For now… 🖕🏽 They worded that so weasely, they’re just waiting for the storm to pass and for Legal to come up with some compelling reason why they’re totally “obligated” to make it happen, “hands tied” “so sorry” and all that.
Fuck Sony. They made this SOP way back when, and there’s no way they let this stop them forever. It’s all about profit, not what “we” want.
Or, more rationally, you all invested so much of yourselves into your gamer outrage campaign and built yourselves up as the underdogs fighting the big, mean corporation. And when, to your own surprise, you actually won and got all of your demands met without compromise, you still can’t let it go because you managed to incorporate all that upset over a video game into your personal identities over just a few days time.
So now, instead of celebrating your win, you’ll limply cling to your hatred of Sony for a few more days or weeks until everyone finds something else to get upset about.
I talk like I have seen this exact same thing happen over and over and I’m sick of capital-G Gamers throwing tantrums over every inconvenience. You aren’t Union Men fighting for your rights. You’re gamers upset by a TOS change to your new toy even though Steam was going beyond their own policy to honor refunds.
Aw, the gamer is upset I forced some introspection into their life.
But no, I’m sorry. You’re totally a noble warrior who fought back the evil Sony and now must remain ever vigilant lest Kazuo Hirai leap from the shadows and scream “Riiiiidge Racer” at you and take away your toys while Gabe Newell gives you your money back and sheepishly shrugs like “I know, right? This guy, man.”
This is such a weird thing to be upset over, and a weird side to take so passionately that you do.
I don’t even play Helldivers, nor do I plan to after this, it’s just on the one side there’s random upset people, on the other side there is the corp that got infamous for distributing straight up malware in a weird effort to enforce DRM. Why would people go back to being happy with a company that tried to fuck them over, and then walked its position back to the status quo with no commitments of not trying this again later.
The “random upset people” on the former side were perfectly happy to give their money to the “corp” on the latter side before the TOS change. This has nothing to do with how untrustworthy Sony has been in the past and everything to do with upset Gamers wanting to keep their outrage party going even after they got what they wanted.
The problem is who can you give money to for entertainment if not to the same 3 corps who have bought everything, and how else can you protest them doing stuff that’s outrageous even by their standards?
The fuck clowns are buying up our culture. It’s hard to not participate in it. I don’t play these kinds of games, but I’ve nothing on people who do. We should beat up the fuck clowns until they serve society again.
And just to be clear, I am advocating violence in the form of stringent regulations binding corporations towards socially beneficial paths. I advocate for violent anti-trust measures to the point even the execs don’t know who is still working for them and who has been broken off to another company to compete freely. And I want worker protections that cause mind-bending fear in wage thieves.
How about we just not advocate violence at all? Regulations can be helpful but also the government needs to make sure it is not creating unconstitutional laws that violate people’s rights, and that includes their right to make bad choices. Otherwise the law will end up more authoritarian than free.
Sorry, I went too deep into sarcasm in there. I wasn’t advocating for violence, just laws protecting society and people that are strong enough to deter corps from breaking them.
“We’re still learning what is best for PC players” Well PlayStation staff member, it definitely isn’t having people create another account when they already have a Steam account.
Maybe a company that has (mostly) made consoles isn’t exactly playing games or has people on staff on the executive level that play(ed) on a PC. I’m 30 and outside of a brief time I tried to play on a PC I’ve pretty much been console my entire life. My first gaming experiences were all on console. It’s completely logical for a company to make a move like this when they have specialized in one area for a time.
As someone who rehosts an old game after the official servers shutdown, we have a dedicated servers for cheating and real moderators for the non-cheat ones. It works great but big corps don’t way to pay for mods.
I also wonder why big companies don’t do it to train ML algorithms on the cheat server data too…
Only if you want to cap the skill limit. Otherwise you would typically have a hand full of players that are genuinely just good or rather far outside the normal skill range. I guess with a lot of data collection one might be able to determine if there was some kind of natual progress or sudden skill jumps, but all in all it could weed out legitimate players.
I’d have a bit more symphaty if they at least tried to do the bare minimum before choosing the nuclear option.
Most notably, the PVE queues in LoL were infested with bots for years and you could tell them apart from real players before they even made their first move. Often times you’d be the only human player. If stuff like that wasn’t caught, I have serious doubts about their previous efforts to catch “real” cheaters.
Also there could (and should?) be “simply” two launch options. One with “hardcore anti cheat” and one with some much simpler anti-cheat. Then a lobby option what you want to allow. You want to play competitive/league/whatever? Then require the hardcore anti-cheat. Otherwise: why bother.
Yup. At the very least, they shouldn’t have made it a requirement for TFT. If it were possible to cheat there that’d be more of a game design problem anyway.
Honestly I’d rather have a cheater in my lobby than Riot Games deep into the sections of my PC they should never have accessed.
With that said, I do not play Valorant for this reason (and also because it would require me to dualboot since Vanguard cannot be ported on Linux, lol)
I’d be somewhat ok with Kernel anticheat if they would work, but the simple truth is that they do nothing of value. COD has Kernel anticheat with Riccochet and is flooded with cheaters. Valorant has only slightly less cause riot updates Vanguard more often.
But guess what, it usually takes 1-2 days for new cheats to reach the relevant forums, maybe a few days more until they are more widely aviable. At most cheaters have to spend another 5€ every 6 months, but that’s it. They don’t care, the amount of money spent on accounts every other month is already way higher.
The only two things anticheat like vanguard protects you from is script kiddies that google “valorant cheat .exe” and Linux only players. And the former could just as well be filtered out without Kernel level.
It’s all a fucking smokescreen. Man, people just eat that shit up. Every time. It’s almost like the game is saturated in satire and we’re spooning it down ourselves.
They are used to playstation players who buy a console for twice the price it's worth through discord bots. I don't think they even know what a backlash is
Nowadays a console is just a locked down, less expensive pc. I think buying the components of a ps5 and assembling the pc is more expensive than just buying a console and liberating it, which is what I would do if I was to ever buy one.
which is why the steam deck was such a breath of fresh air, it’s what consoles SHOULD be.
A computer built primarily for gaming, sold at a reasonable price, that merrily lets you switch to desktop mode and launch excel for some office work if you want to.
"We listened to our accounting, and the massive wave of refunds and unbought mtx is hurting our numbers. PR isn’t happy about the reviews either. We’ll keep you updated on future plans for fucking you over!
Do you really think that Sony will actually back down? They are calming down the shitstorm that is going over all media, socials and steam. They’ll reorganize and will move on with their plans. Arrowhead and Helldivers is just one of many assets.
The review bombing was serious but I’d eat my hat if this stunt cut revenue by more than 10%. I don’t have anything for Helldivers but here’s an article about Dragons Dogma 2
It means the two million people playing it now have to get emails, promotions, and keep sony products in their mind.
They obviously didn’t think it would be popular. Just like Wizards of the Coast when they tried to put out a new license that said “anything with the words ‘dungeons and dragons’ on it becomes our intellectual property”, they assumed that pissing off their entire fanbase would be net positive because people will keep buying their stuff no matter how bad it gets.
This shows the power of steam reviews with it being driven by the actual community. People tried to downplay and belittle its effectiveness, but it being front and center on the store page does have more impact than there would be without steam reviews. If there were no steam reviews the PSN requirement would have been pushed through with it being easier to ignore some random internet comments on social media than a store page.
I suspect someone in accounting ran the numbers and decided they stand to lose more to reduced microtransaction sales than they would have gained via selling scraped data.
Though I agreed with you. It’s still a win, but we have to be careful not to conflate this with Sony “caring”.
I still think the biggest reason why they wanted to push their shitty platform is to artificially push player numbers. "Look how many people use our scam network, see?"
Now the hilarious part is that hopefully someone has to explain why people go these lengths, just to not join their shitty service.
That isn’t why. PlayStation doesn’t view this as a problem and in fairness, I don’t either. If the game had shipped with this requirement, it would’ve been fine. Many people put up with Ubisoft and they have a whole separate account plus launcher.
What Sony actually wanted was to make it easier on their server side to authenticate purchases and then to use the same PSN account systems to matchmaker for easier cross-play.
Would they collect data? I guess. They can already do that if they want as a publisher. So yeah it’s purely just to use their ecosystem, which makes sense.
Insane take imo. How does purchase authentication or cross play suddenly become “easier” with this change? Either it works or it doesn’t; having PC players connected to a PSN account doesn’t alleviate server load.
Did I mention server load? What I mean is that having a PSN account means that whatever game is processing your account details doesn’t have to deal with Steam accounts, it just deals with a PSN account the same as it would if you were on PS5.
What I’m saying is it streamlines the code on the developers side of the games they’re publishing and again if Sony is using systems already to authenticate purchases or whatever that can be collected in systems they already have.
This isn’t rocket science, PSN may just be a translation layer.
Correct, I never said it wasn’t buggy either. I’m just pointing out that if you have cross play and you already have console support with console user IDs then it makes sense to just convert PC players into that same console user system.
This is what Xbox used to do when publishing games on Steam and still do with their GamePass stuff. And very similarly, that system also broke things and still breaks things for people.
It absolutely has to deal with a Steam account every single time I log in to confirm ownership of the title. And then again every time I make a purchase from my Steam wallet. And again every time I connect to a friend through my Steam friends list.
It’s literally adding another potential point of failure and removes none of the necessities of dealing with the other service. I only suggested the server load bit because I can’t for the life of me understand how you can think it’s “easier” to insist that these two systems interact in a new way when they’re already up and functioning, and the original reason account linking was disabled was to make the game more stable.
Because those systems already exist for the console players. All they’re doing is switching it over to steam but they likely had a translation layer there before to do all the things you’re saying but through PSN instead. Why? Because that system already exists for consoles.
So their options here are that they can take the netcode for consoles and modify it to utilize SteamIDs and fetch data from Steam or they can just turn your Steam ID into a console ID and treat all of the inputs to their systems exactly like they would on the PS5 while fetching them from Steam.
I’m not saying it’s a good idea, I’m saying you’d think that just trying to match the console and the way it handles players would be simpler. Especially when you’re trying to make cross play work. Clearly it wasn’t so they temporarily ditched it. Maybe Sony does just want your data but if that’s true, why would the telemetry gathering be such a big deal? And they also could just use your SteamID for that data gathering. So clearly PSN used to be more integrated than people here are suggesting
I mean yeah this is especially true for online games as this is a form of DRM for Sony and it gives them control to easily reject or accept keys and ban users using their pre-existing systems.
Same thing with cross-play, it’s possible that some of these games were designed to use PSN systems and so that makes integration easy. No clue, but if true it makes sense from Sonys perspective on both of those fronts.
Sure, and I’m not suggesting said bean counter was responsible for the decision. What I am suggesting is that the only thing that influenced the decision was bottom line finances. Someone ran the numbers, and when the suits discovered that they stand to lose more money than they’d gain, they reversed the decision. Never mistake this as Sony “listening” to anything more than their investors and their bottom line.
It's probably a bit of this and a bit of that. I mean the game went from one of the best revied games to one of the worst in a day. There were refunds and a drop in players all at the same time.
My prediction is that the game will rebound, certainly, but will not reach back to the levels it had before. A percentage of people who refunded won’t be buying again and another section probably will quit the game altogether, now or as soon as something newer and shinier shows up. Lots will forget to change their review.
Sony actively hurt their own game and probably made irreparable damage.
Many countries actually have such systems in place today, even Russia (lol) - not that they work too well.
Normally, there are two sources of issues here: petitions can in fact be declined, and, in cases where the signature count depends on scale of the petition they can be intentionally escalated as to make it impossible to gain enough signatures. Besides, in many cases petitions can be left unanswered for longer than promised.
Long story short, the system is open to shenanigans and doesn’t make the government truly accountable.
We need the system that would actually make politicians rapidly lose their jobs when they ignore public opinion.
If slaves would have a vote, they’d certainly strongly choose one option :D
Same for the discriminated groups.
If they don’t have a vote, this depends on the rest of society in the short run, but can cause violent rebellions in the long one. Democratic system does not eliminate possibility of revolt.
The sony communities I saw poopooing the whole thing flipped immediately into “WE DID IT” mode, pretending they actually cared about the people that were going to lose access.
This is why Steam reviews should be taken much more seriously. This was impossible to avoid due to the enormous amount of bad press and devs themselves jumping on the hate train, but I’m betting that a lot of review bombing attempts have been quietly offset by the company just paying people for fake reviews. It’s especially obvious when the game has relatively low reviews for months and months, then suddenly bad stuff happens and along with the justified dump of negative reviews, positive ones also skyrocket (99% of which composed of “good game”, random memes or ascii art).
I’d agree with this statement for most games, but the best way to enjoy Helldivers 2 specifically is to play it when the playerbase and the hype is at its peak. The gameplay will still be just as good a year from now, sure, but you’d miss the emergent story being built right now
Sure, not trying to tell you how to enjoy your games at all! I was just explaining why people would want to play this specific game closer to launch rather than later
Agreed! I was just mostly showing my gratitude to the people fighting Sony and my relief that I can get a chance to play, didn’t mean for my message to be taken literal on the “too long” part lol.
That being said, my reasoning for wanting to play it soon is that I’ve got a few friends who are all now interested in picking it up… I’d rather enjoy the time to play with them now then not be able to play it with them in a year when they’ve moved onto something else.
Like I get your sentiment, and I agree…but waiting for a game like this to die and then going see it wasn’t worth it good thing I waited doesn’t make any sense in a general way. Like imagine waiting for destiny servers to shut down in the future and say good thing I didn’t waste my time. Like yeah of course it does when the player base moves on. The point was to play it before that happened.
Like…youre right…but whats the point of saying anything. You don’t like live service games because of the risk of stuff like this happening. It’s not like a no man’s sky thing where you wait for them to patch and offer discounts
Yes I would say so. If game doesn’t show itself able to stay around for years and shuts down early like other live services games then I’d personally have considered it a waste of money due to it becoming unplayable compared to non live service games.
Most successful live services games are free too, so that’s an additional uphill battle for paid live service games. It depends on if someone is willing to spend full retail money on what may be a temporary experience. I’m not one of those.
For paid online only games I don’t rush in. If it seems like it will stick around after steep discounts that’s when I’d be fine with spending money. If it dies before then I’m glad I didn’t waste money on it. No need to be offended that I take the same approach to paid live service games as I do regular games. You can choose to pay for early access if the experience is worth it too you, and if it is worth it you should.
Oh I’m not offended, I don’t play hell divers. I just associate patient gamers mentality with discounts and all dlcs and patches included. So I wanted to know what you said that for
Sony just did a Unity here. How the hell can you ruin such a beloved game in a single cheer stupid move, for the purpose of just gathering data. It’s beyond me.
::: spoiler spoiler Joel is portrayed as being a part of the journey of the game. He dies in the first “chapter”. They went so far as to switch a character out for him to make it look like he would be alive for the game. And then they try to make you sympathetic to the person who killed him by making you play as them for half the game. :::
It makes my blood boil how bad pt 2 is after the first one is one of the best games ever.
Did that actually break computers? I remember hearing about it at the time but I also don’t remember having a problem. I didn’t think I took any real precautions either, I just carried on as per and nothing ever happened.
the starforce driver sometimes prevented some exotic cd drives from working or caused bsods while playing audio cds, but the cases were relatively rare
nvm i didn’t realize they were talking about a different kind of drm
Not just any old malware, but insecure rootkits that allowed ANYONE to have total control over the system with their own malware above the OS-level with no way to even know the malware was there.
This statement reminds me awfully of the Living World Season 4 Story in Guild Wars 2.
And yes, before people become angry about this comparison: I said “reminds me”, not “the same as” or anything else.
Explanation (hard spoiler!):
spoilerIn essence, you do everything you can, unite different people for the fight that determines the fate of the world. But… you lose and that was the only chance. You barely survive with your friends; but not all. youtu.be/jk5nfHxyQno?t=7220The Commander (you) are asked what to do (because you always had some kind of answers; a plan; every time). But since this was the only hope, you say “I don’t know.”
That line hit hard when I played it. It’s rare to see protagonists acknowledge being at the end of their wits and have no clue what to do in face of impending doom.
At least for me I could get into the next story part after I was like “wtf just happened” but for players at the time of release this was the latest part of the story and they were stuck with this awful last line for week(s).
Can’t you make a free PSN account from any country? I know people in countries with no PSN using US PSN account, without any VPN or anything. You just set your country to US, or UK.
There are probably workarounds sure, but they shouldn’t be the default. Keep up the pressure on these suits so they know what their stupid decisions cause
I agree, but that doesn’t apply to multiplayer with server side verification and matchmaking. It’s notoriously difficult, near impossible to pirate exclusively multiplayer games.
Well, 3 data leaks in the last 10 years, at least one of which wasn’t their fault at all. This change is bad for several reasons but “data leaks” isn’t really one of them.
Ya ArrowHead knew what they were doing and what was going on. They signed up for it. There’s no way this wasn’t on their risk matrix ahead of time with the resolution already scoped out.
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