Cheats will only grow more advanced, at some point you’ll be able to train an AI to play exactly like a human, but while performing perfectly far more reliably than a human.
The line between what skill looks like versus cheating will only get blurrier.
The real long term solution is to enable the vetting of players (not by the game company or god forbid the government, looking at you china), by returning to community based servers/private matches. And to have reports dealt with faster and by people who care about the game personally.
As a member of the Northstar community, cheating is basically a solved problem for us atm.
There is no anti-cheat, instead a global ban tracking system was put in place and server admins are now able to share the identities of players who have been caught cheating, banning them on every server, regardless of who is running them, by the hosts simply opting into the global ban system.
People used to form “gaming-clans” in order to find people to play games with to begin with, and that structure for a community around a game is likely to become relevant again simply to be able to fill matches with people who you can be sure are honest players.
server admins are now able to share the identities of players who have been caught cheating, banning them on every server, regardless of who is running them, by the hosts simply opting into the global ban system.
By which information? I have no clue what Northstar is, but if you ban by IP or MAC, its pointless.
It's cat and mouse when it comes to banning, even with hwid signatures the cheaters are able to use sophisticated spoofing techniques. Also there are side effects like legitimate players buying second hand pcs that have been banned.
People used to form “gaming-clans” in order to find people to play games with to begin with, and that structure for a community around a game is likely to become relevant again simply to be able to fill matches with people who you can be sure are honest players.
Unlikely imo, because modern game devs have been killing the viability of that for years. User-hosted servers are gone, crossplay is reliant on SBMM to be realistically possible, and private matches often block players from receiving XP and rewards because they’re worried about FOMO and people getting too much fun without spending enough. Even CSGO got an update in the months leading up to CS2 where they removed the ability to earn drops on community servers, driving another nail into the coffin as one of the last kinds of these games that still retain the mere ability to run servers of our own.
While that’s all true, the day you can just fire up an undetectable AI to play for you, and all the matchmaking queues are flooded with people doing the same… Players are going to beg for the ability to not just team up with people they know, but play against people they know.
Maybe that wont be privately hosted servers, or even fully custom matches, but when cheaters become indistinguishable from the highly skilled, forming even the most basic community bonds in order to find people to play with will be preferable to matching with randos.
For similar reasons people already prefer to team up with someone they know, as opposed to a stranger they might have to carry. People will want to be able to pick who they go up against, as well.
Once the cheaters win, (and they will) the first game to figure out a system to let players do this, WILL be a better experience than current matchmaking algos.
Edit: An example of a game that kinda already does this is Elite: Dangerous. There are two main modes, open and solo, in open you can run into all other players also playing in open, that means you might have to defend yourself against other players.
But, if you want to avoid PvP, but still want to run into other players, you’re in luck! Because there is a third option, private groups. When in a private group, the game works as if you’re in open, but you can only see other players who are in the same group. Meaning other players who also do not want to engage in PvP.
Mobius is likely the largest such group, essential it’s a giant clan of non-PvPers who play the game together. Something similar could absolutely be done for other games, where smaller communities can then vet their members and get rid of players who break the rules.
There is no anti-cheat, instead a global ban tracking system was put in place and server admins are now able to share the identities of players who have been caught cheating, banning them on every server, regardless of who is running them, by the hosts simply opting into the global ban system.
A global ban system without a more nuanced approach is a terrible idea. Operators of that global ban system will whitelist themselves, blacklist people they hate, and maybe even backdoor the mod that enables them to ban people in the first place. Server admins have no choice but to either opt into the entire system or have none at all, and both of these options suck. We’ve seen how this plays out already.
Score players by your own criteria, weight everything with different blacklists, greylists and whitelists, etc. and ban players if they exceed a threshold automatically. It won’t be perfect, but email catches most spam emails that way just fine.
No choice? I can still apply my own bans on top no matter what the mod does. Spyglass isn’t what enables bans, it just makes them networked and tracked. And I could modify the mod to work however I like, or even fork the whole thing and make my own database.
That’s not been necessary as Erlite has been maintaining the spyglass mod and database with integrity.
There’s no chokehold here, no problems have arisen, and if they do, only then are additional solutions warranted. I’m not suggesting this is the final solution for all games, but that this kind of community driven counter-cheater work, is.
Cheating is being treated as a tech problem with a technological solution, when really it’s a social problem which should be solved with inter-social solutions.
I didn’t describe what could happen, but what did happen in real life. Multiple times.
MCBans is open-source btw, yet nobody checked and changed the source code, as should be expected really. Operators whitelisted alts and friends. Blacklisted server owners who didn’t appreciate that the operators of their global ban list griefed their servers with backdoors.
Another typical example is 3rd-party Discord ban lists. They whitelist their own staff. They backdoor their bots to fuck around with servers. It’s just the reality of global ban lists.
If Erlite doesn’t abuse that trust, then someone with admin access will, or Erlite’s successor. That’s a fact, not an opinion. Email spam filters prevent single trust lists with scores, multiple lists, etc.
I’m not denying any part of what you’re saying, I’m saying that this specific case is currently working fine, and that it is merely an example of the kinds of solutions I want to see enabled.
Obviously the bigger the community, the more complex the solution needs to be, and the more bases have to be covered. You’re nitpicking a specific example I gave (and doing so from a position of ignorance concerning northstar and its community), rather than my ideological thesis. Which is that communities should be empowered with social structure so that cheaters can be properly ostracized. Spyglass is just one way for a community to implement that.
Northstar isn’t big enough to even begin to compare with discord or minecraft. The concurrent playercount on all servers put together seldom matches ONE big minecraft server.
If the factors you bring up become a concern, I’m ready to pick up the tools to deal with it myself, as I’ve already done before. But so far, there has been no need.
I installed 1,000 old game ROMs for NES, SNES, Sega Genesis/Master System, N64, and PS1. I’ve been reliving all of my childhood games since I got it. Road Rash on the PS1 was one I never played (and forgot existed) until my wife told me about it. What a blast.
Just curious, did you get the Deck just for that? I think you can run all of those on like the Retroid Pocket, which is like 1/4 the price of the deck?
Keep a rotating history of 20 or so autosaves/checkpoints, not 1, in case the last autosave was at a bad spot. Storage space is cheap. Yeah, I can do that myself with manual saves, but why make me do that? Maintaining that isn’t a fun part of the game for me, and it’s easy for the developer to do.
This saved my butt the other day! I got some message that my current save was corrupted or detected tampering? and to stop playing on it. I was able to go back a couple of auto saves, find a good one, and not have to do a bunch of content over again!
At the point the game allows multiple manual saves, rewinding decisions is trivial. There is not much of a point in restricting autosaves too.
The only way a game can enforce permanent decisions is if it only has auto-saves, in which case it could have a couple hidden backup saves just to prevent any issue from ruining people's progress. Even then that's not enough if players are willing to tinker, but at least it's not trivial.
Online saves are an option too but I wouldn't be too fond of a game that is needlessly restricted to online-only just to make decisions permanent.
Also, at least on the PC, it’s possible to just back up saves.
I mean, I feel like there’s legitimately value to having an “ironman mode”, but I’d really like to have the option not to use it, for a number of reasons.
One of which is that sometimes games have bugs – I just hit a bug in Starfield that was easily worked around by rolling back to an earlier save and taking a slightly different action. However, Starfield had autosaved between the action that triggered the bug and it becoming visible to the player, which would have been a problem if (a) I hadn’t manually saved prior to that and (b) Starfield didn’t do the multiple-autosave-slot thing.
The player can always impose not using saves on themselves, but they can’t debug games.
Definitely, technical problems are another reason not to be overly strict.
Ironman mode absolutely has value, but this gets into a greater discussion that I feel more gamers should keep in mind. The value of these restrictions and challenges are your entertainment as well as fairness towards the people you are actively playing with. Game rules are all arbitrary by definition. It doesn't really matter if someone playing by themselves completes an Ironman mode fairly or cheats at it.
It's because gamers were convinced to take game rules more seriously than they deserve that today some believe that fictional items in a remote server they don't control can be worth hundreds of dollars. That hundreds of hours of RPG grind are somehow a necessary requirement to play a match of a game with someone else, and also that paying to rush this entirely artificial aspect of the game is worthwhile.
If the developers of a game prefer that it's played in Ironman that's fair, but there is no need to come up with exceedingly complex and restrictive solutions to police how people play. If they don't want to play differently, that's fine too.
You know you could also make a post about how much you like it, right? The world would not end. A post being on the gaming board doesn't mean it's the objective truth, it's a forum. Both of your posts could be up at the same time, even!
Also it's hilarious to go "at least it's not buggy like the game this expansion is literally for"
I cant remember last AAA game I played that required me to reload the game to get rid of bugs or getting stuck in my own vehicle,I don’t think it’s acceptable.
You realize that the 2.0 update that introduced all those new bugs is unrelated to the DLC right? Everyone got that update and those bugs regardless of whether they paid for the DLC.
I’ve been considering moving to Jellyfin for a while, but I’m worried they will do the same thing in future.
Currently would not be possible. Jellyfin does not have the sort of centralized accounts/logins that Plex does e.g. you’re not asking Jellyfin devs for permission to log into your own server. That’s just a Plex thing.
If you’re asking could they add that “feature” in the future? Highly unlikely but I guess anything is possible. Were that to happen most likely the code would get forked into a new project.
PS - Jellyfin itself is a fork from Emby back when those devs decided to close their source. Myself & tons of other people dropped Emby at that point & migrated to Jellyfin. jellyfin.org/docs/general/about/
I haven’t had a chance to do the research yet, so pardon a dumb question that might have an easy answer. With the setup I’ve described, would JellyFin just be a drop in replacement or would I need to drastically change things to get the same basic work flow?
Offhand it sounds like it could be a drop in replacement for you. But there are a lot of other variables you’d need to consider e.g. if you require specific app/TV support & don’t like the current Jellyfin offerings.
Maybe others can clarify or you can post with any specific requirements/questions in the Jellyfin forums or the lemmy communities !jellyfin / !jellyfin
That aside you could always just try it out & see how you like it.
Ultimately, I think that is what I am doing, but figured it wouldn’t hurt to ask someone with experience with the software already just in case there was an obviouls big red stop sign I was missing. Looks like I have other plans this weekend then playing more Stanfield or Baluder’s Gate 3. Thanks for the help and info.
Plex is so bizarre. I consider myself a tech-savvy person, but I can’t wrap my head around the concept of “I host Example App on my servers. I host, maintain, and pay for the instance of Example App and servers myself. I also pay for a license for Example App. But Example Company controls my instance.” It’s so foreign to everything you can host yourself. It’s such an unfair commercial practice that I can’t for the life of me explain how such a model can survive. Self-hosting is about regaining control in my books. Yet Plex over here thinks they can not only shove down the maintenance burden and costs of everything down my throat, but also control access to my data. The solution to Plex’s retarded ToS violation situation is for Plex to say shit happens, how about we stop controlling everything you do with Plex to such an excessive degree that the media mafia can accuse us of empowering piracy instead of… the person who hosts pirated media on their server? Plex’s biggest business liability is Plex’s own business practices. They’re practically begging the media mafia to sue them.
I thought the phone home was to make it easy to have different devices talk to each other. It’s similar for a lot of IoT products. If properly set up, they don’t need to phone home and can find each other with the setting ayku input. However, many users are less technical and automating this through a central service makes it easier. Most companies also use this to scoop up personal info too, unfortunately.
I hope this is where it stops. Current laws aren’t too favourable towards projects like these and the IA depends heavily on donations so I don’t think they’d be able to withstand multiple drawn out court battles. I’m just waiting to see what gets affected exactly and to what extent.
For a game that’s a full comedy romp, West of Loathing consistently ruined me with laughter. The spittoon descriptions are probably the most derangedly funny writing ever put into the world. I’ve got to remember to play the sequel one of these days. Its also extremely mechanically satisfying, with several enticing roleplaying moments (as well as the occasional dramatic or scary moment that hits just as well as the comedy)
For a game that’s not explicitly only comedy but still hits strong marks, Yakuza 0 is a full meal. While most Yak games are fairly wacky when it comes to sidequesting (1 being perphaps the single exception, as the beginning of the series was quite dry), 0 feels like the one where they really hit their stride. There’s so many flat out ridiculous moments (you’ve most likely seen the chicken, and that’s just one of many) that you even forget this is also a heavily dramatic story and a full blown action beat’em up.
If you liked that it’s based on a browser game called Kingdom of Loathing, the gameplay is not as tight or refined but there’s plenty to do and it’s pretty enjoyable to play when you have some time to kill on a work pc lol.
Surprisingly, Baldur’s Gate 3. I absolutely love D&D, but I tried playing through the Pathfinder video games, Pillars of Eternity, Divinity: Original Sin 2, and nothing stuck with me. I just wasn’t a fan of the CRPG genre, despite me playing in-person tabletop RPGs multiple times a week.
I bought BG3 thinking I probably wouldn’t get hooked, but I didn’t want to miss out when literally every one of my friends is playing it. Well, I am absolutely hooked and have 40 hours in the game and will likely do multiple playthroughs, and I kind of “get” the genre now. I know PoE, PF, or DOS2 may not be as good, but I feel a lot more confident at the prospect of playing them now.
I’m in the same boat, I’ve been playing Death Stranding and a few other indie games once every weekend or two… or three. Now every one of my friends and coworkers are talking about hundreds of hours in BG3, I’ve bought and downloaded it last night to catch up.
The genre itself appeals to me, but the amount of time and concentration it takes me to get into a game nowadays, maybe this gets a kick start.
I'm on Linux, so if I buy from GOG, I don't get cloud saves or automatic updates. If we had Galaxy on Linux, it would be my default store. But it's not on Linux, so I shop on Steam.
Neither are guaranteed by the seller though. They could change their API tomorrow and break compatibility. Unlikely though that is, if they want my sale, they can do the work themselves rather than relying on an unofficial project with hooks into their store.
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