I have been preaching abandoning it for YEARS. It’s even worse on mobile because the formating is so messed up some links just don’t work. And even without adblock, there’s so many ads that THEY slow down the site. Just because it’s ‘free’ everyone defaults to fandom and I hate it so much
I’ve found the best way to browse Fandom(if necessary) is to use a VPN set to Nordic countries. Ads are very generic and in a language I can’t read. So they are very easy to spot.
It redirects you from fandom wikis to the new official wikis, to which the community has now moved from the fandom one. Also filters out fandom results from search engines only if an independent, more up-to-date alternative exists.
If something is still hosted on fandom with no indie wiki, redirects it to a BreezeWiki instance.
I use it in combination with wiki.gg redirect, which redirects to newer wikis which aren’t independent, but moved to wiki.gg from fandom.
Update: IndieWikiBuddy can now redirect to Wiki.gg wikis too, no need for wiki.gg redirect.
Unless you have no plans to play Online, the money you’ll spend on Shark Cards trying to catch up with established players will far exceed $80. That’s why I stopped playing GTA V Online—I got tired of grinding for cash, just to keep up with the unemployed people who dedicate their lives to one game (I refuse to spend money on microtransactions in any game). Either play at launch, or don’t bother with Online.
There’s literally no reason in this day and age to not release on pc on day 1. Xb and ps market share is absolutely losing ground to pc at record time, there’s no reason anymore.
If they don’t pc release day 1, then I guess gta6 actually just comes out 2027.
Honestly, in a lot of ways, I think this video is a miss. In both this video and to a lesser extent the last, he put a lot of the blame on Valve, but also provides a higher standard to Valve than the other companies covered. So much of this video boils down to “Valve uses lootboxes too,” and “Valve needs to do something about this.” without addressing Valve’s position as a market player nor providing any solution for Valve to actually tackle the casino problem. He even says in the video that Valve previously issued takedowns but nothing changed and many of the casinos didn’t even respond to the cease and desist. No other course of action is suggested, and frankly, I don’t see any from Valve that wouldn’t punish victums and unrelated users far more than the casinos.
This isn’t to say Valve is blameless, but Valve is fairly tame for their direct involvement with lootboxes and is competiting directly against companies that use them far more agressively - exactly the reason Coffee previously gave the casinos and those involved with them leniency, and encouraged looking further up the chain. In the same way, I’d say the actual solution here would be for governments to ban underage gambling and enforce those laws - because the more Valve trys to crack down on this or even just avoid it, the more of an advantage the worse players in the space have. Ubisoft and EA have already been attempting to dislodge Steam for years, and its not because they think they can be more moral than Steam.
He did say govt should be involved, and I’d agree generally. Gambling and gambling lite like lootboxes need regulation to die, but Valve is also a massive company running the biggest game storefront in the world, and they don’t need the money from the lootboxes and cuts from selling and trading. They aren’t in direct competition with most game creators, they compete with other storefronts, and it isn’t even close. They could fix this relatively easily and it would barely make a dent in their finances.
They could also leave the lootboxes and gambling up, and just implement an age verification system, one that locks you out of trading until the account is verified 18 or older, and add other tools like locking yourself out of trading or opening boxes similar to how casinos allow you to blacklist yourself for your own good.
In terms of a relatively quick, relatively painless, realistic fix, with a decent timeframe, valve makes the most sense, and they can fix this extremely easily compared to getting every government in the world to agree, implement, and enforce regulations. Ideally, yes, governments fix it. Realistically, kids are getting addicted to gambling and having their lives ruined right now, and valve has the power to stop it. I think it’s fair to ask, and expect a real answer, yes or no.
I think the issue of lootboxes and shady third-party casinos, while intertwined, are very separate, almost parallel issues. Coffee reads them as largely being the same issue which leads to a lot of the messiness of this video, and makes the video harder to discuss.
I think in terms of dealing with the 3rd party casinos, Valve is pretty powerless, and feel Coffee’s arguments for their intervention are very hand-wavey. That is the biggest issue I have with this video. As I outlined in a comment on his last video, most options they have punish victums and unrelated users more than casinos. Even if Valve goes all-out and disables all item trading and marketing, casinos still walk away with all their profits and are incentived to try and scam their users out of every penny before that happens, while normal users and traders are left without ways to get skins they want (at least outside of gambling through Valve) or are left with a bunch of dead inventory they don’t want. If anything, this kinda highlights what I meant by Valve being less agressive on the gambling, as they provide many fairly priced ways to be involved with the skin ecosystem without ever having to open a lootbox or a casino.
In terms of Valve regulating lootboxes on their platform, and specifically CS2 crates, I think theres more merit to the argument, but I still think it’s not realistic to ask Valve to regulate themselves and assume they’ll be able to compete both on the game and platform level, with those who are not. Valve’s momentum does play a bit part in their success, but so too does their featureset to players and friendliness to developers and publishes.
On the game front, if Valve removes lootboxes or adds barries to entry, they will still be forced to directly complete with games that don’t. Even assuming players don’t want lootboxes (although the unfortunate reality of the market is that many do) Valve is still put in a position where their budget is determined by what they can morally earn while their competition uses whatever manipulate, deceptive, or immoral methods they want.
On the platform side, it might be easier, but it could also put them in an even worse position as they rely on other developers and publishes, including the shady ones like EA and Unisoft, to fill their storefront. Part of the reason Steam has the userbase where other platforms don’t is because they have the most complete selection of games. On the other hand, if Steam starts to threaten Publisher’s incomes such as by requiring age verification on gambling, this will likely be far more in incentive to leave than their 30% split ever was. At least the 30% cost covered infrastructure, payment processing and first level support whereas if companies are blocked from their gambling addict audience, they likely will lose a significant part of their revenue outright.
compared to getting every government in the world to agree, implement, and enforce regulations
You don’t necessary need every country nor do you need particularly extreme measures to have an impact. Same as with privacy regulations and a lot of other forms of monitization on the internet, you just need a few bigger blocks to massively increase the costs and risk. If, for example, the EU started requiring age verification to access lootboxes, that would immediately add a significant new cost to adding lootboxes. Notably, for exactly the sorts of live-service games these lootboxes are most common in, data collection and anti-cheat also tend to be key elements of the game and it’s design and monitization - both of which conflict with the ability to ignore user location or age. The developer can’t claim they thought the user was in the US, if the anti-cheat reported that they were using a VPN and were actually logging in from the EU, for example. Obviously there are workarounds for this sort of thing, but again more costs and compexity that eat into profits, and more risk for making mistakes.
But valve is not powerless. They provide the API to easily trade outside of the steam marketplace. And saying Valve is morally earning money while the competition does not, its not a fair thing to say. Valve started the whole slotmachine lootbox bullshit in the first place. They know very well what they’re doing. Valve could give gamblers 2 weeks to take their skins off the sites and then block API access to these casinos or just shut down the API completely. Saying victims will be hurt so lets have casinos continue to create victims, is a strange argument to make.
And saying Valve is morally earning money while the competition does not, its not a fair thing to say.
This was arguing in the hypothetical that Valve stopped acting immoraly. I’m not trying to argue that Valve is in the right here. I’m arguing that they are a player in this game as well, along with their competition, and so shouldn’t be singled out as the ones required to change or to enforce new laws.
Valve could give gamblers 2 weeks to take their skins off the sites and then block API access to these casinos
This just gives the casinos warning so they can pull the rug more cleanly, and have more time to spin up a replacement casino.
or just shut down the API completely.
Then this punishes every other user for the actions of a tiny, tiny minority. Even ignoring users using the open market for legitimate and fair buisness, said market provides a way to obtain skins without relying on Valve to set prices or distribute skins. As such, unless Valve also removes their own lootboxes at the same time, it means that users can only interact with skins through gambling.
The one solution that would address all of this at once and wouldn’t substantially affect unrelated users would be governments implementing laws against unregulated gambling. Unlike Valve, they can address the whole industry at once, and aren’t punished for trying to enforce said laws.
Valve is still put in a position where their budget is determined by what they can morally earn while their competition uses whatever manipulate, deceptive, or immoral methods they want.
What competition has such a rich gambling scene though. No other game I am aware of (Maybe TF2 but, still valve)
if Steam starts to threaten Publisher’s incomes such as by requiring age verification on gambling, this will likely be far more in incentive to leave than their 30% split ever was
Age verification on the marketplace transactions is the more likely scenario, and again, no other game I know of has as much of a gambling community so I don’t really get why other publishers would leave if it doesn’t effect them.
Ultimately, I think you’re missing the point of coffeezillas video, which is that a lot of people who were in the skin gambling community are actively or, started in it, as a minor. You are here trying to find all of these excuses for valve not to be held accountable for facilitating gambling to a minor.
What competition has such a rich gambling scene though. No other game I am aware of (Maybe TF2 but, still valve)
Most mobile games? Apex? Overwatch? Keep in mind, a lot of the CS gambling happens off-platform and Valve doesn’t collect any direct revenue from it, which is why Valve can’t directly intervene in a lot of it.
Age verification on the marketplace transactions is the more likely scenario, and again, no other game I know of has as much of a gambling community so I don’t really get why other publishers would leave if it doesn’t effect them.
This argument is specifically in the context of lootboxes as gambling on Steam. Think how much people will spend in lootboxes on your average free to play game. If they aren’t allowed to do this on Steam, games like Apex, CoD, PUBG, War Thunder, ect. won’t stay on Steam.
Ultimately, I think you’re missing the point of coffeezillas video, which is that a lot of people who were in the skin gambling community are actively or, started in it, as a minor. You are here trying to find all of these excuses for valve not to be held accountable for facilitating gambling to a minor.
This is exactly my point about Coffee’s argument being muddled in this video, making it hard to discuss. There are three parallel problem here that the video combines into one: third-party casinos, CS lootboxes, and lootboxes in the industry in general.
In terms of Valve shutting down illegal/third party casinos, they don’t have the means to impact this without also shutting down the entire market for everyone, innocent or guilty. Why should I, as someone who has never even bought a lootbox, nonetheless run an illegal casino be punished for their actions. Even then, casino owners aren’t held responsible, they’re just stopped. On the other hand, with government intervention, no one is caught in the crossfire and casino owners could actually be held responsible for their actions with fines or worse. Why wouldn’t this be the better option?
In terms of Valve selling lootboxes themselves, yes its immoral, but as Coffee said about the casinos, they’re competiting with other products doing the same and you can’t reasonably expect one side to just role over and accept their loss. Instead, you need to change the system so neither side can use tactics like this. Instead of asking Valve to regulate themselves, and expecting their competition to do the same, you change the law (or just actually enforce it) to ensure that noone gets away with it.
What competition has such a rich gambling scene though. No other game I am aware of (Maybe TF2 but, still valve)
Gacha games have been taking over the world ever since Genshin Impact and those are pure gambling. Going even further back, Ultimate Team on FIFA (EA FC now) is probably the worst true “selling gambling to kids” product I can remember.
Most of them don’t have a gambling scene, because most gacha games don’t allow you to trade the things you get from the gacha. Valve does and that’s what facilitates the online casinos that is based on CS2 skins.
It’s not his place to provide a solution: he is a journalist exposing a problem. Do you have such expectations for all journalists talking about any topic?
When articles get shared about any other company using micro/macrotransactions, predatory tactics or gambling-related schemes, people’s consensus is unanimous, but when Valve is involved, suddenly people have double standards.
Valve is fairly tame for their direct involvement with lootboxes and is competiting directly against companies that use them far more agressively […] Ubisoft and EA have already been attempting to dislodge Steam for years, and its not because they think they can be more moral than Steam.
Valve could shut down the entire gambling market today and nothing would change to their market position. Steam is not the number one marketplace because of the skin market. They are leaving it as is because it nets them money. I don’t know how can you call Steam “fairly tame” when they are literally allowing multimillion dollar casinos to exist and operate without impunity. They sent a C&D to casinos and then washed their hands of the problem, because ultimately they don’t really care about shutting them down.
They could ban accounts linked to the casinos, but they don’t, because they profit from them. They could have some sort of account-level check to make sure that minors don’t spend their steam gift cards on CS skins (which, by the way, Coffezilla proposes at the end of the video) , but they’d rather use the gambling loophole of “akshually, it’s not gambling as defined by law”. Then they lie through their teeth by saying that they “don’t have any data” supporting the claim that the gambling aspect of the game has profited them by leading to more interest in their games, which is bullshit.
PC players, and Lemmy users in particular, have a huge double standard for Valve.
It’s not his place to provide a solution: he is a journalist exposing a problem. Do you have such expectations for all journalists talking about any topic?
It wouldn’t be his place to provide a solution if he was arguing that the practice is a problem and prehaps pushing for further study. It is his place because throughout the video, he tries to argue that solving the problem is not only possible, but easy - and yet, despite supposedly being easy, his best solution is to basically propose that the industry self-regulate. That is the main issue I have with this video.
Valve could shut down the entire gambling market today and nothing would change to their market position.
And how would they do this without screwing over normal users and victums of the casinos in the process? They can’t get money from these casinos, nor collect casino records to redistribute scammed money. All they can do is disable trading or their marketplace, effectively seizing the poker chips (or metals balls, following Coffee’s pachinko comparison) but doing nothing about the money casinos have taken from victims nor preventing the casinos from either walking away or re-investing in a new casino. To prevent new ones from popping up, you could disable all trading and marketing, but now you’re punishing 132 million users for the acts of a couple thousand.
They could have some sort of account-level check to make sure that minors don’t spend their steam gift cards on CS skins
They could, but A) this is just one game on their platform, and B) this would leave them directly competiting against those who don’t regulate themselves and can make and reinvest significantly more. This is exactly the situation that Coffee argued was systematic and needed to be adressed further up the chain previously.
they’d rather use the gambling loophole of “akshually, it’s not gambling as defined by law”. Then they lie through their teeth by saying that they “don’t have any data” supporting the claim that the gambling aspect of the game has profited them by leading to more interest in their games, which is bullshit.
Again, exactly like their competition. The recent talk of Balatro’s PEGI rating being a prime example, with the industry self-regulation body declaring that virtual slot machines and loot boxes aren’t gambling but featuring poker hands was.
PC players, and Lemmy users in particular, have a huge double standard for Valve.
This is the problem I have with this video. Valve is being held to a different standard, and told to self-regulate while others in this very series are having blame redirected away from them because its unreasonable to expect them to self-regulate.
It wouldn’t be his place to provide a solution if he was arguing that the practice is a problem and prehaps pushing for further study. It is his place because throughout the video, he tries to argue that solving the problem is not only possible, but easy - and yet, despite supposedly being easy, his best solution is to basically propose that the industry self-regulate. That is the main issue I have with this video.
He is not proposing that the entire industry must self-regulate and that it’s the only solution to the problem. He is saying that this specific instance, the CS skin market, could be solved by Valve taking a firm stance, which not only they are not doing, but are actually working against, such as them side-stepping the regulations imposed on them by the French government.
I’m all in for stricter regulations on gambling by government agencies, but that doesn’t mean that the people side-stepping those regulations aren’t to blame too. While they are not doing anything technically illegal, they are purposefully operating in a grey area to profit off vulnerable people.
And how would they do this without screwing over normal users and victums of the casinos in the process? They can’t get money from these casinos, nor collect casino records to redistribute scammed money. All they can do is disable trading or their marketplace, effectively seizing the poker chips (or metals balls, following Coffee’s pachinko comparison) but doing nothing about the money casinos have taken from victims nor preventing the casinos from either walking away or re-investing in a new casino. To prevent new ones from popping up, you could disable all trading and marketing, but now you’re punishing 132 million users for the acts of a couple thousand.
They can’t do anything about the money the casinos have already made, but can stop them by making further money. That happens pretty much all the time in every market.
They could, but A) this is just one game on their platform, and B) this would leave them directly competiting against those who don’t regulate themselves and can make and reinvest significantly more. This is exactly the situation that Coffee argued was systematic and needed to be adressed further up the chain previously.
A) The video is explicitly about Counter Strike and the gambling market surrounding that specific game; not the whole industry. I agree a more systemic approach (ie. on a government level) should be advisable, but until that day comes, Valve could put an end to this specific problem, which they are currently choosing to ignore because they are profiting from it instead;
B) Valve makes literally billions and can invest to their heart’s content. They are not a small indie dev.
Again, exactly like their competition. The recent talk of Balatro’s PEGI rating being a prime example, with the industry self-regulation body declaring that virtual slot machines and loot boxes aren’t gambling but featuring poker hands was.
Cool, their competition does it too. Two wrongs don’t make a right.
This is the problem I have with this video. Valve is being held to a different standard, and told to self-regulate while others in this very series are having blame redirected away from them because its unreasonable to expect them to self-regulate.
Valve literally created the market. If you take the bigger share of the profit, you also take the biggest share of the blame. Casinos are obviously bad, but they are ultimately leeching off the system that Valve put in place.
You can’t do anything about the money the casinos have already made, but you can stop them by making further money.
Valve makes literally billions and can invest to their heart’s content. They are not a small indie dev.
So if I understand this right, and I don’t think I am, you’re arguing that valve should just disable the entire CS skin trading and marketing system, current victims and other users be damned, and should stop expecting to make money on their products because they have enough money as it is? That sounds like a ridiculous argument, so please clairify what I’m misunderstanding here.
Edit: fixed typos, and changed phrasing to sound less combative
I’m just saying what they could do if they were willing to. Your argument was that:
A) Valve should not stop casinos from profiting off vulnerable people, because they have already made money off those people and it would somehow be unfair to stop now, which to me sounds ridiculous.
You are using this as an argumentation that the government should ban them instead of Valve, but the end tesult would be the same. The casinos would walk away with the money, and the victims would be left to cry over it.
B) Poor Valve could not compete with their competition if they didn’t have the money they are gaining from their gambling-adjacent market, which to me sounds even more ridiculous. When Epic attempted to pry open the market using one of the biggest and most successful games ever as a leverage, they largely failed because the Steam user base was too entrenched. Steam is literally printing money right now and they don’t need the CS skin money to compete with anyone.
A) Valve should not stop casinos from profiting off vulnerable people, because they have already made money off those people and it would somehow be unfair to stop now, which to me sounds ridiculous.
My argument isn’t that Valve shouldn’t ban them if they have the means. Its that Valve cannot effectively ban them without penalising unrelated users just as much or more. The body that does have the means to do so without putting random users in the crossfire is the government.
You are using this as an argumentation that the government should ban them instead of Valve, but the end tesult would be the same. The casinos would walk away with the money, and the victims would be left to cry over it.
In a lot of these cases, even under current law, the government could be fining the individuals running these casinos. As they are run with effectively no oversight, many are blatently rigged, rely on false advertising, or use shoddy, under-the-table finances. That was what the first big crackdown was over - not the existance of these casinos, but the revelation of how rigged they were. As exemplified by the mob tactics being used by these casinos, they haven’t changed. Depending on the location, laws could also be implemented in ways that do go into effect in more aggressive ways, upto and including fining casinos for past actions if its really needed (and to be clear, I wouldn’t be opposed to fines like this being applied against Valve either.)
B) Poor Valve could not compete with their competition if they didn’t have the money they are gaining from their gambling-adjacent market, which to me sounds even more ridiculous. When Epic attempted to pry open the market using one of the biggest and most successful games ever as a leverage, they largely failed because the Steam user base was too entrenched. Steam is literally printing money right now and they don’t need the CS skin money to compete with anyone.
When talking about CS, we’re talking about an individual product, and one that is competing with other products where lootboxes and other manipulative tactics are already the norm. As you said, this isn’t about Steam. Valve is still a buisness, and their products are still a part of the market. They’re not going to just spend money to run a game they lose money on. Even if they do stop selling lootboxes, that doesn’t fix much because you’ve got thousands of other companies also trying to hook the same addicts on their gambling products. Instead, you need to impose limitations industry-wide, to ensure one product can’t get ahead by just being more abusive. Since we obviously aren’t going to have Valve, EA, Ubisoft, Epic, ect. all come together and agree to stop putting gambling in their games, we need a higher power to do so, that being the government.
But why not just have the people who can pay reparations, can punish those running illegal casinos, and can do it without catching others in the crossfire do it?
Sorry it’s not going in the direction you hoped. I’m personally super into this vibe. Feels bizarre and different. Hopefully they capitalize on the theme and do something cool with it. If the “dragon” flight part is as tight and fun as recent Doom mechanics, it could be really fun.
Agreed. I am not a fantasy fan for games really at all (with very few exceptions) but this looks so rad. The combination of tech and fantasy looks like a wild ride.
Yeah i really prefer the lovecraft aesthetic of Quake 1 over the tech, body horror of the sequels. Science coming into contact with something that defies science and reason is one of my favorite genres of fiction. The Myst, Event Horizon, Doom (especially Doom 3,) and the newest Rimworld dlc all really scratch that itch of coming into contact with something outside of reality, outside of reason and understanding. Really wish for more of that.
Yeah, I kind of agree. I wish they’d make a new Quake or something, Doom is cool and all but this barely resembles it. Eternal was fun, but too goofy and campy, Doom 2016 did it perfectly.
The headline made me think I must be missing something. It’s not weird to me that games look better/more realistic over time. That’s the progression of technology.
So I watched the video, and… if I was missing something in the headline, I missed it in the video, too. I want my 6 minutes back, please.
To summarize: the video opens on a series of games, each one progressively older, overlaid with a review of that game from the time it came out praising it as the best graphical fidelity of its time. Basically, they’re saying “Yes, graphics got better, but we always seem to conclude that they’re the best they will ever be”
Even their Experimental Gameplay games from before WoG and Tomorrow Corporation are worth playing if you can find them. That includes Tower of Goo of course but I remember there being a lot of fun ones back in the day.
They did Human Resource Machine, which is a pretty difficult low-level programming-based game, and 7 billion humans, which is a similar low-level programming-based game but incorporating multi-threading concepts.
Neither are super accessible if you’re not into programming, but if you are into it they’re both pretty awesome. I finished Human Resource Machine a few weeks ago and have made a start on 7 Billion Humans, so far so good.
I also played World of Goo and Little Inferno back on the Wii U lol. Very unique games with heaps of character.
As a former Floridian, this is definitely triggering my PTSD as they seriously nailed the atmosphere of Vice City (Miami). Curious if the main characters will be as well written as V’s were
The good news is that they are scared. First, they ignored it. Next they tried to debate, well lie, their way out of it.
No one is buying their story or is feeling sorry for those greedy bastards. So they take the other route, attack the opponent and question their intentions/ credibility.
Maybe. All I read is that he was QA. That can mean anything from game tester to someone who tests internal tooling. I haven’t seen an actual description of his role.
I honestly don’t know, but since he ended up in cyber security, I’m guessing it wasn’t games testing, but probably internal tooling. Orgs like Blizzard have a lot of non-gaming related tech, like websites, databases, etc.
I haven’t seen any disclosure about what his role was, just that he started as QA and ended up doing cyber security, both of which likely didn’t involve any coding.
He did technically end up in cybersecurity, but basically yeah, a role that involves almost zero actual technical skill.
He did social engineering, aka, worming his way into people’s emails and texts and social circles, sending fake ‘your account has been comprimised, send me your user name and password to fix’ type shit.
Ironically, social engineering is quite a fitting uh, subclass, for a low technical skill, high charisma narcissist to slot into.
He thought hacking and DEFCON was the coolest convention to go to, so him and some buddies… won the scavenger hunt badge, I believe thats more or less running around the Con with your network analyzer open on your phone, to find wifi/bluetooth enabled hidden scavenger hunt items, maybe with a couple extra steps.
Its literally a gimmick badge, its not really anything to do with actual pentesting, nothing like developing a totally novel exploit.
EDIT: Like, I am reasonably confident I know more about ethical hacking than he does, just having futzed around with tryhackme and some other free online sort of, ‘basics of hacking’ tutorials with simulated demonstrations on VMs, for a few years in my spare time.
Ask him what SYN, SYN-ACK and ACK are, and why they are important, and I’m guessing he would have to look it up, whilst making it look like he is not looking it up.
It’s also probably the most common type of breach. It’s way easier to compromise tech support than find a vulnerability, so it makes a ton of sense for a company like Blizzard to have an auditing team to test the various attack vectors.
A lot of roles like QA and cyber security sound glamorous, but that’s because people like glamorous titles. If you’ve spent even a tiny amount of time working in a relevant industry (in this case, anything touching computers), you should be able to read between the lines. That “sanitation engineer” is probably just a janitor or garbage truck driver, not the person in charge of the city water filtration services or something.
scavenger hunt badge
I haven’t been, but yeah, that sounds likely. Things like that are to get people new to the industry excited, not to actually challenge hardcore hackers.
I’ve attended and even spoken at some tech conferences, and they’re like 90% entry level stuff with a handful of interesting events and talks that actually break some new ground. I’m in senior level position now, and conferences are something I’d send my juniors to for networking and to get an idea of how they want to grow their career, but I don’t really attend anymore. I imagine cyber security conferences are similar.
Ask him what SYN, SYN-ACK and ACK are
Lol, that’s basic TCP stack stuff, I doubt he would’ve gone that low level at a company like Blizzard. You get to that level when you’re looking for amplification attacks at a place like Cloudflare or the military.
At Blizzard, they most likely want to make sure they’re up to date on security patches, their tech support is following the proper scripts, and IT isn’t getting lazy reviewing reports and whatnot. Basically, liability coverage in case there’s a real breach so their insurance can cover any losses.
But yeah, streamers like to appear like they know their stuff because that’s what gets people to watch.
It’s also probably the most common type of breach. It’s way easier to compromise tech support than find a vulnerability, so it makes a ton of sense for a company like Blizzard to have an auditing team to test the various attack vectors.
Yep, absolutely.
The uh, funniest one that sticks in my memory was the hack of basically an early build of GTA 6.
Somebody social engineered their way into someone at Rockstar who had some level of admin acces, I think via fake / intercepted and reformed 2FA auths to the target’s phone, along with some spear phishing.
Then, they were proficient enough to exploit thier way throughout the intranet… but not smart enough to cover all their tracks.
A lot of roles like QA and cyber security sound glamorous, but that’s because people like glamorous titles. If you’ve spent even a tiny amount of time working in a relevant industry (in this case, anything touching computers), you should be able to read between the lines.
You would think this, but everywhere I have worked in the industry… most people cannot infact read between the lines.
I’ve attended and even spoken at some tech conferences, and they’re like 90% entry level stuff with a handful of interesting events and talks that actually break some new ground.
Impressive!
I’ve been to some, never spoken though… also, not DEFCON though.
I imagine cyber security conferences are similar. (mostly exist for networking)
I agree.
But yeah, streamers like to appear like they know their stuff because that’s what gets people to watch.
Yeah, but Thor takes it to an uncommon point of basically being a conman, with his so much of his reputation built, by himself, on vastly overstated credentials.
Its like getting a 2 year nursing assistant degrer and then acting as if you can safely perform a brain surgery.
ve been to some, never spoken though… also, not DEFCON though.
Yeah, I’ve spoken at local JS and Go confs with several hundred to a couple thousand attendees (my sessions were small, like 30 people), and attended a couple others.
DEFCON is much larger, but looking at the schedule, it seems pretty similar, a mix of relatively entry level stuff and more advanced topics. So someone attending doesn’t say much other than that they’re interested in cyber security.
Its like getting a 2 year nursing assistant degrer and then acting as if you can safely perform a brain surgery.
Interesting. I haven’t watched enough of his stuff to know what claims he’s made.
Interesting. I haven’t watched enough of his stuff to know what claims he’s made.
As you seem to be an actual serious person who generally values their time:
Probably don’t bother lol, unless you want to just watch multiple hours of youtubers going through his … literal decades long history of hyping himself up, lying or manipulating the context of what he says and does.
I can best summarize it all as: He is a malignant narcissist sociopath, akin to a cult leader in terms of how charismatically skilled he is and how intricate his fabrications are.
Specifically as it refers to his coding abilities, now, a number of other coders on youtube have done exhaustive breakdowns of his sloppy code, and also shown that he often acts like a seasoned expert in specific technical concepts that he is at best only vaguely familiar with at the level of a sky high overview.
Did we watch the same trailer? This looks fucking amazing. None of this is actual gameplay footage, and about two scenes actually look like cutscenes. but it’s all been rendered IN ENGINE. Just like every other fucking Rockstar trailer to ever exist. This looks freaking insane.
People are shitting on the 2025 release date like……bruh. RDR2 took 8 years to develop. Rumors say this has been in development since 2019 or so, right after the release of RDR2. So 6-7 years which makes perfect sense. I’m not happy about the nearly two year wait but it fits with the development timeline.
Jesus christ I hope Rockstar parodies all of your asses to show how fucking negative the internet has become.
You can generate anything in-engine, it’s not representative of gameplay. Everyone does it and it’s equally shitty. It looks like a minute and a half of cutscenes and, other than character reveals it looks like a normal release. It just looks like smoothed out gta5, so like…gta5 on pc. The achievement wouldn’t be the graphics, it would be “can it maintain the graphics steadily and not drop frames”
Timeline is irrelevant, agreed. it will come out when it comes out.
It all looks great. That’s kinda the expectation tbh. It does look good, but all games “look good” at this stage. This gives rise to the other question about can it look good and be stable, even on lower end hardware (ps4/x1 and mid/low pcs) for release.
But a video is a video. I realize it’s so early and am not knocking it for lacking gameplay footage, just that generating a video in-engine is not representative of gameplay, or gameplay elements.
The game is announced for PS5 and Xbox Series exclusively.
It’s out of the question that it will be released on PS4/XBone, GTA VI will be a proper next gen (or current gen) game. And RStar would be making a fool out of themselves releasing a last gen game in 2025.
I’m guessing it won’t be released on PC for another year after the console release, but their GTA V PC Port has been optimized pretty well imho (even though they’ve pretty much abandoned it at this stage).
Rockstar has a great track record of their trailers being very close to the final game. Just look at any of their trailers and the final game. There’s not really any reason to believe it will be different this time.
I’m with you. The trailer looks incredible and I am very eagerly anticipating the game.
The trailer showed a lot of things that would likely be a part of the GTA6 story, and for that it looks like the game is geared up to be something incredibly entertaining and FUN!
My only gripe is the PC version is likely to release after consoles :(
This is definitely at least in-engine, likely actually in-game footage:
characters swimming in the water during both of the beach shots have no animations whatsoever, they just stand on the water like they’re jesus christ.
one of the container ships in the later overhead shot showing the derelict bridge is entirely untextured and extremely low res, while the rest of the environment is highly detailed
in the opening shot, parts of the city are billboarded or simple blocks to provide a basic skyline shape, while the areas around the prison are extremely detailed
The NPCs standing on the water also suggests NPCs are driven by the final actor and animation systems, but the animations for swimming or walking through water are just not done yet.
We also see a significant difference between the recreations of florida man memes, where every motion is keyframed to match the original videos, and the parts of the trailer where we see NPCs actually running their regular animation loops, as in the beach, club or road scenes.
Now, will we see this level of quality in game? Yes and no. Usually, a small elite team builds a vertical slice, a single mission in which every little mechanic already works, followed by many larger teams then building the rest of the game, trying to match the quality of the original template.
A good example of this is the original 40min E3 demo of cyberpunk 2077, which exists in the game 1:1 today. This vertical slice was awesome, but later missions usually had fewer alternative solutions, less polished environments and an overall lower interactivity.
So while I’m sure the robbery / prison / parole hearing part is fully fleshed out and will likely be included in the final game as-is, other parts of the game might not reach the same level of realism. Even if you ran the game on the same high-end workstations the developers are using.
As an old person who only kinda knew that lootboxes exist, this series was a huge eye opener to the insane amount of money and industry that has emerged around them. 10/10 would recommend to my fellow olds.
Now to head back to Bioshock where the only cost to looting boxes is that I might get attacked by a splicer.
Just check how much money GTA online has made for Rockstar every year. It’s an 11 year old game that makes half a BILLION dollars yearly.
No wonder they’re not in a hurry to get GTA 6 out. It MUST be better than GTA online both for gameplay and microtransactions as well as have the tech for live service
What the heck. Half a billion in microtransactions for a game that (according to this article) sounds like a real turd of a user experience. I loved GTA 3 and Vice City back in the day…I got GTA 4 in a Humble Bundle, haven’t spent much time with it yet. Anyone know if it’s a decent experience for a solo, offline, lootbox-free experience?
The single player is pretty good. You can also mod the single player to launch you into a separate online mode that doesn’t interact with R* servers. I don’t think there’s a way to sample GTA:O without signing in to the actual online mode. But like 99% of Twitch streamers for the game are playing a modded singleplayer version that lets them connect to roleplay servers
Nope. Nothing means anything until it releases. They had an hour of gameplay footage over 5 years ago. The only line these fucks are holding is the bottom line while they milk their players for hundreds of dollars whenever they release a fancy ship.
Even worse is when they announce the future release of a fancy ship and sell limited hulls. Over $1k per ship with no actual release date, but the ships are all sold out.
Between the two of you, you’ve complained they’re selling both too many and too few paid ships.
The claim they make is that they sell better ships because they want there to be late-game ships in the universe on launch day, and that they want the number limited so the game is properly balanced. If they weren’t trying to grab cash at least a little bit, they could have raffled them off or given them for free to the people with the most playtime in alpha, so there wasn’t a need to involve money, but their claim isn’t wildly inconsistent with their actions.
I think part of the reason there’s no set release date is that without shareholders breathing down their necks to release early to recoup their investment, they don’t see any advantage to releasing sooner rather than later. Maybe that means they’ll polish the game to a degree we’ve never seen before, but that could either mean a good game with no bugs on launch day, or a game that no one ever gets to play because some perfectionists working on it will never be satisfied.
you’ve complained they’re selling both too many and too few paid ships.
No, they said non-existant ships are sold out for 1k. They’re talking about how easy the playerbase is to milk.
they want there to be late-game ships in the universe on launch day
Can you buy the ships with in game currency? If not, why the fuck not? If so, let them grind for it. I promise the players have plenty of time before release.
they don’t see any advantage to releasing sooner rather than later.
And herein lies the problem. The pledge ships are supposedly just to fund early development and will not remain after launch because that would make the actual game pay to win. Right now it’s just “pay early to win” which is better somehow I guess? But the point is they’ve made over 800 million goddamn dollars from that. Why in the hell would they EVER release this game when they have people shoveling over hundreds and thousands for in game items? Blizzard, EA, Bethesda, ubisoft, every big dev is looking at this macrotransaction system and frothing with envy. If they release the game, that kills their golden goose and dumps new players into a game they’ll have to grind for months or years to achieve what early players achieved by opening their wallet. And the new players simply won’t.
So you’re almost correct about having a no incentive to release early, it’s a negative incentive to release. They’ll never do it. They keep expanding the scope and changing the roadmap and players keep coping and shoveling money into the fire while they play what is essentially a very good looking tech demo with no depth.
Exactly! They’ve found an incredibly successful business model without having to release a finished game. There’s no incentive for them to change that.
He’s opposed to it. He speaks with a very clam, professional voice, so people like to believe him. I get skeeved out by it personally. Honestly, we shouldn’t be taking advice from former Blizzard dev anyway. Nothing that comes from that company has ever been respectful to players or even human decency.
Sorry, I went to sleep not long after I made that comment. I see I was beaten to it but, he was just so dramatically crass and rude when introduced to the movement, and said mean shit about Ross, the guy behind the movement, calling him gross, a greasy used car salesman, saying “he can eat my whole ass”. And after all of that, he refused to speak to Ross and continued to make 2 entire youtube videos, and some livestreams about shit talking the movement, fuck that snotty little prick.
Calling one of the most polite, succinct and eager to explain themselves YouTubers a greasy used car salesman is just an automatic red flag, just unbelievably skeevy behavior from him.
Please don’t fuck this up… Please don’t fuck this up… Please don’t fuck this up… Please don’t fuck this up… Please don’t fuck this up… Please don’t fuck this up… Please don’t fuck this up…
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