I don’t know if this makes me “a redditor” somehow or what, but…
As a dev, I am deeply troubled by the gaming industry so calmly walking into kernel anti cheats. It’s insane and being tossed around like it’s nothing.
Helldivers especially, since they picked one of the sketchiest ones and it’s a game that entirely doesn’t need it.
I have no idea if Reddit has suddenly picked up on this, but I’ve been pissed since at least Valorants release, but have seen more YT videos talking about it recently.
I really do not understand how server anti cheat is not way easier.
In a clean slate, it is. It’s also way more effective (except for things like wall hacks, aim bots, recoil suppressors, etc, but most of those things are only really important and popular in competitive FPS). It’s also much simpler to understand and to leave no “holes” behind. It also lives in the developers domain so it can’t be “compromised” or circumvented.
The thing is that client side “anti cheat” can be commoditized. Every game with server authority/anti cheat needs specific server software to run their game logic. Client anti cheat is basically “look at everything else running on the system and see if any of it seems suspicious”. As such, there’s not really anything “game specific” to these - they basically are just a watch dog looking for bad actors - so as such, one company can come along, make one, and sell it to other devs.
This being “off the shelf” and not something the dev team has to think about besides a price tag means that management is just going to buy a third party solution and check off the “anti cheat” box on their task list.
I feel like devs are caught up on realtime anti cheat and not willing to do anything asynchronous.
First, this is a management problem and not the devs. Any dev worth their salt knows this isn’t really a good solution.
But I’d say the more relevant and prominent thing here is that game companies just don’t want to have to run servers anymore. It’s a cost, requires dev time, and requires maintenance, and they don’t want to do that. If these games had servers running the game world like games used to, they’d inherently have their own “anti cheat” built in for free that wouldn’t necessarily catch everything but would do a better job than some of these. And it could be enhanced to cover more bases.
But studios don’t want to do this anymore. It’s easier to make the game p2p and slap an off the shelf anti cheat and call it a day.
Some games still require matchmaking servers etc, but the overhead there is way lower.
Or they really like paying licensing fees for client-side anticheat.
Not that I agree with the decision, but it is definitely cheaper and faster than the alternative. But picking something like nprotect totally fucking baffles me. There are better options.
I just don’t understand how any competent software engineer or systems admin or architect trusts the client so fervently.
In some ways, same. Every project I’ve been on that has gotten anywhere near client side trust I’ve fought adamantly about avoiding it. I’ve won most arguments on it, but there are some places where they just utterly refuse.
But then there are things like New World… I don’t know how the fuck that shit released like it did. The number of things trusted to the client were absolutely baffling. I expected Amazon’s first foray into gaming to be a fucking joke, but I was totally appalled at how bad it turned out. They even touted hiring ex blizzard talent to get my hopes up first.
I’d bet some of this is CRTs and public non-digital television at the time.
While we can look at current N64 graphics and compare it to IRL, we’re like “HUH? Not even close”. But that’s not the comparison that was happening in the 90s.
In the 90s, sports were usually shot on a shitty film camera, then converted into signals that ran at 480p and broadcast across shitty infrastructure. These were then shown on really fuzzy CRTs with awful washed out colors and blown up really large. Not to mention, if you didn’t have cable (which many people didnt), we’re also talking radio transmission and bunny ears which even further shittied the picture. What real sports looked like on TV was also, by today’s standards, total ass.
But now we have digital cameras sending 4k digital signals to high resolution and vivid color TVs. It’s totally different.
Not to mention, the fuzziness of CRTs made N64 era graphics seem better because it would essentially anti alias for you and such and make things look rounder than they actually were, which was one of the hardest things to do in that era.
It’s hard to even relate to this because even if you go find a sports broadcast from the and watch it now, you’re still not experiencing the shitty CRT and it’s pathetic reproduction. You kind of can’t even see how bad this shit was unless you watch like someone’s home camcorder recording a CRT and watch THAT footage.
Does it excuse her? Not entirely. I’m sure if you really looked you could figure it out during closeups of the players and such. But at a passing glance, this is way more understandable if you think about what her reference for what “real sports on TV” looked like.
TL;DR: Employees say his actions led to a lot of direction changing that forced management to scramble, and the lower workers had to bear the brunt of this. They also complained that OW2 needed more work or would be review bombed on Steam and his leadership refused. Shareholders are still happy to fellate him though because he made them a lot of money.
Claiming it’s “door in the face” is a little crazy here. If this is where they wanted to be, the “bait” changes could have been much much less bad than they were, and they still could’ve walked back to this.
Hell, they could have announced a 10% revenue split and it would’ve looked much better than what they pitched. And they could still walk back to 2.5% and looked like heroes. And it wouldn’t have lost them nearly as much trust. Nor made them look as bad.
If this was what they were trying to do, they’d have to have been even dumber to have made it this bad.
I’m more willing to bet they’re just fucking stupid. Or that a few people on the board had this as a fucking moronic idea, and the rest managed to take back control after it went totally sideways.
But claiming that it’s a door in the face requires them to be evil enough to do it, stupid enough to not realize they’re overdoing it, crazy enough to think it’d work, etc. It seems way too contrived.
The guy who owns the company knows what it means for the long term stock price: a plummet. He knows that’ll come eventually if these changes go through.
Investors may react positively to the news, but when they see the damage it actually does, they’ll pull out too.
The guy running the company has shares that are valued way higher than when he earned them, he is sitting so high right now it’s far worth selling here instead of gambling on the response to the news. It’s just simple “quit while you’re ahead”.
Is there a sort of collection/discussion of the stopkillinggames.com campaign? angielski
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