Comment by clarry | Hacker News Reader

Comment by clarry | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Why do I need to interact with another store before I can say my experience with GOG has been bad?

But yes, I have been in direct contact with a publisher (who also has their own storefront) after GOG support, expectedly (based on prior experience), refused to support me on the grounds that they do not .. support .. my system (even though I pointed out the issue was not system specific). The publisher had no issues supporting me, and indeed they were comparatively quick to respond and easier to deal with than GOG.

Here's how it goes with GOG:

* Have a problem with your game? Sorry, we don't support your system (and we also release buggy games that would be easy to fix but that's the users' responsibility).

* Want refund? Sorry, refunds are for technical issues only and "we do not support your system" is not a technical issue.

* Want your forum posts deleted? Sorry, we can't do that because we'd have to delete your account and besides, it'd break threading (nevermind that moderators are already breaking threading and removing posts without deleting accounts; and threading breaks only because their software is so crap).

I haven't got a single success story to share about GOG's support. And up til now, the lack of refunds has become a major pain point because you're not entitled to either support or refunds if you can't get your game working on a system GOG does not want to support.

This got worse when Judas' wine thread become a ghost town after the Linko90 fiasco, where GOG decided to side with social media outrage mob and fire their own people and presumably make a policy change that disallows their employees (who in the past had given unofficial but first class support on forums) from being active members of the community. Around the same time linuxvangog started looking for a new job; I believe GOG either fired him or pissed him off enough to have him look for a better place.

GOG really doesn't care about Linux, which really sucks, because a lot of Linux users do care about DRM-free games.

But hey, I've been enjoying STALKER lately thanks to you & GOG.

> GOG really doesn't care about Linux, which really sucks, because a lot of Linux users do care about DRM-free games.

I think Linux users are just a slight bit entitled where it concerns gaming. Just two examples:

1. They want anti-cheat stripped out of games so they can play games via Steam Proton, conveniently ignoring the fact that any multiplayer game that does that will be flooded and destroyed by hackers

2. They demand full support from game devs, despite only making up an absolutely tiny fraction of the customer base. They routinely make up less then 0.1% of sales (!), but cause 20%+ of support tickets[0]. No sane business in the world would sink 20% of their support budget into 0.1% of their revenue.

[0]https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080213166116597760

> 1. They want anti-cheat stripped out of games so they can play games via Steam Proton, conveniently ignoring the fact that any multiplayer game that does that will be flooded and destroyed by hackers

Yes, I want them stripped out or made optional. I've had good times playing multiplayer games without built-in anti-cheat systems. These are a lazy concept in any case. Self-moderating communities are much nicer, and in any case required to save the day when anti-cheat inevitably fails to detect (let alone prevent) cheating.

> 2. They demand full support from game devs, despite only making up an absolutely tiny fraction of the customer base. They routinely make up less then 0.1% of sales (!), but cause 20%+ of support tickets[0]. No sane business in the world would sink 20% of their support budget into 0.1% of their revenue.

There are games that are rock solid on Linux. There are games that I've offered to people on a USB stick running Linux and Wine because it works better than Windows.

So here we have an anecdote from one company and one game, and automated crash reports are conflated with support requests so you can't even tell what's what. Yeah, maybe their game actually crashes a lot on Linux. Sucks for them?

This is not data.

But yeah, they'll continue to make up less than 0.1% of sales when they're not being supported.

> Self-moderating communities are much nicer

Curious how you think a game like PUBG could self-moderate cheaters out of existence.

Given all the cheating videos I've seen, evidently they haven't been able to come up with any automated system that does better.

It should work the way it works anywhere else: people report users that are obviously cheating or suspected of cheating. Server flags players with suspicious behavior. Community moderators keep watch. Replays are saved, and anyone can watch them and report cheating. People who are detected cheating get banned, people who play without obviously cheating gain reputation. Given enough rep, you can access servers with more skilled players & fewer randoms that have no rep yet. You can also have friends with enough rep vouch for you, but there are consequences if they invite cheaters.

A lot of obvious cheating can be detected server side anyway, without installing drm malware on clients. I've seen videos of such obvious cheating in pubg.

Any system that involves verifying reports is a non-starter IMO. That solution doesn't scale to a game that has millions of players.

Server-side detection really should be easy, but developers tend to write code that gives the client too much authority so that the server code can be faster and they can run more game instances per server. It's kind of shit, really. You can't do anything server-side to prevent aim bots, but you can absolutely prevent people from shooting through walls and terrain.

> 2. They demand full support from game devs, despite only making up an absolutely tiny fraction of the customer base. They routinely make up less then 0.1% of sales (!), but cause 20%+ of support tickets[0]. No sane business in the world would sink 20% of their support budget into 0.1% of their revenue.

There's also the opposite story told by some indie devs, where linux user actually make up a significant portion of sales and also provide very technical support requests/bug fixes. I'll see if I can find the article where I read this somewhere.

I think this new policy would make it simpler for your case because it would probably just turn into an automated refund vs talking to multiple parties and support tickets.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com