System scanning: EGS is known to automatically scan your system and send your data back to them. While this seems to be the same type of analytics Steam does occasionally, in Steam’s case, it’s opt-in, and done with full, informed consent.
Paid exclusives: Epic has been known to pay publishers to make their games artificially exclusive to their own store. They regularly claim this money is to support the development of the games in question, but this is easily disproven, as they’ve been seen buying games known to be complete more than once. Additionally, this has resulted in bait-and-switch-like situations, where users would prepurchase Steam copies of games, only to be informed that they wouldn’t be getting them.
Publisher-centric behavior: Another user here claimed that EGS is pro-developer and anti-consumer, but this is only half true. This only rings true in the case of self-published games. There have been cases of developers getting unwarranted backlash after aforementioned bait-and-switches, when they were just as surprised to learn about all the “development support” they received as anyone.
Tim Sweeney: Tim Weeney, the CEO of Epic, is an asshole. A giant, narcissistic, hateful shitbag. Just look at his Twitter, the dudes a giant POS.
Additionally, this has resulted in bait-and-switch-like situations, where users would prepurchase Steam copies of games, only to be informed that they wouldn’t be getting them.
I didn’t know about this.
It happened to Metro Exodus (great game btw) but iirc all pre orders were honoured and the game was just delisted.
You don’t have to like games just because they are popular. It’s clearly not for you and that’s really all there is to it, and that is ok. Go try something else that actually piques your interest.
My understanding is that it is a complete game with no microtransactions to shove along with it. After that I believe it is because it is really really good and not a common genre to get the spot light. Mainly the first part.
There’s also the reaction from other developers claiming that the game “sets an unrealistic standard for what to expect out of a game” despite it being exactly what people want from a triple A studio. Just a complete, well made, functional game with no microtransactions
I was there with KSP from the early days. Squad was not in the video game business, they were a billboard advertisement company. The lead dev HarvesteR started it as a passion project. It found success with the alpha and full release in 2015.
Then in 2017 Take-Two bought the rights to the game. Squad kept working on the original, but development of the sequel was handed off to Star Theory with Private Division publishing. The game was delayed, then development was moved to a new studio, Intercept Games, which was owned by Take-Two. They also poached a third of Star Theory’s personnel, which resulted in the studio’s death. They fucked around for a few years, released the early access version, then sold Private Division, closed Intercept Games, and abandoned the game.
In short: corporate interests. KSP2’s failure had nothing to do with KSP or its developers.
Same, I am still so mad about the whole ksp2 fiasco that I block all of take twos games on steam, they ain’t getting any money from me. I am so glad I didn’t buy it in EA although it looked promising.
I’m with you. I was excited to learn the other day that some of the KSP developers are working on a game called Kitten Space Agency that might fill the void left by KSP2’s demise.
That’s exactly right. They also had managers/publishers telling them to do shit like make the rockets even wobblier than KSP1 because it made for funny viral videos that would get more PR.
Nobody who actually played the game wanted wobblier rockets than KSP1. Nobody really wanted wobbly rockets at all. Sometimes a bug can actually be a feature, but in this case, it really was just a bug. The people in charge didn’t ever care about the people who actually played the game, they just wanted sales, and they made decisions accordingly. That’s why it looks nice, but plays like shit.
Yup, and honestly even according to that anti-art logic it was a strategic failure. Funny meme gifs were part of how the game gained notoriety, but you don’t maintain a game long term on meme status alone.
Even if “haha funni physics glitches” were still the in thing - I think people got over them fast, like with any comedy style - the longevity of the game came from the deep mechanics and impressive missions people could do, and the community support.
I actually think that sequels to breakout sandbox games are always doomed to fail. Like what if they tried to release Minecraft 2? It would be awful, and I think we all instinctively know it would be, which is kind of a self fullfulling prophecy.
Minecraft doesn’t have a monopoly on the special sauce that makes their game good. It has a decade and a half of support and cultural recognition from a dedicated following. You can’t make that happen a second time. I don’t like what’s been done with the franchise commercially, but they figured out how to milk it without doing a direct sequel, which I think is part of why it’s still relevant.
A couple of weeks ago the Mass Effect Trilogy was so cheap on Steam that it was hard to resist, so I pirated it. I’m already on Mass Effect 3, it’s been a while since I played the trilogy.
I bought mass effect legendary edition from epic last year, it was super cheap and I never played. I finally installed it a couple weeks ago and am playing the first game. It’s a great game, but the drm infrastructure is really frustrating.
To play the game, I need to:
Don’t click the desktop icon it installed for me, nothing will happen Start EA app Don’t click the icon on the side, nothing will happen Click on library Click on game Ignore the helpful hint to use the icon on the side to save time Click on launch This starts the epic store This then starts the mass effect launcher Click launch on the game I want While the game is loading, the epic store will now steal focus back and I need to alt-tab back to the game Now I can play the game and it works fine
It really makes me think about pirating the other games instead of continuing this bs. Plus I should be able to then play them on Linux instead of needing to boot into Windows to play.
Gaben was absolutely correct in saying that piracy is a service problem.
So far, I get about 6-8 years out of whatever generation PlayStation controller I get. PS3 controller battery eventually crapped out. PS4 controller got pretty bad stick drift.
Tried an Xbox 360 controller once, it got stick drift after only a year.
Amy recommendations? I’ve been considering getting a new controller, but I use one so rarely. For the longest time I’ve used I think an ancient PS3 controller, or my old Steam Controller (which is great for some things but sucks for others).
While technically true, you will lose the capacitive touch functionality of the sticks (the steam deck knows when your thumbs are touching the sticks) unless you desolder the old thumb caps and resolder them on the new sticks.
Edit: You’re right. It appears newer Hall Effect Sticks for the Steam Deck come with the capacitive caps pre soldered, while the OG Gulikit Sensors required desoldering the original caps and resoldering them on the replacement board. That being said, it was super easy to do, even for my butterfingers that last touched a soldering iron in highschool more than 15 years ago.
Ah ok, so you were even earlier to the Deck modding scene than me, and it has evolved toward being even easier since.
Whew!
I appreciate your pointing this out and explanation, I wouldn’t want to have been unintentionally spreading misinfo.
… Nor would I have wanted to get my own Hall Effect ‘no soldering’ kit and then learned… actually there still is soldering in some other step or on some other component, that the ‘no soldering’ kits actually just mean ‘less soldering’.
I really wanted one of those transparent Atomic Purple shells for mine. Then thought, might as well swap the sticks since it’s already opened up.
Well the transfer into the new shell requires complete disassembly, which was quite bit more involved then I anticipated. The screen is glued to the top half of the shell. Getting a bit impatient, I shattered my screen as I was trying to pry it off. You need to heat the adhesive and remove the screen before it cools. I had done a couple of phone screen repairs in the past, and let me tell you, they use a lot less adhesive and because they are so small, you’ll easily be able to pop it off before the adhesive starts becoming super sticky again. Not so much with the Steam Deck.
Well, the Deck HD (1200p) screen was only like 10€ more than an OEM replacement, so I might as well. (I quite like it, much sharper and more vibrant than the original and FSR can still give you good results in games that can’t hit the resolution, but the battery life did take a small hit).
Long story short, I love my Atomic Purple Steam Deck HD with Hall Effect Sticks, where one cosmetic mod led me to do two hardware upgrades. I don’t regret it, but I doubt I would do it again. I just love how much you can do it.
I hate all online competitive games. Yup, all of em. I can’t relax! I can’t learn at my own pace! I can’t explore! The challenge is unknown! I don’t want to get better than strangers, i don’t care about them!
i like beating systems not people. Watching my BIL play CoD and that car soccer game, I’ve seen and heard some nasty shit. I guess it’s not unusual that people get competitive (ive seen people lose their composure over drunken kickball, i get its not just online) but considering how toxic people can be i just don’t get why people would invite that into their house.
Maybe im just not competitive. Yo, any ranked or generally competitive players, what makes you come back?
I miss server browsers and community servers. Just people playing casually and the teams could shuffle every round. It was competitive, but not sweaty plam bs and being too toxic would get you banned.
Ok first of all, online gaming communities especially around the most popular “serious” competitive gaming scenes are usually awful, terribly toxic places dominated by toxic masculinity.
It is a major problem in my opinion, both from the toxic people it breeds but also from the gatekeeping that keeps out a more diverse player base than just insecure men who hurl around insults and call shit “gay” when they don’t like it.
That being said, I do really like competitive multiplayer games like apex, battlebit, rocket league (car soccer game), halo infinite etc. I am not an especially competitive person though, I don’t HAVE to win and I don’t get super angry when I lose.
I enjoy competitive games because of the rich experience of playing a game against another human who is focused and motivated to win. I especially like playing with a team of humans against another team of humans. Humans are just so much more interesting and dynamic to compete against and generally a blast to cooperate with, singleplayer games often feel stale and like they are trying to forcefully induce a fabricated experience in me in comparison. Why do I want to play a singleplayer call of duty campaign that tries to make me “feel” like I am in a big battle when I can just play battlebit and actually be in a virtual battle with 200 other humans?
Another human competing against you for fun brings a great gift to the table from the perspective of game design and it takes an immense amount of effort to create a singleplayer experience anywhere near as engaging and dynamic. Likewise goes for a human teammate vs an AI one. Drive around in a gun truck in a singleplayer game and get an AI to gun for you and you have a slightly interesting experience where the AI just dumbly shoots at targets when you drive up to them… get a HUMAN to gun for you and all of a sudden you and that person are in an action movie together where your collective survival depends on how efficiently you work together and help each other out. Maybe you never talk to your gunner over a mic, it doesn’t matter really, the connection is still there. It never gets old to me because everything I do impacts other humans who then react and adapt which causes me to have to do the same.
Singleplayer games have to do a massive amount of work to make me fee like I am in a living breathing world that responds to me. Multiplayer games “just” have to setup an arena and let players loose. The experience of trying to outsmart another human who wants to win as bad as I do is perennially rewarding. Every moment I play a competitive multiplayer game I am working on integrating knowledge, skill, and emotional regulation and always learning and adapting. It makes my brain feel alive and stimulated in a way most single player games don’t (don’t get me wrong, I love good singleplayer games too).
I hate the toxicity and I always report it when I see it though.
I feel similarly. Playing with/against npc’s just doesn’t do it for me, and I don’t even use the mic in multiplayer games unless I’m playing with friends. Additionally though, I find video games a really tedious way to get a narrative. They’re long, there’s often a lot of grinding, and if I get stuck behind a boss I won’t figure out what happens next. So I don’t even bother with single player games unless they’re famously good and short, like I really enjoyed the portal games and when I find the time I’m going to play outer wilds. But most of the video games I play are closer to sports than narratives, it’s all about figuring out the little tricks and strategies to improve myself, and the occasional wild situations that can only happen with real people
I agree with you to an extent, in my opinion the gunplay and general movement/action parts of Red Dead Redemption 2 just isn’t fun or deep. Rockstar sucks at gunplay for the most part. I respect that the game is hugely admired and people love the story and open world but I just can’t engage with it for very long because the basic gameplay loop is too unsatisfying.
On the other hand I think really well made point and clicks like Strange Horticulture, the Blackwell Series, Machinarium and others and “interactive fiction” esque games like Roadwarden are awesome ways to tell stories. Other ways are cool too like Firewatch, Oxenfree or Papers Please. If the gameplay is fun I like games with good stories, but I don’t enjoy story focused games with mediocre but prominent mechanics.
I like competitive games where I feel like I outplayed my opponent, the feeling I get from winning against an actual human is so much superior to winning against a system that was designed to not be too hard. Here I know I had to surpass myself to win
Plus having ratings and that kind of stuff is always a nice reward for winning. I play a lot of competitive tetris, Trackmania, CS2, The Finals and recently started learning Tekken 8 for this specific reason
Om the other hand, I don’t like souls like because they’re just a single goal I need to spend hours to beat with no progression afterwards. I want my solo games to be challenging sure but not requiring me to learn like my multiplayer games can get
I’m just competitive. Nothing beats absolutely decimating an opponent to the point they quit.
I also get 0 satisfaction from beating a computer. I do that every day as a software developer, so I’d much rather play against other people.
Also competitive games are great because you can play hundreds or thousands of hours and almost always get new experiences. Some team is going to throw something at you that you haven’t seen before, and it keeps the gameplay interesting and dynamic.
I only like competitive games that are just as much cooperative as they are competitive. Team-based shooters like Overwatch or R6 Siege, for example, are always fun with a group of friends.
Shit like CoD or Fortnite though? Nah, I could never get into them. I don’t really hate them or anything, but I always get bored of them very quickly so I don’t bother buying them.
So, like you I don’t enjoy most competitive games. I like to dabble occasionally and enjoy an FPS here or there(I enjoyed the Finals for a bit, and occasionally a CoD, last one was Modern Warfare), but mostly play single player or co-op games because I find them far more enjoyable.
There is one genre that is an exception, fighting games. I fucking love them. I used to enjoy them as a kid, then had a long hiatus, dabbled when Street Fighter 4 launched, but didn’t “git gud”. Then Dragonball Fighter Z and the Arcade Edition for Street Fighter 5 launched and I think they were the gateway drug for me. Street Fighter 5 was tough, I couldn’t find a character I liked, so kinda bounced off it, but DBFZ kept me in. It wasn’t until Blanka in SF5 came out that it all clicked for me.
The genre starts of like a little puddle, you don’t really need to know a lot going in, but you definitely need to want to improve. And the more you improve the more you realise how deep the puddle is, cause it is actually an ocean. When you play against another human, at the lower ranks it is quite random and spammy. But as you get past them, you get to where you can condition people, you can learn their habits and combo choices. Then you take that knowledge and adjust your gameplay and see if they can counter it, and it can be come a big back and forth of trying to get the other person to make a mistake and exploiting their habits.
It is also a genre where nothing else really transfers across. All that time in FPS or RTS games isn’t going to help, so learning to do the technical inputs can be rewarding, or labbing out a combo and how to implement it in your gameplay.
I also really enjoy the ranking climb in most fighting games. SF6 has kinda perfected it, you play 10 games and it gives you a placement from Rookie upto Diamond 1, then you match against someone typically within ±1 rank(Gold 1 would be matched with Silver 5, Gold 1 or Gold 2)and rack up points. At the top of the ranking you hit Master, then it turns into Elo points and a proper distribution of skill, cause the difference between a professional and good player that just hit Master is massive. And for SF6 it is done on a per character basis, which allows you to sink time into every character and be playing with people your skill level.
I am 417 hours into SF6, 3 characters at master rank and a few in diamond/platinum. I still feel like I am bad, and I am definitely not using all the systems effectively in the game. But I sure as hell am excited to sink another several thousand hours into this game over the life of it.
Tekken 8 also just came out, which also seems incredible, but 3D fighters are basically an entire new genre to learn.
i grew up playing street fighter ii turbo and mortal kombat with my friends from the neighborhood. Whenever we get together these days one of us will have a copy ready in case we want to throw down like when we were kids. Getting a big group talking shit and passing the controller around will never not be fun for me, but i know i dont have what it takes to handle people online.
I have read about all that goes into competitive ranked fighting games and it looks (as you say) as deep as the ocean. there is sooooo much to learn and practice that i don’t think i would ever have fun online, but i can still hold out with my favorite characters with my old pals. I agree with you, fighting games are quite fun.
I am going to respectfully disagree, I think if you have a desire to learn and participate everyone can have fun online in fighting games. Don’t get baited by thinking that you need to learn all these combos and moves and be 100% perfect at doing it all the time. Cause you dont.
The difference between someone just starting and a pro is vast, and will seem daunting and like you need to know a bunch of stuff. But honestly competitve starts out similar to you and a bunch of pals just having fun together.
You are playing the other person, getting reliable damage from a combo is more important to begin with than doing optimal damage. For street fighter(it is what I have the most experience with), you need to know how to anti air to stop people from jumping(this is usually a crouching Heavy Punch, but can be different for some characters). Then throw in a simple combo, can be an easy target combo(or using the modern inputs in SF6) or something as simple as HP > Fireball/Tatsu. And then making sure you know basics like blocking and throws, drive impact and drive parry for street fighter 6.
That seems like a lot, but it is less than the mechanics of most single player games that get thrown out in tutorials, and the rest of the knowledge will come with time and practice. Say you come across someone who just cleanly wipes the floor with you, you can look at the replay and see if there is a gap, or learn the timings, or if it is unsafe if you just kept blocking. But that won’t be something you have to worry about for a while. You will spend a lot of time figuring out how to handle people randomly throwing out DP or Drive Impact or who just won’t stop jumping.
I don’t play competitive games unless the community is generally decent or I have the option to just turn off voice and text chat for people I don’t know.
Hunt Showdown is the one arguably competitive game (in that its PvP) that I still play … the community there is generally great. There is the occasional trash talk but mostly it’s just people having fun.
Sometimes people on enemy teams will be willing to negotiate and you both walk away from the fight.
Sometimes they’ll just have fun with it and make sound effects. One guy just the other night I was in a shoot out with was making sound effects “agghhh my leg!!! You got me you got me, it’s over!!” Only to come back a few seconds later with a bomb thrown at me and my buddies.
Occasionally there are toxic people but it’s really fun when you shoot them, take their stuff, and burn their characters bodies … then report them. Taking the extra time to be inflammatory or make noise to trash talk on an extraction shooter can easily get you killed and make you lose a fair amount of stuff.
If being a toxic egomaniac is your jam, extraction shooters are a bad fit.
It’s so sad to see. I’ve spent way more time listening to the soundtrack than playing, I’ve listened to it working out, I’ve listened to it at work, I listen to it when commuting - his work is just amazing. All that lost because a higher-up fucked up and didn’t care enough to mend the relationship. Whilst straight up lying about the events of what really happened on reddit, of all places.
Holy shit that was a ride to read. Thank you for posting this. I remember the post from Marty shitting on Mick but had no idea he had responded nor the depth of fuckery that occured. It’s a damn shame Mick was treat that way
Honestly, Gordon has a huuuge fan following now, and it’s sad to see how he was VERY close to like gaben levels of influence, and one shitty suit threw that all away. Gordon is still awesome, but Doom and him were a match made in heaven that’s sad to see go away. I’d venture to argue that everything that made the doom reboot special was from him: the sound design, the music, the vibe. Most people do not appreciate audio in the way I do, but almost everybody hears it and experiences it, even if they don’t consciously know. Meaning, everybody knew it was special, but most people don’t realize the depths of which it is the audio doing it. We were all robbed the day this all went down with Mick Gordon, and I will never forgive Bethesda for it, and until they fix it, will never, ever spend a cent or say a good thing about them. It is that big of a deal. Doom and Bethesda are dead to me. My condolences to the other talent that work there.
Wow man that marty guy what an extremely unprofessional dickbag. Im off to find a way to purchase something Mick has released and hopefully to leave an encouraging comment. Will report back.
Something like this does not bode well for bethesdas reputation. This other company, ID software? Purchased by zenimax or whatever, are they considered contractors for bethesda? They seem to be behaving like shell companies
Id used to be like the realest of the real hardcore pc gaming companies. It’s where John carmack claims his fame and id made doom and quake in the 90s, and where half life got its engine from and why games like counter strike and valorant exist, and why insane movement games like Titanfall exist.
I’m not talking about who they are now, mostly because I don’t really know, but, historically, they have a FUCK TON of positive karma built up, but since the 2000s, have generally been an engine studio, with their games all generally being tech demos for said engine, id-tech.
Fun fact: “id” (pronounced like the last part of “kid”) is a psychology term, referring to one of three parts of your psyche (the other two are ego and super-ego) that wants to gorge, fuck, steal, and eat, right now. Which is, I suspect, why they make games that are pretty violent, and satisfying to that part of our minds, generally… Probably.
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 understand just fine. The only good mobile games aren’t mobile games. They are ports of normal games for mobile devices. Which is a super incredibly small number of games.
And latching onto Gatcha games as a good thing for kids? Might as well get them cigarettes and alcohol too if you wanna get them addicted earlier.
Wow, an expert on all mobile games—based on exactly how many hours scrolling and judging from your porch?
There are over 700,000 mobile games on Google Play and the App Store combined. Over seven hundred thousand. You really think you’ve played, let alone fathomed, the quality of that entire universe?
Lumping all mobile games together because of a few gacha titles is like calling all movies “just commercials” because of some awful reality TV. Face it: the world’s moved on, but you’re still shouting at clouds.
I don’t need to have played every game ever made. But I do own several thousand and have played thousands more.
From that experience, I can tell you this: you never truly understand a game until you play it yourself. That’s why I don’t waste time forming opinions about games I haven’t actually tried.
If you can’t be bothered to actually try what you’re criticizing, you have zero business judging it. That’s not opinion—that’s ignorance.
If there are 700,000 games then you must judge games without trying them. Otherwise you’d be constantly playing games to see if they’re any good and would still not get through them all.
Buddy please. Its like a farmer ok? Knows fruit, knows what makes it good and or bad, often. And perilously for your world view, at a glance. Effectively your kinda saying you can’t judge a game accurately without playing it through. So then no one can. And it comes off as rather immature/inexperienced masquerading as thoughtful or mature
Its not a person OK. Its a product and sometimes its more then that OK? But a lot of addictiveness isn’t good game. Like addictiveness isn’t a good drug or food or lifestyle choice (looking at gambling and cigs and stuff 👀)
We make it special we get that, what you don’t get is bad fruit your making special cause it is your holiday gift is still when looked at objectively and compared to the greater whole of produce. In general. Its bad fruit. Though genshin seems like its a legit game, not fully legit, cause of all the predatory design. So there. Objectively worse. Predatory by design is bad. Period. Now its better then many others. So with the greater whole it isn’t as bad. Or candy crush. Like don’t feel like a bad parent or anything but its definitely not getting a judgement pass, sorry
Also explain to your kids there tech bros toys when they play and insist upon the addictive games. They can decide but an informed person is always got a better chance of making well reasoned, informed decisions that makes there brains develop away from that bull 💩 you know
I’m skeptical that people here are as knowledgeable as they claim.
I know from several other threads that the majority of folks here stick to a few handfuls of games and sink 1,000s of hours into them. That might make them an expert at a specific MMO, but it certainly doesn’t make them experts in every game at a glance.
You’re judging the gaming habits of the entire population of Lemmy based on a couple anecdotes from random threads? And you want to talk about not making snap judgements?
Lemmy isn’t a big place. People who populate gaming threads are an even smaller fraction of the userbase. So to see the same handful of opinions, repeated again and again, upvoted ad infinitum – that’s a pretty good sample size.
I deliberately posted this thread as a contrarian take. And what do you know, it proved to be contrarian.
I didn’t say anything outrageous or mean-spirited. Everything has been quite reasonable. But judging by the responses – you all think every mobile game is a gacha game – I can safely say few of you have nearly as much experience with games as you believe you do.
By the way, this is why I generally put little stock into self-declared “gamers” opinions. Most of you are obsessed with playing things in a prescribed manner, in a particular way, regarding a specific canon. And you generally adhere to the same bland culture with little appreciation for diversity.
The hypocrisy of claiming that you can’t judge any game without physically playing it yourself, then turning around and judging thousands of people you’ve never interacted with based on a couple interactions, is absolutely staggering.
Consider giving human beings the same benefit of the doubt that you give to software.
And yet you jumped all over people claiming to have played enough games to be able to recognize crap when they see it. Again, you’re dismissing real people while standing up for what exactly? Defending corporate garbage?
I enjoy the occasional mobile game too, I don’t have an issue with your general opinion. But you certainly aren’t convincing anyone with the childish attitude and ridiculous reasoning.
Calling out groupthink when I see the same tired talking points—no research, no citations, just noise? Hell yeah, I’m gonna call that out.
I’ve never defended “corporate garbage.” I’ve said straight up: there are hundreds of thousands of mobile games, some you can buy outright—no microtransactions attached. More premium paid games on iOS alone than the entire NES, SNES, N64, and GameCube libraries combined.
Let me say it again: you don’t have to play gacha games. Plenty of premium mobile titles exist if you’re willing to look.
But here? Everyone ignores that fact, chooses groupthink instead, and barks the same tired lines.
And yeah, I know this won’t convince anyone here. They’re too busy flexing their Lemmy in-group credentials to entertain anything that breaks the echo chamber.
I’m saying it anyway, loud and clear.
There are literally people here insisting all mobile games are gacha. When I drop hard stats proving otherwise, instead of reconsidering, suddenly I’m a secret shill pushing for some stats company.
That’s the quality of convo I’m dealing with in this thread. And you? No different.
You’re inventing a lot of enemies here and listening to no one.
Nobody is claiming all mobile games are gacha, just pointing out that all the ones you talked about initially are, and they wildly dominate the market.
Honestly I don’t know why I’m bothering, I have more to say but this a waste of my time.
I get you there, and its true they are often over-certain of how the easy to share intellectual take version applies to the reality of the truth
Its a struggle but just wanted to defend the main idea not their participation in it, but I agree that you never REALLY know if its fun till you play it and they would likely be more understanding if they tried out some. There are many mobile games that have no right to be that addictive or “fun” (pleasing or pleasurable weird words here tho) as they are.
But as the overall human shift to focus on profit/retention is where most of the actual resentment comes in from not that your entirely wrong, they just don’t support your opinion because they see it as a much bigger problem that you dont seem to acknowledge
Thanks for being this involved and really having the convo here. Its important as fuck even if we dont acknowledge it. Fucking being alive and thinking and talking about it. That’s what got us everything.
Be good tho I see a lot of taking fights and your not on the right side of several lol but I fucking remember myself so carry on and do what you feel you must till you know yourself 👍
My point is that you need to decide which games to play and that you have already judged a game when you decide not to play it.
You might not like the art style, or the gameplay, or the reviews or whatever but you have definitely judged it without playing it. The only other alternative is to literally download and play every game that you see.
There are over 700,000 games on the play store. … and 699,900 of them are basic, traditional mobile games that are basically a gamified e-store for imaginary goods…
How about we stick to facts instead of making things up?
As of July 2025, there are 14,139 premium, paid games on the iOS App Store—meaning games that are not free-to-play, not gacha, and have no microtransactions.
To put that in perspective: iOS alone has more complete, self-contained games than the NES, SNES, N64, and GameCube libraries combined.
Bro are you a sales rep for this data company and this whole post is just a way to drive people to your product? Because that’s about the only explanation I have for, all t h i s.
Wow, that’s some next-level conspiracy thinking—just because I share stats with a source, you leap straight to “sales rep for the statistics company” territory?
What’s next, claiming schools teach math just to line Texas Instruments’ pockets?
Here’s the simple truth: I’m tired of hearing people mindlessly parrot the same tired talking points with zero facts to back them up.
If having an unpopular opinion rattles your echo chamber, so be it. I’m perfectly fine with that.
Bro this entire post and every reply you’ve made is just next level unhinged, I was giving you a generous benefit of doubt here, because you being a sales rep is about the only way this isn’t insane cringe.
It means I’ve hit a nerve and said something so contrary that it actually rattles you.
Funny thing is, you haven’t actually told me how or why I’m wrong—just that I’m cringe.
You have a really inflated sense of your impact on me buddy. I’m not here to tell you you’re right or wrong, I have no opinion on this whole inane debate at all. I play video games for fun, and if other people are having fun playing video games I’m happy for them, I don’t give a single solitary fuck whether they do it on a pc, console, phone, tablet, or by uploading Doom to a cock ring with lcd display and play it by popping their dick with kegels.
I’m just here to tell you that you’re giving off major “meth head arguing with a brick wall in the alley behind 7-11” energy.
It was obvious hyperbole to point at how you are still hilariously wrong. Congratulations on being too stupid to understand how speech works. No wonder you let your kids engage with addictive games… You’re too simple to understand how it’s still bad.
true on the only good mobile games not being mobile games, though you’re wrong about the number being small. Emulation means that entire console libraries are available. I’ve been plinking away at the SNES library for the past couple of years on my phone and am still spoiled for choice.
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 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.
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