Call of Duty players flock to buy “all-black” DLC skin, hide in dark corners | Hacker News Reader

Call of Duty players flock to buy “all-black” DLC skin, hide in dark corners

arstechnica.com

92 pointsPaulHoule54 comments

As a kid I saved up for a used laptop so I could play Halo LAN games with my mates. The computer didn't meet the required specs for the game, but it mostly worked if you turned the all the graphics settings down to low.

Except for invisibility: invisible players are normally rendered as, well, invisible, except for a slight rippling of the air that's only perceptible if you're a few metres away. But on my underpowered machine, invisible players were rendered as an opaque explosion of colourful glitchy noise!

We agreed to just not use the invisibility powerups after I got in some epic cross-map shots of supposedly invisible players.

Wow, I had the exact same experience! I used to play Halo Trail with family, friends, and random people online. The graphics got messed up on the old family desktop and invisible players became easier to see. Good times.

If anyone else has had a similar experience or wants to relive the old days or Halo 1 PC you can still do so with Halo Custom Edition. OpenCarnage.net has the information you need, be sure to check out the Chimera mod.

Yeah, I think the original Halo PC invisibility ("active camo") effect only worked on AMD GPUs, or something like that. If you had an iGPU or Nvidia (IIRC), other players who picked up the invisibility were fully visible. I also have memories of running Halo PC on a very low-capability PC -- I remember adding "-useff"[1] to the launcher to set graphics to the lowest levels.

[1]: http://hce.halomaps.org/index.cfm?nid=309

In cod4, you could sufficiently mess with how the game rendered (through console commands at least).

This effectively removed folliage rendering. So gillie suit snipers suddenly stood out like a sore thumb. :)

In StarCraft 2 there’s the opposite problem: invisible units make a slight ripple that you can pick out. On low graphics the ripple of invisible units is basically unnoticeable. But if you turn the effects setting all the way up while keeping everything else low, you’ll see a high-res shimmer in the shape of the invisible unit against the low-res background.

Its the reverse. Far easier to see invis units on lower graphics and textures settings than it is on high/ultra textures. If you jump onto twitch and have a look, many of the high level players will have the game on the lowest settings graphics settings for this reason although plenty also just run it looking nice for the audiences sake.

Yes the pros have everything on lowest...except one or two settings are higher to make the invisible units pop out better. Which is what the parent said.

During my first year at uni, we used to play a lot of counterstrike, back when it was still only a mod. Me and my roommates discovered that if you lower the resolution to 320x200, the heads are really big. Desert eagle headshots all day long...

Later i started playing Bad Company 2 with a friend. With details on minimum i could easily make out the mines. We played quite a bit of tanks, him driving and me on machine gun/repairs/mine spotting duty.

Fun times

Back in my day we cheated by playing Oddjob in Goldeneye since he was shorter than all the other characters.

For me, it was the user uploaded models in Action Quake 2.

There were a couple that came to mind: a tiny gray alien with hitboxes to match as well as a model of Trinity (from the Matrix) that was all black and slimmer than the typical male characters.

While watching the other players screen to see where they were.

I once made the mistake of thinking it would be fun to choose the cow character model in a ‘Unreal Tournament’ tournament. The front of the thing is literally all head, so I was constantly headshotted :/

In N64 Perfect Dark my cousins and I (~10 years old) would set the AI team strength to max, make them aliens, and give them those little injection guns. It was the most horrifying/fun experience because they could move incredibly fast, were very short like Oddjob, and would one hit lethal inject you.

Oh wow, as someone who spent a lot of time with this game, that is indeed terrifying!

I vaguely remember that letting the bots have explosives of any kind was similarly terrifying.

first time i ever played goldeneye i picked jaws, thinking he'd be badass.

me: "wait, i have to always be looking down in order to aim my gun at anyone?"

my friend brian: "yeah, jaws is tall. and don't get ahead of yourself, you have to find a gun first."

so then i chucked the controller at brian's head. n64 controllers are the exact perfect shape for this.

This kind of thing has been going on since the original Quake (and possibly earlier). Gameplay resources - models, textures, maps, sounds, etc - were stored as relatively simple “pak” file archives [0]. You could easily add resources and even overwrite existing ones simply by adding additional pak files to the game directory.

One of the easiest things you can do is simply replace one model for another. There’s a power-up [1] you can get that makes you completely invisible except for your eyes. But just replace “eyes.mdl” with “player.mdl” and invisible players become plain as day [2].

You can do even more with custom models. Add big sticks along each axis to see enemies coming from a mile away. Make the skin glow-in-the-dark fullbright [3] white. Cut holes in the map to see through walls.

Put it all together and you can see what a difference it makes: - DM3 normal [4] - DM3 with hacks [5]

0: https://quakewiki.org/wiki/.pak

1: https://quake.fandom.com/wiki/Ring_of_Shadows

2: http://quakeone.com/forum/quake-talk/quake-central/9304-eyes...

3: https://quakewiki.org/wiki/Quake_palette#Colormap

4: https://youtu.be/BPiVVtRRsyk?t=8m57s

5: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hf94PbE-b9I

Maybe games like Fortnite have made this a news to some? But choosing your PvP shooter outfit for camouflage benefit has seemed to be common knowledge for decades (even if some people chose style over function).

It's a huge game with a big budget so it's reasonable to expect that every change is scrutinized and considered before release; it's got a huge player base with many of them very passionate, opinionated, and knowledgeable; it's a high-paced multiplayer FPS where your actions directly affect the success and enjoyment of other people; it has a history of camping; the franchise is currently facing criticisms over balancing issues in multiplayer; a common way for the industry to minimise criticism for DLC and microtransactions is to promise players that any items will be aesthetic only with no competitive advantage (no "pay-to-win").

Company releases DLC skin for $10 that provides competitive advantage to the most unsporting players, altering the game balance in a way that leads to many frustrating and unexpected games for their players, who have to swallow their pride and pull out their wallet to keep the playing field level. Company makes a lot of money.

That's why.

Don't forget the inevitable change the following month where the skin is altered to be less advantageous, and people are upset that they're not getting what they purchased.

... and then they still buy the next "overpowered" skin that comes along.

It's less about people doing it and more about the studio selling the advantage

If this were a skin available for free with the game I doubt we'd see this angle

There's a disgusting incentive structure here

Or confusion. I still remember Q1 with a problem of "cross dressing" players that wore both red and blue due to your ability to customize the other accent color on your character.

Paying additional real money to a game developer for an advantage in a competitive game against other players is not decades old.

Yes, this happens over and over. Hunt Showdown had the same problem recently as well.

DLC skin issues aside, I think IW and Activision did a great job with this game. Obviously I'm a scrub and it's more of a 15min distraction than a game I'll be putting long hours into, but it scratches every itch I was expecting it to. All the positive gameplay elements of the 2011 version and most of the obnoxious stuff removed. From what I know, this is largely a result of IW really listening to what players did and didn't like about their past games. No jetpacks, no martyrdom, no attack dogs, no tactical nukes, just run and shoot and die, then spawn and run and shoot some more. Sometimes you don't need to fix what ain't broken.

I think if they were to repackage this same engine every few years with new maps and co-op, I'd happily continue to pay full price.

I think you've convinced me to buy it. MW2 original on Xbox 360 and PS3 was a pretty unique gameplay I spent hours playing and if what you say is true about the removal of a lot of new crap then I can't wait to play.

It's not as foundational as the original MW or as "fun" as the original MW2, but it scratches a similar itch. The MW 2019 set the direction and MW2 now is a bit more slow paced (no more slide-cancel stuff) and more fun to play. SBMM is still a problem though.

Nuke’s in the game in a different form as a “hidden” permanent kill streak (MGB nuke). Agree with your sentiment though - it’s lots of fun!

I missed jetpacks, martyrdom, attack dogs, and tactical nukes?? Was that all in one game!?

I recall a potentially apocryphal tale of a nation with green military uniforms back in the pre-WW1 days, and how this bestowed a camouflage benefit when fighting in the woods.

Video games typically have different standards for fairness from real-life conflicts.

Robin hood and his merry men in lincoln green come to mind.

I used to snipe my coworkers in Half Life 2 at lunch this way - part of why it worked was our terrible monitors, but on a certain level, hard to beat the classics.

So suppose you buy this, then you successfully hide in the dark and proceed to kill a lot of people because of that (which you wouldn’t have been able to otherwise). Then what? Is that “fun”?

The fact being a sniper or camper was a cheap way to win never stopped certain kids from doing it.

Competitive gaming is a different beast where only set maps are sometimes used, they could avoid dark ones or ban the DLC from competition. Advantages never lasted very long from my experience.

Yes

Welcome to videogames

The subtle beginnings of Earthtone Coalition vs Forces of Brightness.

As a kid I played rayman 2, some levels were way too dark on the crt monitor. I finished the game after figuring out how to change the gamma and contrast settings.

Of course everybody knew what this meant.

The question is: is it a fair advantage/tactic? And I think the answer has been given too: no, it's pretty skewed. If they want to keep the fairly positive reception of MW2, it's obvious what has to be done.

so they'll first rake in the cash and then, once sales stop, proceed to nerf it.

We got merked by one of these last night

Hid out in a gas station, impossible to see.

This Needs to be patched

Press F to pay respect.

upvote this comment if you always played oddjob on goldeneye

In the meantime CSGO makes changes to explicitly increase player contrast in maps: https://blog.counter-strike.net/index.php/2020/06/30428/

This is interesting game tuning. I guess the tactics isn't as fun, when you're less likely to see someone before they can shoot you?

The gameplay is quite complex so that difficulties parsing enemies due to visuals just detracts from the experience and reduces that gameplay complexity. There are still situations where it's intentionally more difficult to recognize enemies, but that's an explicit choice made by map designers, not an accident, and requires you to learn how to deal with that in specific situations (while also adding to the decision space for the other side).

This was only required because they started selling very camo-like player skins which nobody wanted, and didn't even fix the issue very well. people just had to accept it, and I still regularly see some skins blend into the background way too well...

> some skins blend into the background way too well...

That's kind of the point of camo.

I'm guessing the issue is that this is a supposedly cosmetic item you can buy with cash, so if it has an impact on gameplay, it creates a pay-to-win environment.

That isn't the point of in game skins that aren't supposed to give you any advantage though

I haven't played CS except for the OG version,but that just seems like the same to me (and I have a gaming laptop)

I'm looking at it on MacBook with 40% brightness and I can tell the difference, but yeah it's only slightly better. Reading the comment I was expecting some orange outline but there's only a very light "gamma" difference.

I have an ASUS and I switched to its "FPS" mode in Armoury Crate.I was then able to see the difference, but it is really subtle. My monitor doesn't have 4K, so maybe that might make the difference.

You have to imagine that we're recognizing and reacting to these things faster than we're often aware of. It's largely an unconscious process where edge detection is the very first step. Even a subtle change like this will have a significant impact on how quickly you can visually process and react to it. This patch is meant to make it easier to discern the model from the background and it does that perfectly without affecting game balance too much across the game.

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