coordinate, while a good player may be a frame or two early or late. Someone with wallhacks will behave differently if they know someone is around a corner. There’s almost certainly going to be small “tricks” like that that an AI can pick up on.
We went through this in RuneScape with auto miners. You just randomise locations and times slightly and it’s almost impossible to tell the difference.
Depends on whether people working on cheats can see the anti-cheat detection code. It’s hard to ensure that one data set is statistically-identical to another data set.
Recently, Russia had a vote in which there was vote fraud, where some statisticians highlighted it in a really clear way – you had visible lines in the data in voting districts at 5% increments, because voting districts had been required to have a certain level of votes for a given party, and had stuffed ballot boxes to that level.
If I can see the cheat-detection code, then, yeah, it’s not going to be hard to come up with some mechanism that defeats it. But if I can’t – and especially if that cheat-detection code delays or randomly doesn’t fire – it may be very hard for me to come up with data that passes its tests.
Distinguishing between a good player and a bot probably won’t be that hard. A simple aimbot would probably fire exactly at a target’s (0, 0) coordinate,
bots are way more elaborate than that, even 20 years ago there were randomization patterns.
Unless the aimbot is using its own AI learning system, it’ll not behave as a human would. For example, it might fire at a random point in a circle, where a human might have better aim along the horizontal axis or something.
People with wallhacks will deliberately move their crosshairs over people that they see through walls. Or, if they know the server is watching for that, they’ll make a subconscious effort to never have their crosshairs over someone through walls.
Inexhaustive of things that kernel mode code can do that unprivileged (without “root”) user mode cannot:
Update and install drivers.
Run programs (like cryptominers) without them appearing in the task list.
Make network requests ignoring all firewalls and monitoring tools, even when seemingly in airplane mode.
Monitor your webcam and microphone, possibly without turning on that little light next to it.
Escape any sandbox you put it in.
Replace the OS with one containing malicious code.
Replace the efi firmware with one that replaces any future OS install with the aforementioned malicious OS.
Permanently brick your graphics card.
Take advantage of buggy hardware to burn your house down.
And so on. The question you should be asking isn’t “are they going to do this?” but instead “why are they even asking for this permission in the first place?”.
A game where you run around pretending to be a space marine doesn’t need low level access to your hardware.
I’d argue that any software that is adversarial towards the user/computer owner, and takes actions specifically to hinder an action by them, on their own machine, is malicious.
We’d be absolutely apoplectic if the government demanded we install a surveillance tool on our laptops in order to e.g. access the DMV website or file our taxes, but when someone tells us to in order to play a game, it’s okay? Nah.
I don’t. Anything on the client can be tampered with. It’s the server’s job to make sure anything they receive is both valid and consistent with how a human would act.
how do you stop it on client side? I’m not sure if it has been deployed into the wild but these days computer vision is good enough to just work off the images. Capture image signal, fake usb mouse outputting movements calculated from image data. If this isn’t already available it’s only held back by the need for extra hardware.
I just started apex two month ago and i think i haven't encountered more than one cheater, but i wasn't really sure. I watched a video on cheaters on apex yesterday and ooof, it's really bad. In other games i played they would use aimbot and or walls. But not speedhacking, dual wielding, aimbot and quickshielding and what not. And apparently nothing really ever happens to them.
Quick disclaimer, I’ve been involved with FOSS shooters for something like 20 years now. I mention that to establish where I come from: in a FOSS game anybody can modify the game client all they want, so all the bullshit is out of the way from the start. You can’t hide behind make-believe notions such as “they can’t modify the client” – which is one of the major lies and fallacies of commercial close-source games. If there’s something you don’t want the client to know or do, you make it so on the server.
There is a lot of things that the server can do that can severely limit cheater shenanigans. If you don’t want them to see through walls then don’t tell them what’s behind walls. If you don’t want them to know what’s behind them then don’t tell them what’s outside their cone of view. If you don’t want them to teleport look where they were a moment ago and where they claim to be now and figure out if it should be possible. You get the idea.
Aimbots can be detected because at the core it’s a simple issue of the client’s aim snapping from one place to the target too fast. What’s “too fast” and the pattern of the movement can be up for debate but it can definitely be detected and analysed and reviewed in many ways – regular code, AI, and human replay.
If this kind of analysis is too much for your server to perform in real time (it was too much, 20 years ago) then you can store it and analyse it offline or replay it for human reviewers. You can fast-parse game data for telltale signs, analyse specific episodes in detail, and decide to ban players. Yes it happens after the game was ruined but at least it happens.
There are a couple of types of cheating that you can’t detect server side:
Modifications to the client HUD that help the player grok information faster and better. This is a large category that can include things like colorblindness overlays, font changes, UI changes, movement tracking on display etc. As far as I’m concerned that falls under HUD modding and should be welcome in any healthy game. Again, if you don’t want clients to have a piece of information don’t give it to them, and design your game in a way that such mods are mostly irrelevant.
Automating input. Again a large category that includes macros that speed up complex chains of operations. Can be slowed down by imposing server-side delays but you can hurt legit fast players this way too. Same as above, if this is what makes or breaks your shooter then perhaps you should rethink it.
Some of the most fun games I’ve seen did not care about HUD mods and macros and on the contrary embraced them. You want to write a macro that will auto-purchase the best gear based on your available coin after respawn? Knock yourself out, because what constitutes “best” gear changes depending of the circumstances, and a veteran with a pistol can smoke your ass anyway if you don’t know how to properly use that fancy plasma gun.
I’ve mentioned human review above which brings up an interesting feature that I don’t see implemented in enough games: saving and replaying game metadata. It’s stupidly simple to store everything that happened during a match on the server side and it doesn’t take much space. You can offer that recording to seasoned players to replay on their PC which allows them to see the match from any player’s point of view. An experienced veteran can notice all kinds of shenanigans this way – and it’s also an excellent e-sport and machinima feature that enables commentary, editing, tutorials and so on.
Edit: Oh, forgot one thing. You may be wondering, then why don’t the big game companies do all this? Simple, cost. Why should they pay for server juice and staff to review games properly when they can slap a rootkit on your computer and use your resources?
in a FOSS game anybody can modify the game client all they want, so all the bullshit is out of the way from the start. You can’t hide behind make-believe notions such as “they can’t modify the client” – which is one of the major lies and fallacies of commercial close-source games.
Sometimes, just for practical performance reasons, with realtime games, the client is gonna need access to data that would permit one to cheat. You can’t do some game genres very well while keeping things on the server.
Consoles solve this by not letting you modify your computer. I think that if someone is set on playing a competitive game, that’s probably the best route, as unenthusiastic as I am about closed systems. The console is just better-aimed at providing a level playing field. Same hardware, same performance, same input devices, can’t modify the environment.
'Course, with single player games, all that goes out the window. If I want to modify the game however I want, I should be able to do so, as it doesn’t hurt anyone else. I should be able to have macros or run an FPS in wireframe mode or whatever.
For PC competitive multiplayer, in theory, you could have some kind of trusted component for PCs (a “gaming card” or something) that has some memory and compute capability and stores the stuff that the host can’t see. The host could put information that the untrusted code running on the host can’t see on the card. It also lets anti-cheat code run on the card in a trusted environment with high-bandwidth and low-latency access to the host, so you can get, for example, mouse motion data at the host sampling rate for analysis. That’d be a partial solution.
Sure, it’d be a solution for five minutes until someone delids the secure enclave on the gaming card, extracts the keys, and builds their own open source hw alternative.
High-performance FPGAs are actually relatively cheap if you take apart broken elgato/bmd capture cards, just a pain in the butt to reball and solder them. But possibly the cheapest way to be able to emulate any chip you could want.
someone delids the secure enclave on the gaming card, extracts the keys
Not a problem. You can potentially go for an attack on hardware, maybe recover a key, but you have a unique key tied to it. Now the attacker has a key for a single trusted computer. He can’t distribute it with an open-source FPGA design and have other users use that key, or it’ll be obvious to the server that many users have the key. They blacklist the key.
It’s because hardware is a pain to attack that consoles don’t have the cheating issues that PCs do.
I’m just a little bit late to the Baldurs Gate 3 party,
Late? As a patient gamer I would say you got in early. :)
I played most of the mainstream CRPG, including multiple Larian Studios titles and I have no doubt that I will play BG3 as well… But probably in a year or two after the game gets some polish and, hopefully, a discount.
BTW, thanks for posting and generating content in Lemmy.
There’s also no statute of limitations with Baldur’s Gate games. When there are people still getting into the previous games in the series for the first time 20 years after they were released, you have a little more of a grace period before considering yourself “late to the game.”
Oh, totally fair. Theres bugs. But not on the level of AAA fames that get churned out. This game sits in a completely different category to other games in terms of development and quality etc.
The point veing you dont need to wait for it to be polished as its been in that process for longer than any other AAA game at release.
I cannot help you with BG3 as I have not bought it yet.
Having said that, and knowing other games from the same developer, I guess BG3 is probably friendly enough to new players to CRPG. Just be warned that it is probably also overwhelming (I played the last two games and they took me more than 100 hours each).
If you played any d&d game (videogame or paper) is easier. If you played previous BG, it helps in some lore, but overall I think its quite easy to get in some more classic classes, like warrior, cleric, wizard or rogue
I’m pretty dialed into indie games. What kind of games do you like? I might be able to recommend some. I get most of my indie recommendations through word of mouth or curators.
The steam store page has an algorithm tuned to your preferences. If you’ve already been playing a lot of live service games, then it assumes you must like them. Once you start showing an interest in other games, you can probably just cruise through your discovery queue.
To skip the algorithm, you can try looking at the steam store web page in a private / incognito window. But if most of the money makers are live service or free-to-play then that may just be the default offering.
It’s mostly just finding some reviews/word of mouth sources that you trust and which align with your tastes.
On the review side of things Second Wind covers a decent spread of indie games. I also occasionally see some new stuff from streamers, but that’s more of a toss up since there’s a lot of sponsored coverage.
Almost everything on my store page is AAA or liveservice trash.
Very little on my Steam page is. This is just one data point but still it suggests their suggestion algorithm somewhat works for this.
Just an observation on that specific thing not a disagreement with the problem. Live service is trash and needs to go away if it’s not an exclusively multiplayer game.
Look at what pirate repackers like fitgirl and dodi are putting out. They have a much lower throughput and often focus on popular indie or small studio titles.
That’s not my experience with steam at all. Only one or two options of the steam store tend to show AAA games over indie games. If you browse by category or using the dynamic recommendation you’ll see plenty of good games.
I think this may be algorithmic. Like steam gives suggestions based on what you have already purchased, and what other people who purchased the same games also like. Additionally it’ll tell you what your friends are playing if you friend them on steam. This sort of gives everyone a different picture of steam suggestions that is tailored to them. It might be a good idea to find older non-live service games you like, add them to a new profile or wishlist, and then see what new information pops up for you.
Phoenix was the best place I’d ever worked until they came along. Fucking bitcoin bros destroyed everything because they didn’t understand the games industry.
You can blame crypto bros but the original owners sold out. Once a studio has been swallowed up by a conglomerate it is only a matter of time before it turns to shit.
The owners might have had no choice though because they took a ton of venture capital funding.
I’ve realized that it’s best to just avoid any company that takes VC because they will inevitably fuck everyone over.
I wish I could get more into this, but yes there were some major missteps during the covid/post-covid “stocks are crazy high, money is free!” period. After that there just wasn’t really a way to recover.
Unfortunately it’s pretty hard to avoid VC money, the tech industry runs on it.
If you worked on Dauntless, just want to say I appreciate your part! Only played it for a while at release because the grind turned me off but it’s been sad seeing news pop up of how it has been going downhill. Was such a fun game.
Sucks that good game devs get laid off because the leaders are asleep at the wheel unless it involves monetization.
I’m okay with a little chromatic aberration and vignette.
Why? It’s literally something that pro camera tools have added in-software fixes for to remove them. Like - if you’re simulating an old JVC vidicon tube camera and wanting to make something specifically look like an image capture device from a specific time, I get it, but otherwise, it just seems like a way to hide the fact that your graphics aren’t quite hitting the realism mark and you think if you obscure it a bit, players will think it looks more “real.”
I’m very aware, I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the years removing them from photography projects.
For vignette, it accomplishes a lot of the same thing in games as it does in photography in general: it is a subtle focus shifter. For some games - like some photos - I enjoy that little bit of extra emphasis on the center of the screen.
For chromatic abberation, i generally avoid it in photography, but it can be used for effect. I feel like that’s also true to a point in games. Over the top CA feels like trying to watch something without 3d glasses. A little bit on the fringes can give a smidge of retro (and, oddly, futuristic) style for effectively no compute cost. It’s definitely overused though, and I tend to turn it off more often than not.
Agreed on the “shifting focus” part for vignetting specifically - but everything else… outside of specifically tailoring to fit a particular “aesthetic” I think are crutches that are generally used to obscure an overall graphical presentation in order to work in a similar way to how squinting your eyes works.
I agree that highly stylized games like “Bodycam…”
…use things like a specific kind of grain, noise, distortion, aberration, etc. to create a highly appealing visual aesthetic designed to match an actual low-fidelity police body camera, but Battlefield and CoD have much less excuse in my book.
The camera aesthetic stuff only makes sense on things like the AC-130 killstreak in CoD where you’re emulating the on-aircraft cameras actually used in the real deal.
Aah, i think it was tie-fighter, where you could lock on and press a key to match speeds with an enemy - (albeit instantaneous only).
Maybe it was there in x-wing, but i feel like it was one of the minor qol improvements in tie-fighter that made it better.
I don’t find the absence of criticism suspicious. The petition makes sense. It aims to solve a problem that affects many individuals and a significant part of human culture.
What I do find suspicious is the sudden emergence of criticism now that it looks like it might succeed. I smell astroturfing and media manipulation.
Man, for a console gamer coming over this thread has a bunch of pretty terrible recommendations. I can't imagine a better way to send somebody back to console gaming than immediately dumping a bunch of fiddly mods and janky old stuff on them so they can play their OS for a while before having any fun.
I mean, if they're into competitive, hardcore console stuff they probably will want to decide if they want to go down the rabbit hole of competitive PC gaming. Checking out a couple MOBAs or fast mouse and keyboard shooters is probably a good way to start (for Steam ease of use I suppose DOTA2 and CS2 are the obvious choices). That's the fighting game equivalent stuff they're unlikely to have played already. I'd say if they aren't feeling it, it's fine to step away, though.
Depending on how beefy their gaming PC is, it may be fun to go for crazy console-crushing visuals. Path traced games like Indiana Jones or Cyberpunk may be fun to check out even if they've played the console versions, if they have a current-gen expensive GPU in there.
There are a couple of genres that are also cross-over but play best on PC, like survival sims and the like. I'm a PC controller player, but I'll switch to mouse and keyboard for, say, Satisfactory, although that's less action-packed and timing-based.
And of course there's upcoming stuff. VF 5 REVO is coming out in January, and that seems like a good chance to jump into a new thing on a gaming PC instead.
I agree. People keep suggesting Factorio, which leads me to believe that they have not actually read the post since his friend is into souls-likes and heavy combat games. Factorio is the antithesis of that! I don’t personally play those games (Factorio is one of my most played games), so I can’t make suggestions aside from Monster Hunter.
Yeah, that's why Satisfactory is probably a better choice (I mean, it's mostly "what if Factorio didn't look like a 1999 Flash game").
Honestly in 2025 (hey, happy new year!) things are platform-agnostic enough that the biggest thing to do when you switch to PC gaming is go check how all the games you know play when you run them at 200 fps or whatever. But even if you're an action game guy I do think it's work taking a few minutes to decide if you're going to be a sweaty mouse and keyboard guy and it's time to start browsing online stores for mice with ten grams shaved off the mouse wheel or whatever.
I posted about this in another thread, but Epic also bought exclusivity for games that were crowd-funded then had the option to have the game on Steam removed or you’d get the Steam key after the exclusivity period expired. This pissed off a lot of people.
Yeah, this caused A LOT of controversy back then. As far as I know, Epic has stopped doing this and has pivoted a bit more into funding game development (i.e. Alan Wake 2.) That being said, that gave Epic a terrible reputation when they initially launched EGS.
I meant with crowd funded games. I’m aware that they still buy exclusivity. Though from what I know they pay indies less compared to what they used to pay.
I don’t actually know all the games that did this, but the most famous examples are Phoenix Point and Shenmue 3. I already read that Outer Wilds was another one that took the exclusivity deal.
I’d come to enjoy several creators who simply could not tolerate the negative attention of bigots. People’s desire to compel conformity, against the very nature of their subjects, creates a society that is not only deleterious to them and their subject, but mentally taxing to the rest of us. Literally not a single soul directly involved in this comes out ahead. It’s just a game designed to promote infighting and tertiary power grabs.
And that’s why I love lemmy. The general absence of []-phobes is fantastic. It’s the only reason I can tolerate the general inability to read sarcasm here.
I’ve been spending a fairly sizable amount of time lately with the Android emulation scene, and the amount of times the public goes nuclear over the tiniest inconsequential things is…just unbelievable. From the []-phobes to death threats. I wish that people would learn some social skills.
The dev of Lazarus didn’t have this kind of reaction to Seaglass, so I think we could say that this trend of being a disgusting bigot is one which is being ‘allowed’ more recently than it once was in social media.
so I think we could say that this trend of being a disgusting bigot is one which is being ‘allowed’ more recently than it once was in social media.
I always try to bring this up because honestly, if we go pretty far back in internet terms, we can see that this has actually been brewing for over a decade.
In the past year, we have received thousands of emails and postcards protesting against EA for allowing players to create LGBT characters in our games. This week, we’re seeing posts on conservative web sites urging people to protest our LGBT policy by voting EA the Worst Company in America. That last one is particularly telling. If that’s what makes us the worst company, bring it on. Because we’re not caving on that.
When this happened in 2013, most of us thought this was absolute bunkum and just EA doing damage control. Now, I’m genuinely not so sure anymore. I think perhaps some suit at EA had noticed something happening, some change in the waters that had not yet become “mainstream” but was bubbling beneath the surface, slowly growing. People made fun of this response from EA, because we thought at the time “this is the modern era, those are just backwards fools stuck in the past that are complaining about LGBT inclusion, if they even exist at all, I bet EA is making it up to cover for how shitty they are.” But… were they?? At the time it was roundly dismissed because popular culture widely accepted LGBTQ inclusion, but now we’re on a backswing and people feel emboldened to be disgusting bigots and be loud and proud about being a exclusive asshat who hates people different than themselves. Has it just been brewing under the surface for over a decade?
Damn, I hate how often I look at a situation like that and just think… what a waste. Some morons came in and ruined the message most of us were trying to send to EA by making them the “Worst Company in America”. Now these gross bigots get a “win”, and EA gets to sidestep all the legitimate anti-consumer issues most people were railing against. What a waste. And it feels like that’s everything these days, someone gross is always “on your side” looking to claim your victories for their own narratives.
I still have my doubts that was the majority of the issue, at least the first time they “won” that award in 2012. That poll happened 1 month after Mass Effect 3’s release, when emotions were still raw over people’s disappointment with the game’s ending. That’s not to defend those who were voting for EA over, say, Nestle or any number of other awful companies. But most of what I saw was immature lashing out to punish anyone perceived as responsible for the writing. I remember people cheering they’d managed to harass EA’s tech support Twitter account into closing, like they’d made some great moral victory. It was all pretty gross, just for different reasons than EA claimed.
I’m not saying it was a majority issue, I’m saying the beginnings of the social turn against LGBTQ openness and inclusion has been brewing under the surface for a long time and this is potentially evidence of it.
Lemmy appears to have a lot of autistic users on it, which explains the struggles to understand sarcasm. But autistic people tend to be open-minded and we’re often targeted by the same bigots that you’re lamenting about. So while the sarcasm thing is an issue, it’s also a sign of an open-minded user base.
Dang Ive been wrestling with the realization that I might be neurodivergent in some way, I’m on Lemmy but I do understand sarcasm. This hasn’t helped at all
We actually fairly recently had a severe mental event, and since then, frequently read sarcasm as serious on the first pass and sometimes for some time after.
It fucking sucks from this side, too. We just go charging at someone and then have to be like, oh, uh, sorry, guess I was socially stupid!
We can at least take some solace in knowing we all hate the situation together?
Sorry, I think I misinterpreted your comment. Are you using something like the “royal we”? I initially read it as referring to Lemmy as a collective, figuring you were talking about something that happened here.
They only had their comments removed for “being rude”. They did not get banned.
Studies are being done to look for treatment and prevention of various issues historically treated with primarely weight loss. This research is finding positive results, and for some things like prediabetes it can be treated even while the person is gaining more weight. This is extremely imlortant research, because weight loss is not something everyone can and wants to do.
A comment attacked the research as useless as “the fatties” should just lose weight. After I responded with the importance for everyone of any size for this type of research being done, death in horrible and gruesome ways was wished on me and all other fat people and was even extremely proud of it too doubling down after being called out.
Outside of this one case, talking about body positivity and body liberation here on Lemmy feels like a minefield that will blow off any moment at any time. Either due to some crazy dude just attacking me or someone arguing it is all invalid because they don’t agree me and people in general can also not feel miserable in their bodies.
Disco Elysium is a fantastic one. There are an insane amount of choices that shape how you go about the investigation of the hanged man and ultimately what happens beyond that investigation. Choices of who to side with, how to side (openly or playing multiple sides, etc.), choices that ultimately define what kind of detective you are (by-the-book boring, superstar douchebag, violent tough guy, Sherlock Holmes-esque genius, etc., including my favorite: Twin Peaks Lynchian detective that bases their decisions off of dreams, intuition and imaginary conversations with the dead body), and even how failing or succeeding at something can lead to progress in very different ways. If you fail to hit that person you tried to punch, or miss that shot with your gun, or utterly fail to convince someone to help you, you progress through in very different ways so that failing your way to the truth is just as satisfying and entertaining as succeeding your checks to get there.
And of course Fallout: New Vegas. Whether you choose to support the New California Republic, Caesar’s Legion, Mr. House, or a truly independent New Vegas, none of them are perfect. Each succeeds in an ideal society in some ways but completely fails at others, leaving you to decide which imperfect system you feel is the right one for the world instead of shoving an obvious answer in your face.
Lol, YDI. When asked to provide the identifiable information, you just say “Stop and do the thing I want.” You seriously expect them to just hand over an account to someone who can’t provide basic information about it? You owned yourself, pal.
I misread the order of the interaction, which painted a much more antagonistic view of OP. Sorry about that. That said, the actual interaction plus their further reaction here is still not good. “Brainstorming how to automate the requests” is not an appropriate response to any of this.
I’m just imagining their pure rage when reaching out to a Bitcoin Dev/maintainer whatever with something like „I don’t know what my Wallets name was, idk my 10 phrase password, but give me back my 10$ in Btc right now”
And then pasting this again with the Title DONT BUY BTC THEY SCAM YOU
Dude, treat every service like your wallet.
You have an Email, you have a password. If you forget these, consider everything the Support does as an extra service and not the bare minimum.
Social Club is the kind of account you use a throwaway email for, and just use whatever random nickname isn’t taken yet. I, personally, have no idea what the email or nickname to my Social Club account are. I also have bought GTA V through Steam back in 2015 and haven’t lived into Social Club since. I think it’s perfectly fair to expect that your Steam account shouldn’t be hijacked by Rockstar upon linking it to one Social Club account once.
At the very least, if they’re gonna have a Rockstar launcher, it should allow you to unlink your Steam account through it, using your Steam credentials, and free it up to link to a new Social Club account.
Look at the timestamps, the conversation is from top to bottom. So technically I guess he tried to answer, but he probably missed the answer and instead had a tone that happened to match exactly how a scammy email would sound.
If legitimate, it’s probably better that they didn’t get to successfully automating spamming the support system. Nothing screams legitimate requests like bot spamming… Don’t know the tone of his follow ups, but best to take a breath and reset their tone and try again, asking what other details aside from nickname can be used, given their steam access.
Ah, yeah, I totally misread those screenshots. My mistake. Still not good, though. I take back that YDI, but yeah, not surprised they’re getting ghosted after all that.
While you can argue that nothing happened and we still have loot boxes, I’d argue that my life is greatly enriched for not feeling any motivation to play in those looty skinner box games.
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