Consumer activity and protest does work from time to time. One lesson to learn about these sort of statements here is not to make them during weekend. In the end backing down here at least for a while is a sensible action.
And there is no way to report players for that either.
Also not all of us have friends who play HD2, so we don't play "most of the time with people you know"...
So... what if there was?
But currently with whatever anti-cheat they're using the amount of cheaters is practically non-existent. I haven't personally seen any weirdness.
A friend of mine managed to get a screen recording of two people doing the grenade exploit before it was fixed.
Interesting side effect of this has been that it has driven a substantial amount of people to play the game under a Linux distro using Valve’s proton wrapper for Windows emulation (same as is used on Steam Deck) because the anticheat version for Linux doesn’t have the rootkit element.
Conversely most of the cheaters that this system is designed to stop seem to also use Linux, making the entire endeavour pointless from the developer’s side, yet they remain adamant in keeping a system that harms many and doesn’t even prevent cheating anyway…
But yea, "victory for gaming" that they don't need to log into an account... As they log into an account to boot the game up. But TWO accounts, absolutely not. Unless it's Call of Duty. Or Diablo. Or Assassin's Creed (which isn't even an online game?).
I can't even feel sorry. They bring it all on themselves.
They marked something like 15 countries to allow sales, and blocked the rest. Just completely mismanaged the entire way through
I'm not sure if things are the same now - that happened in the era of transition from PS3 to 4
More importantly imo is that the game is working well in the flatpak distribution of Steam.
That's not to say it's hopeless. Sibling comments point out various options that can be run purely server-side. But there's no perfect solution. Even cloud gaming can't prevent cheating because I can take the resulting video stream and run computer vision algorithms on it and still send wrong-numbers back up as my input stream. This may not let me see through walls but is still plenty to implement an aimbot, for instance. Push it into a DRM'd device and I can grab the HDMI stream and hack apart my controller to directly apply voltages to the controller. DRM the HDMI stream and I can point a camera at my TV. Detect my aimbot through machine learning and I can put together a machine learning network with a few hundred of my buddies to precisely characterize the thresholds the server is using and stay below them while still having a cheat system that plays better than I do. And so forth.
(And do not underestimate the extent that people will go to to cheat. I don't really consider "get together with a hundred of my buddies and use machine learning to characterize your machine learning ban algorithm" to be something that could not happen. The amount of effort people will put into cheating is not bounded by your credulity. Weirder things have already happened.)
The deck is fundamentally stacked against preventing cheating. You can certainly take a bite out of it but precisely hitting the exact right contour to exactly nail the cheaters and never hit anyone by mistake is effectively impossible.
It won’t work perfectly, or perhaps even well, but maybe it’d work well enough to avoid rooting your customers’ PCs.
There's so much that could be done through basic behaviour analysis and injecting false data. Yet, instead of that, games just come loaded with anti-cheats that barely work.
Theoretically, such a driver could allow anti-cheat systems like Vanguard the same permissions as before, but provide information to the user on exactly what it is doing and accessing. Even that would be an improvement. (And in the future, if the driver had a stable API surface, it would make Linux porting easier.)
Yes, there are still possible ways of getting around this, but it becomes much harder than "Download this cheat, install, and you're aimbotting"
The problem is that multiplayer game servers aren't run by players anymore; which means they aren't moderated by players anymore. Game studios have monopolized the responsibility of moderation, and tried (utterly failed) to replace it with a rootkit.
But they """had""" to, because they want to sell cosmetics and "microtransactions", nevermind that a digital costume that costs as much as a candybar or soda shouldn't be called a "micro" transaction.
You can't sell anything if you give away the authoritative server software. Valve tried to get around this by having third party servers contact an official server with a "who actually owns what" style api but nobody gives a fuck.
Ah man, it's almost like a costume that took your character artist a week to put together when they would have otherwise been sitting on their hands shouldn't cost $5
A gaming youtuber, 3kliksphilip, made a 10-minute rundown of the state of VAC and where it may be going from here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DHMAwAeRMA. I'm unaffiliated with the channel.
The video front-loads some information that many readers here will already be familiar with (along the lines of "what's a kernel and who decided to put so many rings on it") but overall it's a nice light watch.
This is especially bad because in CounterStrike, a "game" is a one hour commitment with the same group of people, and most people near the higher levels of rankings report getting a match with a cheater in about 1/10 matches or more. It's so bad, there are MULTIPLE third party companies whose entire product is "we install a rootkit style anticheat software so you can actually play counterstrike" like Faceit.
Counterstrike official servers are unplayable because of cheating. I mean, christ, Warowl literally had a video last week about how it's impossible to play the new counterstrike because of cheating! Philip should definitely be aware of that situation.
Holding it up as some sort of pillar of achievement is absurd.
https://support-leagueoflegends.riotgames.com/hc/en-us/artic...
That's old school marketing. Sony knew this wasn't going to be popular, you release bad news on Friday and good news on Monday. The problem is that 1. this is a game, we get more engaged with it on weekends; 2. the internet exists; 3. the entire premise of the game is to band together against unlikely odds, the sentiment of camaraderie is there.
That requirement/disclaimer was present on the Steam store page the entire time the game was actually available for purchase.
The main issue was that it was not actively enforced due to server issues at the time - which the studio CEO acknowledged:
> I do have a part to play. I am not blameless in all of this - it was my decision to disable account linking at launch so that players could play the game. I did not ensure players were aware of the requirement and we didn't talk about it enough. We knew for about 6 months before launch that it would be mandatory for online PS titles.
I'd say the bigger issue is that Sony listed the game for sale in many countries in which the requirement to have a PSN account could not be met because Sony doesn't offer PSN there.
If PSN were available in all of those countries then having the requirement listed (which of course nobody reads, because we're programmed to ignore that sort of thing) would be a reasonable out and I'd be fine with telling people to suck it up and make a free PSN account, but the unrestricted selling in regions in which that requirement can't be met was a huge fuckup that's entirely on Sony (and likely why Steam rightfully started giving people no hassle refunds).
In fact, it's insanity that Sony can sell consoles in all these countries without allowing them to make accounts when they literally require it for significant functionality. How is that okay?
But there was a nice little "skip" button there! Not "skip for now", not "remind me later" not "here's when you won't be able to skip anymore"
Just "Skip"
But the thing is you gotta do more than downvote on steam to do that. That's where you lose people. I'm sure many web devs here can attest to how much traffic is impacted by an extra click. Ironically, logging into a new website to fill out a form may be enough to kill so much momentum.