Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why you'd think requiring a phone number would fix any of this. The incentives are still against you. I still play games occasionally and I deeply understand the frustration when the two hours you can afford to play in a week are utterly ruined intentionally by a thirteen year old child not getting his way. Your misjudgement is that the game company would eventually ban those accounts or at least only let you play against nice players after you've accumulated enough trust. Riot, for example, once said that they have all the data to only match the horrible, toxic people against each other and let everyone else have a great time, but they will never implement it in their system. All of those toxic players have a massive amount of value to them because of the money they spent, pooling them against each other would tank engagement and thus sales. So while you might be disincentived to play their game because of your past experiences, you're worth less to the company than the 10% ruining every other game for you.

In my opinion valve fixed this problem a lot better with their counter strike lobby system. In that game, you can mark yourself "searching" like in other competitve games, but you have the option to not be thrown into a round directly but to have other players invite you to their team. You can then check their profiles and chat with them a bit to see what kind of people they are. Games that where ruined by my own team have become so rare that they can neglected when planning my evening, which has become the most important reason for me to start counter strike instead of other competitive games.

There might be other options to improve the average match experience that I'm not aware of, but essentially outsourcing the player base moderation to the players in question seems like the best option I've encountered yet.

By far the biggest issue isn't just toxic accounts, but "smurf" accounts. Alternative accounts where players don't want to risk their incredibly high rank so they play on an account they "don't care about". You end up. With top 1% players playing at the median bell curve with average players.

You then end up with one player who can solo an entire enemy team of 6, dominating the game; OR being incredibly toxic to his team for not meeting his expectations and throwing the game.

It takes 1 player per match to ruin it for everyone else. In Overwatch, if 10% of accounts were smurfs, you statistically would have at least one in around half your games. Players eventually can't progress and make progress to get better because the top 1% of players at 4500 SR gatekeep 2800 SR and above.

I couldn't agree more. It'll filter out the cheaters, abusive players, and early leavers. In terms of privacy, asking for a phone number is peanuts compared to the level of access Vanguard has on your computer. I think people are blowing this out of proportion.

I guess I'm too old for that. So don't take my pov too seriously.

Competitive gaming takes away all the fun. I think the stress and frustration do not compensate the wins.

You play to relax but gets stress 90% of the time You dedicate an absurd of time to it like in a sport, but it has no benefits to health. You have a limited amount of time in your day to experience different things but then you get dragged to the same 3 button mashing over and over.

Obviously, it is not for me. So, again, don't take it seriously. Maybe someone can answer and give some good counter points that may convince me that it is worth it.

I encounter all of those behaviors on games like CS:GO that already require phone verification. Can't wait to get SWATed by a tank who thought I was a bad healer when the db leaks.

> level of access Vanguard has on your computer

I use a separate computer for games. Multiple for different games. Just because they have egregious amount of access to stuff like the hardware profile and the ability to run anything with full privileges doesn't mean I want to also have phone number nonsense on top of that.

I'm mildly annoyed by it because it really doesn't work.

Something you might not realize is in games that require phone numbers

> Increasingly these new accounts are being sold for $0.50 to $3.00,

This is still true: https://www.playerauctions.com/cod-account/warzone/

Unfortunately the best deterrent OW 1 has was being paid.

I’ll respond to this, but I’m also replying to another that noted how cheap phone numbers are. In the beginning, yes, they appear to be cheap. But that doesn’t last very long in my prior experience, the last multiplayer platform I used that used phone number verification blocked several VoIP carriers shortly after they started abusing the ease of getting numbers. This was super effective, overnight games got significantly better. Rinse and repeat, adding region locking of phone region to server region, etc… I know it’s not perfect, but you can’t forgo good for a lack of perfect. Every hoop removes a non-trivial amount of bad actors.

I’d rather have one game a week be annoying, then 3 dodges and 1 disconnect nearly every attempt at playing.

1. It's supposed to be easy go get new phone numbers. This is required for things like privacy, bypassing block lists that you got on for reasons out of your control, getting a new number that doesn't receive 1000 spam messages per day, etc. Basic stuff any engineer knows about.

2. Some carriers (1 in 50) require a photo ID to sign up, which is ass backwards. They even have brainwashed employees that answer "maybe something happened", when you ask "WTF? Why do you need photo ID now?". The idea that a phone number is a thing conveying some sense of liability and responsibility, is asinine.

3. Whatever problem you are experiencing is over represented. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33038531 . Yes, people disconnect, shit happens. Get over it. You are literally asking the world to become more police state so "you can enjoy your video game".

4. Your "there is no alternative" bullshit has been covered by other posters in this thread.

Let's actually break down this dodge and disconnect thing a bit more:

There are only two situations:

1. You're in a complete noob or unranked match. You already will get useless teammates that don't know how to play the game anyway. In fact, I'm now suspicious that everyone in this thread are this extremely bigoted player I play with sometimes in an unranked game, who gets angry at every noob when we lose with that noob on our team, or quitter, or whatever he can blame things on. Calling out dodgers is highly suspicious that you're one of those people.

2. You're in a ranked match. By definition, there are less "bad actors" here, as they would have been banned and have to work to get back to this rank. This is a straightforward problem to solve and if your company is so bad at it that every match somehow has this problem (which itself is against odds even without moderation), then they're not doing their job. Of course they could always add whatever gimmick you want to appease you instead of solving the problem (moderating better).

First of all you need to stop with the personal attacks, it weakens your argument.

Second, we’re not talking about unskilled players. We’re talking about players who intentionally seek to grief others. Players who want the game to end prematurely, or who use unfair assistive programs (cheats).

Your second point is a feature not a bug, IMO.

I want a mechanism that uniquely identifies players to prevent them from circumventing bans they’ve received for their bad behavior.

You keep turning this into a privacy problem. For you that may be the case, but for myself I want my multiplayer games to be able to uniquely identify players. You suddenly bringing to the extreme of “police state”, etc, does not help your argument.

Finally, you insist these problems are “over represented” yet don’t provide anything that addresses the problem I actually stated. Players using hacks/cheats are typically over represented, in games like Overwatch, League of Legends, DotA2, any team strategy game, there are a significant amount of selfish players who will grief there team because they did not get their way. The answer “well then play ranked”, is a non-answer because it implies that we should not be allowed to enjoy casual gameplay.

You seem quite adamant that people should be able to behave poorly, and bypass restrictions applied to them for their poor behavior. I’m curious why.

And lastly, I’ve never had to change a phone number because it was “blocked by something out of my control”. I’ve changed a users DID because they made the mistake of giving the number out to customers.

You didn't answer anything I said.

Warzone is a game that's distributed by Activision Blizzard. It uses the exact same scheme that OW2 does.

Literally every $5 account listed there will also work for OW2, and those accounts have been sold for almost 2 years now.

And forget dodging, Warzone has a massive cheating problem that verification didn't even make a ding in.

Verification will not work for OW2. Maybe you felt placebo, maybe your game was considered not worth it by bad actors... but the fact I can click on that link and buy an account for $5 that's verified with the same system that OW2 needs proof it doesn't work here.

It sounds like Blizzard/Activision is doing a poor job of ratcheting down on abused carriers.

However, at their scale they may consider this effective enough. The $5 cost on the underground market probably still represents a large enough hurdle to significantly reduce the number of casual bad actors. People who will not be investing in an updated cheat and/or account after their first ban.

> nonsense that ignores reality which no one who calls themselves a hacker (old school definition) would agree with is still top upvoted

I played Fortnite for 2 years at the start. Reddit posts with 50000 upvotes were complaining about "the cheaters", while posts about actual problems (weapon switch lag, bug where you edit a wall but it edits the wrong one, etc) were unacknowledged. The company even acknowledged the "cheating problem" (as any bad company would, regardless of if it's real). However, in my thousands of games, I've come across maybe 2 cheaters. What I did notice, is almost every random I play with complained about:

- shooting around corners

- flick aim

- stuff that cheats dont even typically do, like allowing you to bypass a highly specefic cooldown which would only benefit a highly experienced player who would beat said randoms even without cheats

And then we get all those big incompetent hardware review sites who can't even explain how vsync works writing articles about how there are so many cheaters in game 1 2 and 3.

Again, I have played competitive FPS for 20 years. When I'm in a game playing with randoms and it happens to be the 1/300 where a cheater ruins it, I noticed consistently what is unsurprising: my team mates act like this is the end of the world, want to shoot the cheater IRL, etc. This is because the average video game player is a bad sport and is always seeking for something to blame his losses on. Most people do not play video games for sportsmanship, but to consume a product.

Do you see the problem now? No matter what measures are added, you will still complain. I argued with the exact same hordes of entitled bigoted kids each time something like VAC or Punkbuster came out. The before and after situation of perceived cheating was absolutely no different. I do not believe for one second that 50 of you ITT are competent gamers and can discern cheating. Less than 10% of gamers can. If you're "an adult with other things to do", you most certainly can't. So why do you really want phone identification, after knowing all of this? Answer that and stay fashionable.

But cheating is just one aspect of the problem. Another very common thing to do is Smurf, where you get an alt account and end up playing in low-level matches again and easily win. Shouldn’t it be possible to prevent these players from coming back?

Or how about that person who wants to shoot their opponent IRL just because they’re a bad sport? Shouldn’t it be possible to report them and get them banned permanently?

When a game is free to play like OW2, all of these things which are already huge problems for the OW1 player base become even worse because there’s no cost barrier to entry.

SMS seems like the least intrusive way to identify the same person across different accounts.

> Shouldn’t it be possible to prevent these players from coming back?

Just make a mechanism to slow down account generation. CD keys were good for this. It doesn't matter that it's not fool proof, it still works since you have less chance of running into a freshly made smurf or cheater account in the lowest rank. Phone does the same thing, however phone is intrusive and a bad solution. Smurf is even less of a problem than a cheater btw.

> Or how about that person who wants to shoot their opponent IRL just because they’re a bad sport? Shouldn’t it be possible to report them and get them banned permanently?

Umm, wtf? This was just an example and no they shouldn't be banned at all for that. That's also a good 50%-90% of any game's userbase.

> When a game is free to play like OW2, all of these things which are already huge problems for the OW1 player base become even worse because there’s no cost barrier to entry.

Free 2 play games are literally a scam. I don't want a game that has skins and nonsense. In fact, I take more issue to having to learn what cosmetic skins mean what (for instance in a class based game, you have to memorize each skin of a class, and for team based, some skins are the wrong color, like in Splitgate), than the perceived problems of this thread. I don't care what Overwatch does, I care about the fact that whatever nonsense they do will be normalized in the rest of the industry to the point where devs can't even argue with it.

> It’s the type of behavior that you the good behaving, rule respecting, team player gets penalized for.

This rather sounds like badly designed scoring rules.

> I don’t understand how this is controversial.

First and foremost: Because it's a gimmick on top of being annoying.

Second and very important: Because phone numbers do not actually fix anything. People will pool numbers, people will buy new numbers ($1). But since you already got baited on the hook, you will all happily accept photo ID as the next "fix" as well as whatever comes after that.

Because I've literally watched gamers complain about practically the same shit since the year 2000 and layers of new snake oil were added by the corporations to appease you, and you still complain since these gimmicks predictably amount to nothing aside from making it more annoying to play the game.

Because not everyone has a phone.

Because kids don't have phones (yeah I know this is changing).

Because phone is not the internet.

Because phones suck.

Because phone numbers change.

Because I don't want more stuff tied to my phone (which I don't have) that needs to change when my number changes.

Because it's another way for your game to break. Phone might not work at the time or the message wont be received or your phone is crashing/updating as usual and that adds another 5 minute delay before you can start the game, or you forgot to charge the phone. Which brings up the same point: because phones suck, why the hell do I need to hold a separate physical device to use what is essentially a different email account which is on an entirely different network and both networks have to be up all the time to be able to do anything?

The above point is extremely pertinent. About every 19 in 20 games I have played since the year 2000 have had some obtuse login, onboarding, social, whatever the hell bogus system with all kinds of dangling third parties and if any one of them broke or you clicked the wrong button you'd have to spend possibly an hour just making the game start up. Perhaps with one of the most successful games ever made this may not be an issue, but for the rest of the games, this certainly is.

Because I don't want gamedevs to have my phone number (nor the hassle of setting up a throwaway).

Because of all the reasons I hate email verification (which is utterly pointless aside from helping grannies not lose their account, since this is what captcha is for) as well.

Because the company will fuck up every possible thing imaginable so the phone will have some huge downside I didn't think of yet.

> I hope all multiplayer games start to add in this type of requirement

No. Kindly keep that, far away from anything I use, pretty please. Thank you. I will never add it to my games, either.

I would already accept photo ID for ranked ladders. It's basically real money on the line these days.