I personally think that interacting with anything related to Harry Potter continues to give it cultural dominance and longevity, so even if you aren’t personally spending money to support the giant piece of shit that is JK Rowling, you’re helping it stay relevant enough to keep making that bigot of a bitch money.
It can also be argued that since Epic made a deal for giving the game away, that the money has already been paid to Rowling, whether you grab the game for free or not. The fewer people who grab the free copy, the less wise of an investment it will be seen as by Epic’s beancounters. This also ties back into the first point of the more people taking the free copy is giving Harry Potter more cultural dominance and longevity.
I pirated this game when it came out specifically I could play it and write about how bad it was in terms of gameplay, story, and game design. I don’t feel like re-writing a full on review here, but I’ll just say it: It’s a bad fucking game and the only reason people have given it as much attention as it has gotten is the association with Harry Potter. If this had been an original property with no connection to the HP series with similar gameplay and story it would have been a clusterfuck of a failure on release.
Anyway I’ll shut up now but fuck Harry Potter, the only thing Harry Potter related I’ll accept anymore is Wizard People, Dear Reader, because it’s a parody.
Re: 3, unfortunately, pirating the game won’t let you avoid supporting transphobic lunatics. The person who cracked the game is even worse than Rowling - as in, “makes Rowling look like a paragon of progressiveness in comparison” worse - and uses the download numbers for her cracks (and the fact she’s usually the only one willing to crack Denuvo) to justify asking for donations.
That’s a fair take. I deleted it promptly after playing, but anyone who is willing to fund empress’s insanity is a fool anyway. Yet, sadly, a whole lot of fools out there.
How’s the action? It looked like you can launch people in the trailer and perform some kind of air combo. I doubt it leads to anything truly fun, but I’m curious.
You can, and I find it fun. Some other reviewers don’t like it, and it can be clunky, but it is still fun for me to levitate someone and then slam them into a wall.
Oh yeah, that was a really interesting choice. You had to actually sacrifice something tangible to you as a player to get the “good ending” i really had to think over that one for a while
Yikes. Sad to see ANY company treat their employees like this. Diabolical
Was IGN respected prior to this? I hadn’t used the site in like 12 years, haven’t kept up with them. It has always been the big meme for a 10/10 IGN so I can’t assume the company was held in super high regard prior
There is an audience for such games. Mainly for them to blow off steam and try to see if they’re a better crack shot than anyone, and sometimes to acquire a degree of fame. They have spent enormous amounts of money hoping to land more shots at a higher framerate.
I’m now more content quietly playing an offline sandbox game, no rush at all.
Proof is in cheaters existing on day one of battlefield 6 open beta. Client side anti-cheat will never work. It’s good to have some basic preventative measures client-side, but server-side anti cheat is the only way to properly prevent cheaters.
Unfortunately companies keep investing in garbage client side anticheat that just pokes security holes into our machines.
Only Valve to my knowledge is investing money into their server side anti cheat, no other big player is to my knowledge.
It needs to be a mix. Have your clientside anti-cheat look for obvious attack vectors, have your serverside anti-cheat look for suspicious play, and let users report others. Then have humans review suspected cheaters and make the final call.
But that’s expensive, and off-the-shelf anti-cheat gives them someone else to blame.
I agree, there’s definitely some checks you can only do on the client and only some that work server-side. Ideally everything that can be checked on either, are checked.
Currently it’s just all wrong, the client-side can’t be relied upon as heavily as it is.
The benefit factor to the rootkits they install on our machines is nil. Just bloats our systems with garbage that is just waiting to be exploited by hackers.
You're viewing from the perspective of what would be best for the playerbase. These decisions are made based on what's the cheapest possible solution to have the playerbase shut up about cheaters so they wouldn't drive away potential customers.
I would think there’s money to gain by keeping your players engaged longer by having less cheaters, but I guess theres also an incentive to keep just enough cheaters that you can steadily ban them for more game sales (not that I think that’s happening, i hope not).
Anyways they take our money, we expect whats best for us, within reason of course.
I doubt the revenue from sales to cheaters is that significant compared to the risk of losing players. I think the simplest explanation is that catching cheaters is hard (read: expensive), so they’re happy with catching the most obvious cheaters with off the shelf solutions (i.e. the Pareto principle).
I refuse to play them. If they want kernel level anticheat, they can submit the source under the GPL to the Linux kernel devs for consideration, because that’s the only way I’d consider using it. No game is worth compromising my system’s security.
That’s only proof that it will never be enough to stop all cheating. But if the metric is if it reduces cheating then that proves nothing. Not saying I have proof that it does reduce cheating but I would personally bet on it reducing it somewhat at least.
It definitely reduces cheating, but mostly just by raising the bar of entry (not by that much as evident in day 1 cheats being present). I doubt it’s effectiveness though, since most games you can do some quick research and find $5 cheats that will go undetected (hell even free cheats can work if you do a little more research on doing the injection part manually yourself).
You can also never stop cheating, but the anti-cheat they install on your computer is just an extra attack vector for hackers, etc at this point, since it obviously doesnt work as intended.
Hopefully they start to learn from this at some point… they should realise that their current anti-cheat systems are not working as intended at some point right?
Battlefield will lose sales, every game definitely loses players because of cheater infestations. Lots of money lost in my eyes, is it enough to make them see straight?
Valves anti-cheat doesn’t really do anything though, at least not in CS2. It does like to boot me from the game from time to time because I’m playing on Linux though.
True VAC alone is not great (nothing really is), but CS2 (in my opinion) has one of the best systems against abuse, even though legit players like myself can get stuck in low trust factor sometimes.
VAC, trust factor, overwatch (player report reviewing, not sure if this was discontinued) all work together.
Hopefully a big improvement is to come soon with the VAC Live agents that monitor games using AI to predict likely cheaters.
Valve obviously has a big interest in keeping cheaters out, because their skin economy makes them boatloads (literally hehe) of money. I think they are the only company going down this road right now of AI agents, which is unobtrusive to users and should hopefully keep up VACs high accurate ban rate (which is at least a good thing about VAC, when you are banned, in almost all cases, you were indeed cheating (low fase positives)).
I do recognize though that AI agents likely comes with a high cost and may only be implemented in other highly competitive games that make lots of money.
There probably exist other methods, but it’ll take more investment in designing adaptable systems that can work on many games.
I do report a lot of cheaters, but I never know if it even does anything. I pretty much only play casual anyways. The worst is when someone is obviously cheating, and no one votes to kick them, or some special types actually vote against kicking the cheater so they can win …
ETA: the AI agents sounds cool, as long as legit players don’t get mistakenly banned. I didn’t realize cheating was such a huge problem these days until I started playing CS2 again. I used to scrim 1.6 Back in the day and never really had that problem that I can remember.
Client side anti-cheat (the one installed on your PC) will never work, it’s just fundamentally impossible. They can restrict user freedom as much as they want, but the hardware still isn’t under their control.
The only reason they push for those kinds of anti-cheats is because they don’t have to pay for the extra processing of server side anti-cheat, and they also get the benefit of a backdoor into your computer that you may never fully uninstall without buying a new computer.
That statement is to easy. It all depends on how much permissions you give the game and in what kind of environment you execute your game. From sandboxing to inmutable root file systems there is a lot possible to exactly prevent this to happen.
I mean, it’s like saying Pentagon security can’t work because some skilled hackers can someday find a way to spoof / steal credentials. Security always happens on a sliding scale based on the value of the contents.
I think at the very least, they can take steps that inconvenience hackers sufficiently each update without harming players - they can’t make it impossible to hack on the client side, but they can’t make it feel not worth it for them.
The reason I sort of insist on it is that even with serverside checks for game logic like teleportation and instant kills, game engines still load the data for player positions which allow for wallhacks and aimhacks. Those checks can only happen clientside; you can’t even send mouse positions often enough to look for “snaps”.
At the least, I agree that modern coders have gotten very lazy about having the server verify basic actions. “Okay, player 22 deals 8000 damage to every other player in the server simultaneously? Okay.”
Some of it does, some of it doesn’t, the critique is that kernel level stuff is way more than needed against most cheaters but not enough against the most dedicated ones, and it is invasive as hell.
The best anticheat is good netcode and server side checks. You can’t wallhack if your client doesn’t see behind the walls.
My Uncle Winky used to own a bar in Gay called the Gay Bar. It’s still there, although under different management. I literally went there this morning because I’m on vacation in Keweenaw, they have some raunchy-ass merch.
That was also in the '90s, before people could be bothered to give half a shit. Fresh off the 80s Masters of the Universe style. It still wasn’t cool for kids back then. No reason for her to have a revealing vine fit. Tangent, but I still hear all that music in my head constantly. It slaps.
They said it should be rated for everyone. Do you think a five year old should play this? Do you think showing your voluptuous side boob is necessary in an E rated game? I think its fine in a T rated game. But I dont need my kids asking why the therapist is showing her boobs to off-duty Santa Clause
I prefer AA for controllers actually. Rechargeable AAs are good these days and you can just swap them out. I actually really hate this trend of integrated batteries in things where it isnt necessary. Yeah we need new form factors of replaceable batteries, but the switch from replaceable and standardized to neither is definitely causing problems and costing us money.
Trying to find replacement batteries for integrated batteries is a pain too, since might not be able to find an OEM replacement or battery from a reputable brand. So you end up having to go with whatever random no name battery that could be worse than the OEM battery and end up dying after less than a year.
My preference is rechargeable AA or AAA. And even better if the controller itself can recharge the battery like drone controllers.
I got some good rechargeable AA for my controllers about three years ago and will never go back. I have one pair more than controllers and I always have a charged pair read to switch out if needed.
I got 2500mAh batteries from duracell and the charge lasts for days of activity on my xbox controllers. Longer than my PS4 controllers with integrated battery for sure.
I’m still using the same AA eneloops I used since I picked up my Steam Controller all the way back in 2015-2016. And I also used it with my 360 controller too. Just keeps chugging along being good for a month before I need to swap.
Yeah the PS4 battery life has been crap and I don’t know why. Was finally able to replace Sony controllers with 8bitdo now that Steam provides support for the extra buttons to be mapped to unique keys and use analog triggers and gyro together. So been nice not having to spend money on the dualsense, which doesn’t even have hall effects/TMR sticks.
I bought two packs of Eneloops from Dell in 2007 that are still constantly in use. I haven’t noticed any degradation. I can only imagine how many alkaline batteries these things have replaced.
Took me a long time but I settled on Xbox one controllers. I use rechargable batteries but can run the AAs if u want. AA batteries have longer shelf life if u let the controller sit long periods vs rechargeables always seem to discharge. Support in just about every game. Can be had reasonable price on sale now and then and lots of parts available for them. Id never buy a controller with a non replaceable battery!
8Bitdo controllers are pretty hit and miss, but this is a big hit for them. The Pro series (and maybe others) comes with a rechargeable battery but the slot also fits 2 AA batteries.
If only they could get their software more feature rich and consistent.
I mocked Xbox controllers for years due to them using AA batteries… until I actually started using one with my PC. Now, I wish all controllers used them. It’s vastly more convenient than charging via USB cable.
I’m not gonna go out of my way to review bomb his game or send him messages or at him on twitter. But I am not gonna stop calling him a narcisistic idiot whenever the topic comes up. People should know. That is not harassment, that is countering misinformation, at least IMO. A meme like this is not harassment in my book either. He is a public figure.
One of the big reasons many people are “okay” with making fun of him. Is that he could basically make it all go away if he just admitted he was wrong.
The whole thing stems from him being so full of himself that he cannot admit any fault, ever. He has been objectively proven wrong many times on several different topics, there are a lot of situations that heavily indicate misconduct, etc. And he literally went on a stream with a licensed psychiatrist who tried to explain some of his faults. To which he laughed and said “Okay, don’t see it that way, but alright”.
At the end of the day, he seems almost incapable of admitting that he ever did or said anything wrong. So people keep making fun of him, since he’s objectively proven wrong repeatedly.
If you’re not familiar with it, check out his classic wow hardcore drama. He’s absolutely incapable of admitting any fault. And he and his mods just ban anyone immediately if they try to have a discussion.
I hope the wording of the petition is very clear. The last time this was brought up in the UK the government of the time basically just brushed it off by intentionally misunderstanding the petition. You can’t give them any leeway to do that this time.
I suspect they would’ve brushed it off regardless, they didn’t want to deal with it. There’s another 100k UK petition (The one linked to at the bottom of the OP text) that would force them to re-look at it with more depth which is also ending quite soon.
Yes I’ve already signed it, and I signed the original. Although even back then I suspected that the petition was simultaneously too vague and too specific.
It was vague in that it didn’t really explain what it was asking to happen, and didn’t really make the distinction between a product being technically still functional and a product not working because the servers have shut down. While at the same time being too specifically focused on games rather than server run software in general. What happens if Adobe goes down, does everyone lose access to photoshop?
I just feel that this has a better chance of succeeding if they were to de-emphasize the games aspect, and allow politicians the wiggle run to focus on the corporate business side of things.
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