Games aren't games anymore, especially multiplayer titles. _Especially_ competitive multiplayer titles aggressively marketed towards the widest range of players possible.
No longer are you simply one player among thousands, you are a uniquely identifiable individual who is allowed (or not) to participate only after identifying yourself to the platform stewards.
I don't think this is necessarily bad per se but it really escapes the realm of what I consider a "video game"
These competitive platforms with broad mainstream appeal are more akin to social networks, with strict rules around identifying yourself and policing of what's considered acceptable speech/interactions.
It makes perfect business sense but I wonder how many people are weirded out by having to explicitly identify themselves to sign up for a video game in the same way they would for a social network/plane ticket/hotel room/etc. It feels less like a game and more like a chore to me if I have to temper and guard my gaming experience because my real-life identity is on the line.
Next they will want scans of my photo ID and a picture of me holding the ID next to my face with a timestamp. I'm being sarcastic here but I also think this is a pretty realistic endgame. We all know that phone number verification won't stop anybody with an ounce of motivation to cheat/troll/whatever. It's just an annoying mandated virtue-signal for the real players, as well as a tacitly implied threat: obey the rules, or your real-life UUID goes on the naughty list.
To be clear, again I think this makes some sort of sense for an eSports platform, but competitive gaming as a whole kind of escapes me (old school gamer, not the target audience). Maybe they could keep the phone requirement for their professional ladder only?
I yearn for the days when my relationship with the game publisher ended when I walked out of the store with my purchase.
League of Legends requires a phone number to create an account on the korean server, and there's reasonably widespread belief that that rule is a huge part of why the korean server is regarded as the best in the world. In 10 player competitive games being held hostage by a bad actor sucks. On other servers players who get banned just make a new account which leads to the game not even banning anyone since "oh they'll just make a new account." But in Korea if you get banned 3 times you're totally cut off, so people behave better.
> League of Legends requires a phone number to create an account on the korean server, and there's reasonably widespread belief that that rule is a huge part of why the korean server is regarded as the best in the world.
I'd attribute their gaming culture over their dystopian digital surveillance tbh.
I would not, and I think characterizing it as "dystopian digital surveillance" is disingenuous. Operators of free to play games only have so many mechanisms to make bans matter, and people behave differently if they know there are negative consequences. Overwatch has a significant toxicity problem as-is.
None of the games I play have this problem. So you're wrong. I'm not claiming that this proves the problem is culture specific, just knocking down your counter claim.
I humbly disagree. The problem is that a single can grief, smurf, boost, and otherwise ruin the game for 9 other players, and then immediately create another account.
It is a huge problem in League of Legends especially at the lower ranks. I’ve almost quit several times due to it. They’d have a much larger player base if implemented worldwide.
It's amazing how many oblivious, ultra consumer, pro- getting scammed, pro-monopoly, pro- proprietary protocol, people are on this so-called hacker forum. The policy you are asking for is literally one of the highest things I've ever seen that go against the hacker ethos. If you pay more than $10/mo for a smart phone in the US (prime audience of this site), you are getting scammed, no even then it's a scam as you're getting something only worth 0.001 cents.
The 0.1% of cheaters ruin those games so much for the masses that it requires actions like this. Unaddressed cheating will literally destroy a game and bankrupt a company.
It's sad that we have come to needing this kind of measures to prevent cheating, but the companies aren't the ones to blame for it.
This goes hand in hand with cheating, but I imagine this would also help reduce smurfing, which can be just as frustrating as dealing with straight up wall hack types of cheating.
I think it’s tempting to look at policies like this and associate them with other trends that are broadly concerning. Minecraft comes to mind. But this seems like a very different situation, with legitimate arguments for why this may be a good thing.
Smurfing being seen as something to be reduced/eliminated is also a very new concept to me. When I played MMORPGs, having a smurf (or "alt") account was VERY commonplace, it was simply an alternative way to play the game.
Now, increasingly, the context seems to be that it's unacceptable/unfair for some reason. This feels wrong to me.
If I can't play the game the way _I_ want to play, what use is it as a recreational activity? It's supposed to be a "game" after all so I don't understand where are all the rules and revisions are coming from.
It must be because encountering alt accounts in an open-world MMO is very different than being paired with smurf accounts in a competitive matchmaking system.
This I can understand, but I hope the anti-smurf thing doesn't go _too_ far. Alt accounts are the only way to re-experience the bottom of the ladder/beginning of the story in certain types of games.
People complain about smurfing because mediocre players don't want to be matched against good players (but they will always complain that someone who wins is a smurf).
It's only because matchmaking has gotten so good that it's even a problem. In the old days you matched with whoever was available and that was that.
Smurfs are also different from alts in my mind at least, an alt is something like a low level WoW character when you have a main that is max level; a smurf is more like Carlsen signing up for a chess.com account under an assumed name to gleefully squish people until his rating gets high enough, then starting another account. It only really works in games where each "match" starts off fresh for both players.
Playing a Smurf vs playing someone at your skill level in competitive is a completely different experience. An enemy widow sniping your entire team over-and-over again is not the same as going overtime and nearly drawing a payload nap.
I'm agreeing that Smurfs are a problem, I'm willing to help develop an AI to detect unexpected above average skill and boot those players, we'll call it Gargamel.
MMOs (the current mainstream variety) are completely different games. That's why alts in MMOs are not called smurfs. This should be blindingly clear.
Smurfs in competitive shooters suck because the only reason you make a Smurf is to play in ranked lobbies of much lower skill level, ruining the experience for those who are actually playing around their rank level.
> Now, increasingly, the context seems to be that it's unacceptable/unfair for some reason. This feels wrong to me.
The context in which "smurf" is used these days is very different. But if you try to look at it from the original MMO definition of that term, that would explain why it might feel wrong to you.
In an MMO, people refer to using many characters on one account as smurfing. That's not the case with competitive multiplayer games, where it refers specifically to using a separate account to get (initially) put in a matchmaking pool with lower-skill people, in order to "have fun" obliterating them. As opposed to playing with people of your skill on your regular account with a calibrated MMR.
In an MMO, having a smurf doesn't ruin anything for anyone else. It is just a way to play a different character class, how else is a person supposed to do it? Asking users to restrict themselves to playing only one character class (e.g., mage) forever out of many available in the game is just strange. You still have to level up that smurf character, collect appropriate gear, etc.
In a competitive multiplayer game, like CSGO/League of Legends/Overwatch, etc., none of this is the case. You can play any character on one account. You aren't expected to play one character forever, that would make zero sense in a game like League. What smurfing refers to here is existing players with high MMR creating a separate fresh account, and tearing through new players (because new accounts, rightfully, get placed in a lower MMR matchmaking pool, along with other new players). It is basically an equivalent of Mike Tyson disguising himself perfectly to look like a newbie, and then going to a local boxing gym and just beating everyone there within an inch of death in the ring.
This is the context in which smurfing is being discussed these days as a negative, and I agree with this stance. Your example of smurfing in an MMO, however, is perfectly valid and causes no harm, so it is totally fine.
> What smurfing refers to here is existing players with high MMR creating a separate fresh account, and tearing through new players (because new accounts, rightfully, get placed in a lower MMR matchmaking pool, along with other new players).
Considering the example that you just gave, the word "rightfully" in "because new accounts, rightfully, get placed in a lower MMR matchmaking pool, along with other new players" is exactly the bug in the game code that enables smurfing.
If such new players with win streaks far above than what is to be expected by their level ranked up very fast (and if they are not that good, get thus "picked apart"), smurfing "to have fun killing some low-level players" would be impeded by a lot.
> is exactly the bug in the game code that enables smurfing.
Not really.
A smurf who doesn’t lose will quickly rise to their appropriate rank and stop being a “problem”.
> If such new players with win streaks far above than what is to be expected by their level ranked up very fast
This is generally exactly what happens. But unfortunately it doesn’t prevent smurfing and is trivial to get around by simply losing placement matches and throwing just enough games to keep the winrate low enough to stay in the given rank the smurf wants to play in.
They screw over the other team when they’re playing to win. They screw over their own team when they need to lose. The only people having fun in these scenarios are the smurfs, and maybe their followers.
The only truly effective tool right now is a ban. And this is why measures to prevent ban evasion (like requiring a phone number) are on the table.
I don’t know what the ideal solution is, but do know that Blizzard has been trying to address this in various ways for awhile, with somewhat limited success.
> If such new players with win streaks far above than what is to be expected by their level ranked up very fast (and if they are not that good, get thus "picked apart"), smurfing "to have fun killing some low-level players" would be impeded by a lot.
That just tells me you haven't had much experience with this. You are correct, if they keep going on those massive win streaks, they will grow out of that new player MMR soon enough.
You know what's the simplest and most common workaround to this? Just tank a few games in a row intentionally by doing nothing or playing poorly on purpose.
It is even more annoying to deal with than with someone who is tearing through low MMR on a massive winstreak, because you can at least theoretically (but unlikely) beat those players. Cannot really win a game when your teammate plays poorly on purpose or doesn't do anything at all.
Because in a MMO you would start a new character from scratch and most of "power" is tied to the character's items.
Games like Overwatch is skill based and have a skill-based matchmaking, a new player will play with other beginners, and as they get better the game will put them in matches with better opponents. A smurf in this context is someone that is already really good in the game, but because they just created a new account, they are put in matches with beginners just so they can steamroll them. And takes a good while for their account to reach the same rank as their main account.
While in MMOs there's still some skill involved, but it's much harder to compete with someone is better items, compare to Overwatch where two players with the same character have the same everything it all comes down to the player skill.
>If I can't play the game the way _I_ want to play, what use is it as a recreational activity? It's supposed to be a "game" after all so I don't understand where are all the rules and revisions are coming from.
I would argue that competitive games are less about recreation and more about getting good, which can be fun, but that seems to be secondary.
I have and use alt accounts. I have two Overwatch accounts, but they’re around the same rank. I don’t intentionally go and play against players far below my rank for the sole purpose of being a troll and destroying the game for others.
Smurfs are another thing entirely. Some games like Rocket League have become borderline unplayable since going F2P because smurfs are everywhere in competitive. I once went on a 15 game losing streak with every one of those losses involving an obvious smurf. And I’m not talking about “they were just a better team” kind of matches - these were players that come in and 1v3 the entire other team, and who clearly are playing with game mechanics only found at the highest levels of the game - and I am not one of those pro level players.
And these aren’t just people with an alt account. They’re people on their 20th account (because the others have been rightly banned), and it ruins the game.
Smurfs existed when the game still cost money, but skyrocketed as soon as it didn’t.
Having an alt should should still be fairly easy. Getting a 2nd phone number isn’t hard with various VOIP options.
0.1% being cheaters means 0.01 players per game are cheating. If you play 100 games, then maybe a cheater will be in your game. In fact I have played 10K games in one BR and 2K in another, and these stats seem about accurate.
I have had far more games ruined by bugs due to irrational people being the developers.
I also beat most of these cheaters since they don't know how to play the game and they can just be outplayed.
Congratulations on proving how your outrage is over nothing. And your intrusive "fixes" are over nothing.
It's not logging into a server (MMORPG-like) that kills it for me, it's the push to link the in-game identity with a real-life identifier. It's not (in an almost literal sense!) a game anymore at that point.
For the broad appeal bit, I was thinking tragedy of the commons. A critical mass of actors (good and bad alike) has got to be one of the main drivers behind such a decision. So I'm thinking the more popular a game gets, the higher the likelihood that drastic actions like this are taken, ostensibly to defend against some boogeyman or other.
I’m not sure what definition of game you’re using, where having to validate your account with a real life identifier (which feels vague, since basically every multiplayer platform already has accounts tied to email addresses, because of course they do) makes something “not a game anymore”. But that’s not the definition that I’m aware of in use anywhere else.
Email addresses aren't real-life identifiers, although they could be used that way. And on the inverse, I can buy a burner phone with cash and defeat Blizzard's requirement easily.
But it's pretty clear what Blizzard is going for here, since we know their platform is competitive and thus harsher on individuals viewed as bad actors. Blizzard knows full well that most people signing up to play only have one phone number, which is most certainly a real-life identifier for those players.
My point is that if players feel compelled to self-censor their interactions online for fear of repercussions[0], then they are not playing a game. They are instead representing themselves as individuals on a social network with competitive/gamified attributes. Requiring phone numbers to play is just a method to gently reinforce this.
To each their own - this might be exactly the type of game you like to play. But it departs pretty strongly from the classical definition of "video game" that I grew up with.
[0] For example, your primary phone number being disallowed access to all Blizzard services. Maybe they go even further and request that 3rd party services ban you for off-platform violations. Moved this down to a footnote so as not to spread FUD, I'm sure they don't currently do this, nor do I expect them to. But cross-referencing phone numbers would make it very easy to start.
Overwatch’s only social features are in-game voice/text chat, whose purpose is primarily coordinating with your team.
If this helps censor the people who are interrupting the game to shout racist insults or read their manifestos, that seems like a win for gaming to me.
Putting something in a footnote doesn’t make it it FUD, for what it’s worth.
> If this helps censor the people who are interrupting the game to shout racist insults or read their manifestos, that seems like a win for gaming to me.
To be hopefully crystal clear: Overwatch voice chat is a privately hosted service that’s built to be used by players during overwatch games. Blizzard moderates the content of that chat to remove disruptive content, where disruptive means “chat that makes people not enjoy playing overwatch”. In general, that’s people shouting slurs at their teammates or rambling about nonsense. Changes like the phone number requirement are part of their approach to expand the preemptive blocking of this activity. And I am fully in favor of them doing this, because it improves the quality of the game.
I mean the real-world social aspect of the game - from eSports tournaments to casual/competitive play. Even the conversation we're having now. How others interpret gaming as a whole. A social system is created where only certain kinds of behavior is acceptable, and disputes are arbitrated by the platform-holder. When those disputes are won or lost, the platform-holder presumably will attempt to take action against individuals - not IP addresses, emails, or usernames.
We've already established that it's not really a game (seems more like a sport), so whether it's a win for video gaming or not is irrelevant to my thinking, though I do tend to agree with regards to the actual in-game communication mechanics.
Footnotes are used to call attention to idiosyncrasies in written communication so I used one here, similar to how I described another sentence of mine as sarcastic in an earlier comment - just trying to be fair :)
Well, it isn't. What people are saying in chat has no bearing on the quality of the game. I'm not even playing devil's advocate like you are doing in this sub thread either, I literally could not care what people say in game chats. I take more issue to this obnoxious, cancerous, USA opinion that someone saying the N-word is the end of the world and requires me as an innocent bystander to bear the costs (such as having to use phone identification to play a game). You see the problem is not being racist itself, but the "solutions" you people propose.
This doesn’t seem coherent. The team voice chat is used by players coordinating to play the game. If somebody is shouting nonsense into their mic, they’re interfering with people playing the game, which makes the game less fun. If they’re shouting slurs at other players, they’re making the game less fun for those people. And blizzard wants the game to be fun, as do I.
Why are you arguing like a lawyer instead of coming up with a valid point for me to rebuke? Obviously I was referring to just the general notion of people saying racist stuff in chat. It's no the end of the world when that happens.
Saying that you find the game less enjoyable when people say racist shit just makes you sound like an annoying person.
The fact that you brought up racism and then used this strawman of "game being disrupted" is actually hilarious and shows what a thin spine you have.
My point feels pretty clear: Blizzard is doing this to raise the effort required for people to evade bans by making new accounts. People get banned for cheating, for being disruptive in chat, or for throwing games on purpose. I support this decision by Blizzard, because those things make the game less fun to play.
No straw men here, and racism is only in the thread because it’s a common example of people being disruptive in chat.
Well congratulations, you prevented 0.01% of "bad things". I've been gaming for 20 years on competitive FPS. Cheating is a tiny issue. 99% of cheating reports are bogus.
not true. cheating is a HUGE issue in competitive games. call of duty also requires you to validate your phone number and they have a kernel-level anti-cheat called ricochet. games like tarkov are swarmed with chinese cheat accounts and undetectable radar cheats. there are monthly cheat subscription services where you pay hundreds of dollars for access to sophisticated aimbots, etc. counter-strike employs sophisticated frame-by-frame anti-cheat heuristics analyzing shot and input patterns, they have a system in place where good actors can review cases of alleged cheating (called overwatch) AND they ALSO require you to validate your phone number if you want to play comp matches. games like r6 siege and apex legend employ similar systems. stop pretending “cheating is a tiny issue”. either you don’t play competitive games as you claim or you have no idea what you are talking about.
Cheating is a tiny issue as in, its still rare. It's more rare than bugs in your typical shoddy post-2000 game. Any competent gamedev can deter it easily. Since they are deterring it, its rare for you to encounter a cheater. Remember, we're primarily concerned about general games here, not specific high ranked matches. Those are the _only_ place that any sort of extra validation would even start to be acceptable.
All that matters for casual games is that the company actively does something to minimize cheating. Identity verification is not a way to do this as it is not an active measure. It just puts one hoop for people to jump through. More useful is to do typical statistical analysis as that will catch 99% of actual impactful cheating (subtle cheating doesn't matter much since the average player won't be able to tell the difference anyway) and rinse and repeat.
Nice job using in-kernel a/c to claim how advanced the problem is. When those came out 20 years ago, it was just a few small patches to bypass them. Even some of them were still only signature based so you could just change the signature of your cheat and bypass it. But I'll stop here since you don't seem to comprehend the concept of cat-and-mouse nor the fact that pursuing it to the end just makes the game unplayable for innocent players.
Yes, I know some games requires phone verification to play at all, and I'm against that. My initial reaction to this thread was "um we are just now caring about this? they're moving onto photo ID now, which creates real life fraud problems". Gee I can't wait until game devs start stealing my ID and the subsequent "fix" of using a trusted third party that's also abusive and blocks me from multiple games because they have monopoly, and has integration bugs causing the game not to work at all if I press the wrong button on their web page embedded into the game.
In the case of Apex Legends, I think the experientially high incidence of cheaters and persistently active cheat manufacturers (as well as almost-cheats like using mouse and keyboard on consoles for superior aim assist) are both a compliment to the game and a side effect of battle royales. Larger lobbies and survival of the fittest equates to a higher likelihood of encountering the cheaters that exist. Even if less than 1% of players cheat, it is quite possible to encounter one during an evening of play. And it sometimes seems like the cheating comes in waves, where a new one will be wildly popular for a while before the team in charge of it catches on.
All that is to say, additional identifiers might be against the hacker ethos, but hopefully not the gamer ethos.
I'm sorry but this doesn't make any sense to me. Doubly so when, in this case, the goal is to identify you as a person by the platform holder who needs to validate to the best of their ability that you're not a ban-evading cheater ruining other people's games. You are not personally identifying yourself to other players.
No, you have it exactly right. I posit that a service run by a platform-holder who has a legitimate need to validate players' identity in this manner, for these reasons, is not quite the same as the video games (even the multiplayer ones) which have existed up until now. They have built something very different. And it's great! I just think it's also important to discuss what it really is, why, and the current+future implications.
I feel there should be a new term to describe this type of game. Up until now "eSports" has been used but that seems passe. Metagame perhaps? Might have sounded dumb a few years ago, but there's strong precedent now :P
How about we just call it a game? It’s not clear why we’d need to find a new term because you have a nostalgia for games based on their login requirements.
Yes. I've never played one, but from what I can tell it's like a forum where you go on with an identity and form clubs with people and chat about stuff, then you play some wonky subgame for 1 minute in that 3 hour session, then you go press a bunch of buttons to gamble for virtual prizes, etc.
Yeah, the subgame is the PVP. But that's rare and requires players to play for thousands of hours to get to whatever level and probably is like an RPG but with worse mechanics because the devs spend most of their time adding new items and currencies and other things peripheral to the game
But thanks for the downvote, you really got me there.
I've played lots of MMOs when I was younger and it's always the same: the "game" doesnt really start until you hit the "endgame" (usually near max level with decent gear).
Until that point, you are often grinding and doing daily events, like a job.
And we often joke that once we get there: "Finally, I get to play the game".
Then there's fear of missing out with seasonal or other limited-time awards etc. which " forces" you to play when you don't want to.
Jonathan Blow has written about why this isn't fun game design.
And those are some reasons why despite having played a lot of these, I agree with the pithy comment that they aren't games.
Yeah I was excited about the idea of MMO back in 2000 when my friends told me about one they played. Then realized they're all scams (and do not even have any MMO element; You can't actually have a bunch of players fighting and when you do it just lags and bugs) and dodged that bullet.
And if you're a console player you also get to pay monthly for the privilege of playing online. I miss when game companies didn't host their own games and you could just download the server portion and host it yourself (or rent a server). You can't even play a lot of the single player games/modes without a connection now.
> heavily policed speech.
I also miss the days when there was no communication provided in-game. It's unnecessary for the vast majority of games. And if we wanted that, we used xfire or something external to collaborate, outside of what has now become yet another walled garden.
>I miss when game companies didn't host their own games and you could just download the server portion and host it yourself (or rent a server)
I have hosted several servers for several games over the years but they have huge disadvantages too. One of them being that server admins can see IP addresses of players, and that leads to DDoS. Admin can also be fickle and kick players for whatever reason, had a popular server(which turned into the only server as the game got old) where the admin would kick women if they didn't respond positively to his creepy flirting.
And there is no automated matchmaking that takes balance into account.
> Admin can also be fickle and kick players for whatever reason,
This also describes the behaviour of common game providers. The difference is: you can switch to a different server if you are annoyed by this, but cannot get rid of the game provider/publisher.
> And there is no automated matchmaking that takes balance into account.
I’m nostalgic for the clubhouse feel of private servers but I played CounterStrike 1.6 in the early 2000s and also remember nightly encounters with aimbots, wall hacks, porn sprays, toxic voice chat and uneven teams because there was no centralized matchmaking.
Todays system certainly has trade offs but the competitive experience is so much better.
> And if you're a console player you also get to pay monthly for the privilege of playing online. I miss when game companies didn't host their own games
Just to be clear, you aren't paying for game server hosting, only for the console's lobby/matchmaking services. The game servers are still paid out of pocket by the devs.
This is why many games try to get away with player-hosted servers (which gamers misname P2P), where a player is assigned a host role by the matchmaking service and the rest connect to it for the duration of the match. Which means one other player can see your IP and if the server disconnects the match is interrupted.
I think self-hosted servers are one of those things that do not scale as playerbases grow, as casual players get added who have zero interest in hosting servers. Look at Minecraft which takes advantage of this by offering Realms, a paid server to host servers. There isn't even a public realm option, I believe, it is all friends only.
With multiplayer versus games that do not have a persistent world that players feel is their own, there's even less incentive for a player to want to host their own server. Minecraft is still an example of this: even without any Mojang hosted servers, the majority of players aren't joining random servers from a server list. They're joining the well-known and popular server networks, like Hypixel or Mineplex.
"Next they will want scans of my photo ID and a picture of me holding the ID next to my face with a timestamp."
Is this a bad think? F2P games are more lottery than video games. There would be statistics how many kids play it. In the best case scenario this would result in regulation of those practices.
As you say, these are social networks, and your ability to connect with other people playing the game opens all kinds of avenues for attacks and harassment as social networks. No one wants to put up with misanthropes just to play their favorite video game.
You can still have that relationship with your publisher, but if you want that in your multiplayer game, you have to go back to a day where people behaved differently on the internet. Those days are gone, and it's not the publisher's fault. It's ours.
> You can still have that relationship with your publisher, but if you want that in your multiplayer game, you have to go back to a day where people behaved differently on the internet. Those days are gone, and it's not the publisher's fault. It's ours.
In these former days where people behaved differently on the internet, the internet was an insanely weird and wild place where the people did and posted things that are typically not considered acceptable behaviour anymore.
To get just a glimpse on this topic, see, for example, the following linked article and its dicussion on Hacker News:
> Next they will want scans of my photo ID and a picture of me holding the ID next to my face with a timestamp. I'm being sarcastic here but I also think this is a pretty realistic endgame.
“Implement the real-name registration system for online game accounts — To this end, the "Notice" requires strict real-name registration, and all online game users must use valid identity information to register for game accounts.”
Strictly control the length of time for minors to use online games — It is stipulated that no game service shall be provided for minors from 22:00 to 8:00 the next day, and the daily period of statutory holidays shall not exceed 3 hours, and other hours shall not exceed 1.5 hours per day.”
I don't understand these games. With all the hoops you have to jump through just to start playing and then all the grinding to level up it seems almost like applying for and then working a job. Except you're the one paying, not getting paid. Is this actually fun or am I missing something?
It's a nice day outside, think I'll take my dog for a walk.
What about Chess? By your definition, since have to work really hard to level up the elo, and for some professional individuals it is how they survive. Do we suddenly consider Chess no longer a game?
You know, some people can really feel and obsess to thee enjoyment when they learn, progress and eventually beat worthy opponents, such enjoyment dog walking will never endow.
So if I walk into an arcade, and the owner stops and says “hey, we’ve had some incidents recently and you need to write down your name and phone number on this sheet of paper before you can play anything”, all the arcade cabinets suddenly stop being video games? That doesn’t really make any sense.
I think you can still play unranked without a phone number, though. So, people who don't want to take the game seriously don't have to. It's a nice compromise, between that and fighting hordes of cheaters/smurfs/whatnits
It is still just a game though. For fun. Just because they want to posit their toy as a sport doesn't mean it is.
Luckily there's plenty of competitive games out there that are actually fun. The meatgrinder of matchmaking isn't actually the elite competitive environment these gamers think it is.
Real competitive video games are played IRL. Your online eSport PC game of the month does not compare to a real tournament at your local arcade/community college/bar/netcafe.
If your game doesn't have those, then it's probably a skinner box posing as a ladder with different colored badges as prizes.
I dunno. I truly detested being in competitive games with a "thrower" (someone who will blatantly try to sabotage their own team) and I imagine this will help quite a bit to mitigate the problem.
Notably, all of Valve's competitive games—Dota 2, CS:GO, and Team Fortress 2—already require this. I'm not sure I support it, but even minor barriers help fight cheaters and smurfs.
Edit: Apparently they're not actually as strict as I remember, but all three definitely have some sort of a system.
I'm not sure where your getting this from, a phone number is _optional_ for CSGO, adding one is said to improve your "trust factor"[0], theoretically improving your matchmaking experience.
I don't believe TF2 has any sort of phone number system that I'm aware of. If there is one, it doesn't seem to function very well given the bot invasion over the last few years.
One way of doing all this stuff is creating "haves" and "have nots" where those who have a higher credit score from age of account, phone number, etc, get better matchmaking (against players of a similar high score) than those who forgo those things.
CSGO used to require a phone number. It changed a bit to be "optional", but all that really means now is that they made the system more opaque.
It used to be that to get prime queue (or whatever it was called) you need to phone number, since the open queue was filled with hackers. The new systems still attempts to do the same, just without the hard boundary. You may end up in the hacker lobby, or you may not. You won't know.
> I don't believe TF2 has any sort of phone number system that I'm aware of. If there is one, it doesn't seem to function very well given the bot invasion over the last few years.
If I remember correctly, in TF2 competitive mode and Mann vs Machine (pve) gets locked if you don't have steam guard enabled. But you still have access to casual and community servers, which are what you will usually want to play.
I'm going off of memory mostly. I'm pretty sure all three asked me for a phone number to play ranked, but apparently it's optional at least for CS:GO. The impression I was given though was "give your phone number or you'll only ever play with hackers and smurfs" such that it was basically required.
They do not require a phone number just to play the game, as Blizzard is doing here. They also accept more types of phone numbers and other authentication methods.
COD Warzone required phone verification to install when I tried. There was no way to play at all without getting a code sent to your phone. But yeah this is old news. This cancer started around 2010 when Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and friends out of nowhere required it on all of their services.
Makes sense. Valve already does this for all of their competitive games, it’s basically what you need to do to stop easy smurfing if your game is free-to-play.
This is way less egregious than Blizzard shutting down Overwatch 1 (which I paid for) and just replacing it with Overwatch 2. It's not even out yet and previews are not great, especially the new player grind - it seems designed to explicitly fish for the whales from the original game only. As someone that plays OW casually, I'm not happy that Blizzard is taking away something that I paid money for and giving me something that I do not want in the slightest.
I can still play CS:Source to this day, yet they need to shut down Overwatch because the sequel is out? Modern gaming is absolute garbage. This whole "you only purchase a license to play the game" nonsense is getting out of control.
> taking away something that I paid money for and giving me something that I do not want
In that sense, there's really very little difference between Overwatch 2 and an update you don't like in any other live service game. It's no different from the many games which have previously gone free-to-play.
And to be clear, I'm not saying you're wrong to be unhappy, I'm saying that your framing is really just not accurate. Overwatch 2 is really just a peculiar name for Overwatch 1's free-to-play update.
> In that sense, there's really very little difference between Overwatch 2 and an update you don't like in any other live service game.
Yeah, I totally get it. I'm still miffed that they updated the game in a way that leaves me unable to play the version I actually like. I do not find this new update appealing at all.
When Overwatch came out (when I bought it) "live service" games hadn't really reached a critical mass in the market yet so the idea that they would do something like this was kinda unheard of.
Maybe a year ago or so there was a big Microsoft server outage that caused Xbox Live to go down for a few hours. During the outage you couldn’t access any online games. Fair enough. I own a handful of single player games on disc (rather than through the Xbox store) but while Microsoft was having all of their server issues I couldn’t play those games either. It seems, even when you own the disc outright, the system automatically phones home before the game is permitted to launch.
People are prepared to put up with a lot of bullshit to get their gaming fix.
I'm pretty sure Blizzard could get more than a phone number out of me a few beers in on a Friday night. Especially if my friends where already signed up and ready to go.
> Likewise, (some) prepaid phones won’t work, and neither will VoIP numbers (which use IP networks to make calls or send texts). Likewise, a landline phone number won’t work either.
This affects me. If only I could give them a phone number.
I've had a Cricket family plan for 5+ years and their official support recommendation is to "change number or carrier". They offer no other authentication options - not even a credit card.
Am I going to pay an extra $50 a month to play your "free" game? No thank you. There are some people who prepaid for their early access content and are now fighting to get their money back on a game they can't even play. What a stupidly anti-customer company.
All this for a game that is a glorified patch of the previous one.
Yes, but this was something obvious from the outset from an engineering standpoint. I would never consider requiring phone verification for my games. I don't even require an email account as lots of games do (because of cargo cult) these days.
The Western software development bubble (largely the demographic of HN) is full of self centered people / ignorant people who have never seen hardware aside from a Mac or a $2K Windows box, who buy a new phone literally every year, who claim to be saving the world. On the contrary what you get is web browsers being too slow to run on hardware of someone who lives outside the West and being banned from the game because outside the West you can't conform to the game's asinine requirements. The irony on top of the irony is that the ones who think of themselves affluent for this are not at all: cell phones and their protocols are badly engineered technology.
Well this sucks. It doesn't work on individual plans for cricket either. I paid for the Overwatch 2: Watchpoint Pack (mostly due to their confusing marketing around it). I've been playing Overwatch almost since the day it came out, and I was excited about it since it was announced in 2014. I was really looking forward to playing OW2....but maybe this is a good thing for me. This game encapsulated 6 years worth of my life. Lots of highs and lows. Maybe I need to move on.
The toxicity of random matchmaking has gotten out of hand. Whenever I decide to dive into a game of Overwatch, I'm rolling the dice on whether any of my five teammates will be misanthropes, and the odds are quite high these days. I shouldn't be subjected to that to play a team based game. Your ability to play nice with others should be a data point. To make that a data point, bans need to have teeth. Bad behavior needs to have consequences. We have to disrupt the Internet Fuckward Theory [1].
People who don't like the idea of phone numbers maybe should propose alternatives, because things are not fine the way they are.
> People who don't like the idea of phone numbers maybe should propose alternatives, because things are not fine the way they are
"There is no alternative" is not an excuse to implement a bad decision, short of a need to physically save lives. Bad actors can get phone numbers for verification stupidly easily, meanwhile privacy continues to be eroded for the sake of stopping them.
At one point, I was working at a company where attackers were spamming our service with ToS-violating content (moslty porn but many grotesque, violent stuff). The decision was made to require a phone number on the account to disable the attack. I argued that phone numbers were stupid easy to get and bypass this measure, but we did it anyway. To my complete surprise, the attackers didn't bother the obviously surmountable hurdle of getting burner numbers. Yes, phone numbers aren't perfect, but in practice they're surprisingly effective.
I fail to see how privacy can both be eroded while also saying phone numbers are stupidly easy to get and bypass. If you're concerned about the privacy of your phone number, feel free to avail yourself of the same methods the bad actors could use. Burner is a legal app.
I think calling this a bad decision is arguable. We hand over phone numbers for MFA all the time. I think this is a perfectly fine decision walking well away from the border of invasiveness, which is why I put the burden on critics to define an alternative.
Things aren't fine, I just don't think this will help.
Either accounts will still be buy-able, or the trolls will move on to some other annoying but not bannable strategy. It'll stop people from yelling slurs at each other in chat, but it's not going to solve people troll-picking Widow when they get salty.
I see a lot more of the latter than the former, and it takes moderation changes more than real identities to fix.
At my previous role at Twitch, attackers were spamming our service with ToS-violating content (mostly porn but also grotesque, violent stuff) to an insane degree. The decision was made to temporarily require a phone number on all accounts in order to stream. I argued that phone numbers were easy to get, making this measure unhelpful, but we did it anyway. To my complete surprise, the attackers didn't bother the obviously surmountable hurdle of getting burner numbers.
Yes, phone numbers won't stop determined people, but in practice they're surprisingly effective. After my experiences, I believe that's because there's a difference between determined attackers trying to penetrate your system and people "just out for the lulz"
prior to the separate matchmaker rating per role ("role queue") I had three accounts:
- one for support (which I'm pretty good at, main account)
- one for DPS (which I'm ok at)
- one for tank (which I suck at)
why? so I didn't ruin games when I played something other than support
I've not used the other 2 accounts since then, but out of curiosity I tried adding phone numbers to their accounts from my pile of free UK SIMs from various providers (my "backup internet" plan)
3/6 networks registered fine (no credit required)
quite how they expect this to stop smurfing/hacking if any kid in the UK can pick up 10 free SIMs from a phone shop and get 10 new overwatch accounts
Meanwhile, Overwatch remains an immensely popular arena shooter, with frequent content updates and new characters. The type of game, like Team Fortress 2, that does not see "sequels" per say, but rather an ongoing evolution. The game is 3 years old.
What I'm trying to say is, in October 2019, the idea of "Overwatch 2" seems entirely, entirely absurd.
Not sure if you recall, but this was a HUGE fire-and-pitchfork controversy. #BoycottBlizzard became a real thing. I was among them, permanently cancelling my accounts, because that mattered to me.
Less than one month later, Blizzcon 2019 happened. If you remember the atmosphere at that moment, people weren't even sure if BlizzCon would happen at all. It seemed like it may simply be cancelled.
And what happened at BlizzCon?
Announcing... OVERWATCH 2. The sequel to the popular arena shooter. Will there be new characters? Uh, probably, but definitely there will be reskins! Okay, when's it out? Uh... eventually, one day, TBD!
That was 2019. Blizzard announced Overwatch 2 in 2019. The amount of time between that announcement and today is roughly equal to the amount of time between Overwatch 1 being released, and the controversy.
Am I insane? Is it not extremely, extremely obvious why Blizzard made the "surprising" move to announce a game that no one expected, and to this day has not been released?
As someone who put down Overwatch a while ago, after having actually enjoyed it for a while, I have no desire to pick up OW2.
Activision-Blizzard's merger tells me that 'Classic Blizzard' will never again exist, and that I should discard what goodwill I have left towards either publisher.
Overwatch's monetization model was not the best (they helped pioneer loot boxes, with no information on odds), and now they're locking new characters behind a Battlepass for OW2. F2P players will be able to unlock the hero eventually, but according to current leaks, competitive modes will lock out players who don't have all characters unlocked.
Diablo Immortal is something I've never played, but I've enjoyed listening to some of the drama. After Blizz cracked down on third-party sellers of the game's real-money currency, some people had their Eternal Orb balances go negative(!!!) when they removed the Orbs from their account. With a negative Orb count, players get locked out of participating in some of the game. The only by-the-books way to restore that functionality is to buy more Orbs from the store. One headline you can easily find is a player with over $30k worth of 'Orb Debt', as in, they would need to spend that much money in order to get to a balance of 0.
Acti/Blizz's monetization schemes have become more manipulative over time, and as of now, it's leaching into how people can actually play the game. Swipe your credit card, or you're gonna be behind.
Another can of worms, which I will label instead of open: Blizzard's recently-unearthed history of sexual harassment in the workplace, and etc etc.
If you’ve ever played a competitive game then you’ve almost certainly encountered an abusive player.
I don’t just mean verbally abusive, I mean the player who quits the game, AFKs, or intentionally feeds the enemy team when they don’t get the role they want. Maybe you’ve encountered the player who dodges the match the moment their favorite character is selected.
Typically even if the game ended the moment they left, or if there was a vote kick/remake mechanism. You will have lost at least 2-3 minutes of your time, if not the length of an entire match.
As a child, maybe this is acceptable, you can just move on to the next match. As an adult who can only set aside enough time for one or two matches it’s devastating. It’s the type of behavior that you the good behaving, rule respecting, team player gets penalized for.
When there is no restriction on just creating new accounts, these negative types of players just create a new account after they get banned or penalized and continue being negative players.
Increasingly these new accounts are being sold for $0.50 to $3.00, pre made with the tutorial missions completed, so that these negative players can spend a tiny amount of money and jump right into ruining another persons night.
I hope all multiplayer games start to add in this type of requirement. Bad behavior should be punished in an enforceable way.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
The segment of HN's readership whose ideology is simply "privacy or bust" are unsurprisingly vehemently opposed to this, but for everyone else this is super reasonable... anything to improve the integrity of the competition so your progression feels fair and meaningful.
This is only necessary because Blizzard decided that IAPs + Free-to-Play (Overwatch 2) was worth more than charging customers outright for a quality product (Overwatch).
It’s becoming almost required to follow this business model. These games live and die on active player count. And the easiest way to get the most players is to lower the barriers to entry. You need to get players in for free and then charge the ones open to paying later with cosmetics.
i can guarantee you that requiring a wired connection for ranked matches would do far more to improve your experience than any kind of blizzard panopticon scheme will.
That's absurd. Match quality is fine even with people having slightly less than optimal ping. And then you get one troll every few games that just totally ruins it.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 248 ms ] threadNo longer are you simply one player among thousands, you are a uniquely identifiable individual who is allowed (or not) to participate only after identifying yourself to the platform stewards.
I don't think this is necessarily bad per se but it really escapes the realm of what I consider a "video game"
These competitive platforms with broad mainstream appeal are more akin to social networks, with strict rules around identifying yourself and policing of what's considered acceptable speech/interactions.
It makes perfect business sense but I wonder how many people are weirded out by having to explicitly identify themselves to sign up for a video game in the same way they would for a social network/plane ticket/hotel room/etc. It feels less like a game and more like a chore to me if I have to temper and guard my gaming experience because my real-life identity is on the line.
Next they will want scans of my photo ID and a picture of me holding the ID next to my face with a timestamp. I'm being sarcastic here but I also think this is a pretty realistic endgame. We all know that phone number verification won't stop anybody with an ounce of motivation to cheat/troll/whatever. It's just an annoying mandated virtue-signal for the real players, as well as a tacitly implied threat: obey the rules, or your real-life UUID goes on the naughty list.
To be clear, again I think this makes some sort of sense for an eSports platform, but competitive gaming as a whole kind of escapes me (old school gamer, not the target audience). Maybe they could keep the phone requirement for their professional ladder only?
I yearn for the days when my relationship with the game publisher ended when I walked out of the store with my purchase.
I'd attribute their gaming culture over their dystopian digital surveillance tbh.
None of the games I play have this problem. So you're wrong. I'm not claiming that this proves the problem is culture specific, just knocking down your counter claim.
ooh! if you know of popular free to play games with no toxicity, im absolutely in! which games are these?
It is a huge problem in League of Legends especially at the lower ranks. I’ve almost quit several times due to it. They’d have a much larger player base if implemented worldwide.
Great, so I will never play your game.
It's amazing how many oblivious, ultra consumer, pro- getting scammed, pro-monopoly, pro- proprietary protocol, people are on this so-called hacker forum. The policy you are asking for is literally one of the highest things I've ever seen that go against the hacker ethos. If you pay more than $10/mo for a smart phone in the US (prime audience of this site), you are getting scammed, no even then it's a scam as you're getting something only worth 0.001 cents.
Not sure what the cell phone bit is about.
The 0.1% of cheaters ruin those games so much for the masses that it requires actions like this. Unaddressed cheating will literally destroy a game and bankrupt a company.
It's sad that we have come to needing this kind of measures to prevent cheating, but the companies aren't the ones to blame for it.
I think it’s tempting to look at policies like this and associate them with other trends that are broadly concerning. Minecraft comes to mind. But this seems like a very different situation, with legitimate arguments for why this may be a good thing.
Now, increasingly, the context seems to be that it's unacceptable/unfair for some reason. This feels wrong to me.
If I can't play the game the way _I_ want to play, what use is it as a recreational activity? It's supposed to be a "game" after all so I don't understand where are all the rules and revisions are coming from.
It must be because encountering alt accounts in an open-world MMO is very different than being paired with smurf accounts in a competitive matchmaking system.
This I can understand, but I hope the anti-smurf thing doesn't go _too_ far. Alt accounts are the only way to re-experience the bottom of the ladder/beginning of the story in certain types of games.
It's only because matchmaking has gotten so good that it's even a problem. In the old days you matched with whoever was available and that was that.
Smurfs are also different from alts in my mind at least, an alt is something like a low level WoW character when you have a main that is max level; a smurf is more like Carlsen signing up for a chess.com account under an assumed name to gleefully squish people until his rating gets high enough, then starting another account. It only really works in games where each "match" starts off fresh for both players.
I’m wondering if you even play overwatch?
Smurfs in competitive shooters suck because the only reason you make a Smurf is to play in ranked lobbies of much lower skill level, ruining the experience for those who are actually playing around their rank level.
The context in which "smurf" is used these days is very different. But if you try to look at it from the original MMO definition of that term, that would explain why it might feel wrong to you.
In an MMO, people refer to using many characters on one account as smurfing. That's not the case with competitive multiplayer games, where it refers specifically to using a separate account to get (initially) put in a matchmaking pool with lower-skill people, in order to "have fun" obliterating them. As opposed to playing with people of your skill on your regular account with a calibrated MMR.
In an MMO, having a smurf doesn't ruin anything for anyone else. It is just a way to play a different character class, how else is a person supposed to do it? Asking users to restrict themselves to playing only one character class (e.g., mage) forever out of many available in the game is just strange. You still have to level up that smurf character, collect appropriate gear, etc.
In a competitive multiplayer game, like CSGO/League of Legends/Overwatch, etc., none of this is the case. You can play any character on one account. You aren't expected to play one character forever, that would make zero sense in a game like League. What smurfing refers to here is existing players with high MMR creating a separate fresh account, and tearing through new players (because new accounts, rightfully, get placed in a lower MMR matchmaking pool, along with other new players). It is basically an equivalent of Mike Tyson disguising himself perfectly to look like a newbie, and then going to a local boxing gym and just beating everyone there within an inch of death in the ring.
This is the context in which smurfing is being discussed these days as a negative, and I agree with this stance. Your example of smurfing in an MMO, however, is perfectly valid and causes no harm, so it is totally fine.
Considering the example that you just gave, the word "rightfully" in "because new accounts, rightfully, get placed in a lower MMR matchmaking pool, along with other new players" is exactly the bug in the game code that enables smurfing.
If such new players with win streaks far above than what is to be expected by their level ranked up very fast (and if they are not that good, get thus "picked apart"), smurfing "to have fun killing some low-level players" would be impeded by a lot.
Not really.
A smurf who doesn’t lose will quickly rise to their appropriate rank and stop being a “problem”.
> If such new players with win streaks far above than what is to be expected by their level ranked up very fast
This is generally exactly what happens. But unfortunately it doesn’t prevent smurfing and is trivial to get around by simply losing placement matches and throwing just enough games to keep the winrate low enough to stay in the given rank the smurf wants to play in.
They screw over the other team when they’re playing to win. They screw over their own team when they need to lose. The only people having fun in these scenarios are the smurfs, and maybe their followers.
The only truly effective tool right now is a ban. And this is why measures to prevent ban evasion (like requiring a phone number) are on the table.
I don’t know what the ideal solution is, but do know that Blizzard has been trying to address this in various ways for awhile, with somewhat limited success.
That just tells me you haven't had much experience with this. You are correct, if they keep going on those massive win streaks, they will grow out of that new player MMR soon enough.
You know what's the simplest and most common workaround to this? Just tank a few games in a row intentionally by doing nothing or playing poorly on purpose.
It is even more annoying to deal with than with someone who is tearing through low MMR on a massive winstreak, because you can at least theoretically (but unlikely) beat those players. Cannot really win a game when your teammate plays poorly on purpose or doesn't do anything at all.
Games like Overwatch is skill based and have a skill-based matchmaking, a new player will play with other beginners, and as they get better the game will put them in matches with better opponents. A smurf in this context is someone that is already really good in the game, but because they just created a new account, they are put in matches with beginners just so they can steamroll them. And takes a good while for their account to reach the same rank as their main account.
While in MMOs there's still some skill involved, but it's much harder to compete with someone is better items, compare to Overwatch where two players with the same character have the same everything it all comes down to the player skill.
>If I can't play the game the way _I_ want to play, what use is it as a recreational activity? It's supposed to be a "game" after all so I don't understand where are all the rules and revisions are coming from.
I would argue that competitive games are less about recreation and more about getting good, which can be fun, but that seems to be secondary.
I have and use alt accounts. I have two Overwatch accounts, but they’re around the same rank. I don’t intentionally go and play against players far below my rank for the sole purpose of being a troll and destroying the game for others.
Smurfs are another thing entirely. Some games like Rocket League have become borderline unplayable since going F2P because smurfs are everywhere in competitive. I once went on a 15 game losing streak with every one of those losses involving an obvious smurf. And I’m not talking about “they were just a better team” kind of matches - these were players that come in and 1v3 the entire other team, and who clearly are playing with game mechanics only found at the highest levels of the game - and I am not one of those pro level players.
And these aren’t just people with an alt account. They’re people on their 20th account (because the others have been rightly banned), and it ruins the game.
Smurfs existed when the game still cost money, but skyrocketed as soon as it didn’t.
Having an alt should should still be fairly easy. Getting a 2nd phone number isn’t hard with various VOIP options.
100 players per game.
0.1% being cheaters means 0.01 players per game are cheating. If you play 100 games, then maybe a cheater will be in your game. In fact I have played 10K games in one BR and 2K in another, and these stats seem about accurate.
I have had far more games ruined by bugs due to irrational people being the developers.
I also beat most of these cheaters since they don't know how to play the game and they can just be outplayed.
Congratulations on proving how your outrage is over nothing. And your intrusive "fixes" are over nothing.
downvote why? out of arguments?
The comment about broad appeal is also a bit confusing to me. Why do things stop being games because they're designed to be accessible to many people?
For the broad appeal bit, I was thinking tragedy of the commons. A critical mass of actors (good and bad alike) has got to be one of the main drivers behind such a decision. So I'm thinking the more popular a game gets, the higher the likelihood that drastic actions like this are taken, ostensibly to defend against some boogeyman or other.
I’m curious what your definition of a game is?
But it's pretty clear what Blizzard is going for here, since we know their platform is competitive and thus harsher on individuals viewed as bad actors. Blizzard knows full well that most people signing up to play only have one phone number, which is most certainly a real-life identifier for those players.
My point is that if players feel compelled to self-censor their interactions online for fear of repercussions[0], then they are not playing a game. They are instead representing themselves as individuals on a social network with competitive/gamified attributes. Requiring phone numbers to play is just a method to gently reinforce this.
To each their own - this might be exactly the type of game you like to play. But it departs pretty strongly from the classical definition of "video game" that I grew up with.
[0] For example, your primary phone number being disallowed access to all Blizzard services. Maybe they go even further and request that 3rd party services ban you for off-platform violations. Moved this down to a footnote so as not to spread FUD, I'm sure they don't currently do this, nor do I expect them to. But cross-referencing phone numbers would make it very easy to start.
If this helps censor the people who are interrupting the game to shout racist insults or read their manifestos, that seems like a win for gaming to me.
Putting something in a footnote doesn’t make it it FUD, for what it’s worth.
Why not let stupid people shout stupid things ...
In-game chat isn’t bound by any requirement to support everything that stupid people can do in real life.
Do you seriously claim that "not preventing" already means "supporting"?!
We've already established that it's not really a game (seems more like a sport), so whether it's a win for video gaming or not is irrelevant to my thinking, though I do tend to agree with regards to the actual in-game communication mechanics.
Footnotes are used to call attention to idiosyncrasies in written communication so I used one here, similar to how I described another sentence of mine as sarcastic in an earlier comment - just trying to be fair :)
Well, it isn't. What people are saying in chat has no bearing on the quality of the game. I'm not even playing devil's advocate like you are doing in this sub thread either, I literally could not care what people say in game chats. I take more issue to this obnoxious, cancerous, USA opinion that someone saying the N-word is the end of the world and requires me as an innocent bystander to bear the costs (such as having to use phone identification to play a game). You see the problem is not being racist itself, but the "solutions" you people propose.
Saying that you find the game less enjoyable when people say racist shit just makes you sound like an annoying person.
The fact that you brought up racism and then used this strawman of "game being disrupted" is actually hilarious and shows what a thin spine you have.
No straw men here, and racism is only in the thread because it’s a common example of people being disruptive in chat.
All that matters for casual games is that the company actively does something to minimize cheating. Identity verification is not a way to do this as it is not an active measure. It just puts one hoop for people to jump through. More useful is to do typical statistical analysis as that will catch 99% of actual impactful cheating (subtle cheating doesn't matter much since the average player won't be able to tell the difference anyway) and rinse and repeat.
Nice job using in-kernel a/c to claim how advanced the problem is. When those came out 20 years ago, it was just a few small patches to bypass them. Even some of them were still only signature based so you could just change the signature of your cheat and bypass it. But I'll stop here since you don't seem to comprehend the concept of cat-and-mouse nor the fact that pursuing it to the end just makes the game unplayable for innocent players.
Yes, I know some games requires phone verification to play at all, and I'm against that. My initial reaction to this thread was "um we are just now caring about this? they're moving onto photo ID now, which creates real life fraud problems". Gee I can't wait until game devs start stealing my ID and the subsequent "fix" of using a trusted third party that's also abusive and blocks me from multiple games because they have monopoly, and has integration bugs causing the game not to work at all if I press the wrong button on their web page embedded into the game.
It is certainly not a FUN game (cough Apex) when beset by cheaters constantly. I’ll gladly give up anonymity to make the game fun again.
All that is to say, additional identifiers might be against the hacker ethos, but hopefully not the gamer ethos.
I feel there should be a new term to describe this type of game. Up until now "eSports" has been used but that seems passe. Metagame perhaps? Might have sounded dumb a few years ago, but there's strong precedent now :P
Yes. I've never played one, but from what I can tell it's like a forum where you go on with an identity and form clubs with people and chat about stuff, then you play some wonky subgame for 1 minute in that 3 hour session, then you go press a bunch of buttons to gamble for virtual prizes, etc.
Some hints: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massively_multiplayer_online...
But thanks for the downvote, you really got me there.
I've played lots of MMOs when I was younger and it's always the same: the "game" doesnt really start until you hit the "endgame" (usually near max level with decent gear).
Until that point, you are often grinding and doing daily events, like a job.
And we often joke that once we get there: "Finally, I get to play the game".
Then there's fear of missing out with seasonal or other limited-time awards etc. which " forces" you to play when you don't want to.
Jonathan Blow has written about why this isn't fun game design.
And those are some reasons why despite having played a lot of these, I agree with the pithy comment that they aren't games.
> heavily policed speech.
I also miss the days when there was no communication provided in-game. It's unnecessary for the vast majority of games. And if we wanted that, we used xfire or something external to collaborate, outside of what has now become yet another walled garden.
I have hosted several servers for several games over the years but they have huge disadvantages too. One of them being that server admins can see IP addresses of players, and that leads to DDoS. Admin can also be fickle and kick players for whatever reason, had a popular server(which turned into the only server as the game got old) where the admin would kick women if they didn't respond positively to his creepy flirting.
And there is no automated matchmaking that takes balance into account.
This also describes the behaviour of common game providers. The difference is: you can switch to a different server if you are annoyed by this, but cannot get rid of the game provider/publisher.
> And there is no automated matchmaking that takes balance into account.
This could in principle be implemented.
Todays system certainly has trade offs but the competitive experience is so much better.
Just to be clear, you aren't paying for game server hosting, only for the console's lobby/matchmaking services. The game servers are still paid out of pocket by the devs.
This is why many games try to get away with player-hosted servers (which gamers misname P2P), where a player is assigned a host role by the matchmaking service and the rest connect to it for the duration of the match. Which means one other player can see your IP and if the server disconnects the match is interrupted.
With multiplayer versus games that do not have a persistent world that players feel is their own, there's even less incentive for a player to want to host their own server. Minecraft is still an example of this: even without any Mojang hosted servers, the majority of players aren't joining random servers from a server list. They're joining the well-known and popular server networks, like Hypixel or Mineplex.
Is this a bad think? F2P games are more lottery than video games. There would be statistics how many kids play it. In the best case scenario this would result in regulation of those practices.
You can still have that relationship with your publisher, but if you want that in your multiplayer game, you have to go back to a day where people behaved differently on the internet. Those days are gone, and it's not the publisher's fault. It's ours.
In these former days where people behaved differently on the internet, the internet was an insanely weird and wild place where the people did and posted things that are typically not considered acceptable behaviour anymore.
To get just a glimpse on this topic, see, for example, the following linked article and its dicussion on Hacker News:
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33025477
But of course. After all, we can’t risk giving certain cohorts of people too much self-determination before they’re fully indoctrinated into The Economy: http://www.gov.cn/xinwen/2019-11/06/content_5449157.htm
(Google Translate disclaimer)
“Implement the real-name registration system for online game accounts — To this end, the "Notice" requires strict real-name registration, and all online game users must use valid identity information to register for game accounts.”
Strictly control the length of time for minors to use online games — It is stipulated that no game service shall be provided for minors from 22:00 to 8:00 the next day, and the daily period of statutory holidays shall not exceed 3 hours, and other hours shall not exceed 1.5 hours per day.”
It's a nice day outside, think I'll take my dog for a walk.
You know, some people can really feel and obsess to thee enjoyment when they learn, progress and eventually beat worthy opponents, such enjoyment dog walking will never endow.
If you’re arguing with someone who is making an analogy, you’re wasting your time because it's so easy to ignore their point.
Analogies only work between people cooperating to understand something, so just ignore ‘em if youre not working together
Luckily there's plenty of competitive games out there that are actually fun. The meatgrinder of matchmaking isn't actually the elite competitive environment these gamers think it is.
Real competitive video games are played IRL. Your online eSport PC game of the month does not compare to a real tournament at your local arcade/community college/bar/netcafe.
If your game doesn't have those, then it's probably a skinner box posing as a ladder with different colored badges as prizes.
Edit: Apparently they're not actually as strict as I remember, but all three definitely have some sort of a system.
I don't believe TF2 has any sort of phone number system that I'm aware of. If there is one, it doesn't seem to function very well given the bot invasion over the last few years.
I can't speak to dota 2 as I've never played it.
[0] https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/00EF-D679-C76A-C1...
It used to be that to get prime queue (or whatever it was called) you need to phone number, since the open queue was filled with hackers. The new systems still attempts to do the same, just without the hard boundary. You may end up in the hacker lobby, or you may not. You won't know.
If I remember correctly, in TF2 competitive mode and Mann vs Machine (pve) gets locked if you don't have steam guard enabled. But you still have access to casual and community servers, which are what you will usually want to play.
I can still play CS:Source to this day, yet they need to shut down Overwatch because the sequel is out? Modern gaming is absolute garbage. This whole "you only purchase a license to play the game" nonsense is getting out of control.
In that sense, there's really very little difference between Overwatch 2 and an update you don't like in any other live service game. It's no different from the many games which have previously gone free-to-play.
And to be clear, I'm not saying you're wrong to be unhappy, I'm saying that your framing is really just not accurate. Overwatch 2 is really just a peculiar name for Overwatch 1's free-to-play update.
Yeah, I totally get it. I'm still miffed that they updated the game in a way that leaves me unable to play the version I actually like. I do not find this new update appealing at all.
When Overwatch came out (when I bought it) "live service" games hadn't really reached a critical mass in the market yet so the idea that they would do something like this was kinda unheard of.
I'm pretty sure Blizzard could get more than a phone number out of me a few beers in on a Friday night. Especially if my friends where already signed up and ready to go.
This affects me. If only I could give them a phone number.
I've had a Cricket family plan for 5+ years and their official support recommendation is to "change number or carrier". They offer no other authentication options - not even a credit card.
Am I going to pay an extra $50 a month to play your "free" game? No thank you. There are some people who prepaid for their early access content and are now fighting to get their money back on a game they can't even play. What a stupidly anti-customer company.
All this for a game that is a glorified patch of the previous one.
You're looking at 30 million+ people who flat out cannot even play the game.
The Western software development bubble (largely the demographic of HN) is full of self centered people / ignorant people who have never seen hardware aside from a Mac or a $2K Windows box, who buy a new phone literally every year, who claim to be saving the world. On the contrary what you get is web browsers being too slow to run on hardware of someone who lives outside the West and being banned from the game because outside the West you can't conform to the game's asinine requirements. The irony on top of the irony is that the ones who think of themselves affluent for this are not at all: cell phones and their protocols are badly engineered technology.
Also a landline doesn't work for verification? How does that make sense?
People who don't like the idea of phone numbers maybe should propose alternatives, because things are not fine the way they are.
1: https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/325699-greater-internet-fuck...
"There is no alternative" is not an excuse to implement a bad decision, short of a need to physically save lives. Bad actors can get phone numbers for verification stupidly easily, meanwhile privacy continues to be eroded for the sake of stopping them.
I fail to see how privacy can both be eroded while also saying phone numbers are stupidly easy to get and bypass. If you're concerned about the privacy of your phone number, feel free to avail yourself of the same methods the bad actors could use. Burner is a legal app.
I think calling this a bad decision is arguable. We hand over phone numbers for MFA all the time. I think this is a perfectly fine decision walking well away from the border of invasiveness, which is why I put the burden on critics to define an alternative.
It is if the status quo is worse than the bad decision.
This is exactly the point where people's opinions differ.
Either accounts will still be buy-able, or the trolls will move on to some other annoying but not bannable strategy. It'll stop people from yelling slurs at each other in chat, but it's not going to solve people troll-picking Widow when they get salty.
I see a lot more of the latter than the former, and it takes moderation changes more than real identities to fix.
Yes, phone numbers won't stop determined people, but in practice they're surprisingly effective. After my experiences, I believe that's because there's a difference between determined attackers trying to penetrate your system and people "just out for the lulz"
Really? Out of a 100 players, 7 interact vaguely positively (gg, glhf etc), 3 are salty and the other 90 are silent.
I've not used the other 2 accounts since then, but out of curiosity I tried adding phone numbers to their accounts from my pile of free UK SIMs from various providers (my "backup internet" plan)
3/6 networks registered fine (no credit required)
quite how they expect this to stop smurfing/hacking if any kid in the UK can pick up 10 free SIMs from a phone shop and get 10 new overwatch accounts
Let me paint you a picture of October 2019:
In Hong Kong, this is happening, and it's a big deal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%932020_Hong_Kong_pr...
Meanwhile, Overwatch remains an immensely popular arena shooter, with frequent content updates and new characters. The type of game, like Team Fortress 2, that does not see "sequels" per say, but rather an ongoing evolution. The game is 3 years old.
What I'm trying to say is, in October 2019, the idea of "Overwatch 2" seems entirely, entirely absurd.
Then, on October 6, this happens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitzchung_controversy
Not sure if you recall, but this was a HUGE fire-and-pitchfork controversy. #BoycottBlizzard became a real thing. I was among them, permanently cancelling my accounts, because that mattered to me.
Again, this was a BIG DEAL. https://www.pcgamer.com/brian-kibler-says-he-will-not-take-p...
Less than one month later, Blizzcon 2019 happened. If you remember the atmosphere at that moment, people weren't even sure if BlizzCon would happen at all. It seemed like it may simply be cancelled.
And what happened at BlizzCon?
Announcing... OVERWATCH 2. The sequel to the popular arena shooter. Will there be new characters? Uh, probably, but definitely there will be reskins! Okay, when's it out? Uh... eventually, one day, TBD!
That was 2019. Blizzard announced Overwatch 2 in 2019. The amount of time between that announcement and today is roughly equal to the amount of time between Overwatch 1 being released, and the controversy.
Am I insane? Is it not extremely, extremely obvious why Blizzard made the "surprising" move to announce a game that no one expected, and to this day has not been released?
Activision-Blizzard's merger tells me that 'Classic Blizzard' will never again exist, and that I should discard what goodwill I have left towards either publisher.
Overwatch's monetization model was not the best (they helped pioneer loot boxes, with no information on odds), and now they're locking new characters behind a Battlepass for OW2. F2P players will be able to unlock the hero eventually, but according to current leaks, competitive modes will lock out players who don't have all characters unlocked.
Diablo Immortal is something I've never played, but I've enjoyed listening to some of the drama. After Blizz cracked down on third-party sellers of the game's real-money currency, some people had their Eternal Orb balances go negative(!!!) when they removed the Orbs from their account. With a negative Orb count, players get locked out of participating in some of the game. The only by-the-books way to restore that functionality is to buy more Orbs from the store. One headline you can easily find is a player with over $30k worth of 'Orb Debt', as in, they would need to spend that much money in order to get to a balance of 0.
Acti/Blizz's monetization schemes have become more manipulative over time, and as of now, it's leaching into how people can actually play the game. Swipe your credit card, or you're gonna be behind.
Another can of worms, which I will label instead of open: Blizzard's recently-unearthed history of sexual harassment in the workplace, and etc etc.
If you’ve ever played a competitive game then you’ve almost certainly encountered an abusive player.
I don’t just mean verbally abusive, I mean the player who quits the game, AFKs, or intentionally feeds the enemy team when they don’t get the role they want. Maybe you’ve encountered the player who dodges the match the moment their favorite character is selected.
Typically even if the game ended the moment they left, or if there was a vote kick/remake mechanism. You will have lost at least 2-3 minutes of your time, if not the length of an entire match.
As a child, maybe this is acceptable, you can just move on to the next match. As an adult who can only set aside enough time for one or two matches it’s devastating. It’s the type of behavior that you the good behaving, rule respecting, team player gets penalized for.
When there is no restriction on just creating new accounts, these negative types of players just create a new account after they get banned or penalized and continue being negative players.
Increasingly these new accounts are being sold for $0.50 to $3.00, pre made with the tutorial missions completed, so that these negative players can spend a tiny amount of money and jump right into ruining another persons night.
I hope all multiplayer games start to add in this type of requirement. Bad behavior should be punished in an enforceable way.
This rather sounds like badly designed scoring rules.
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’d rather have one game a week be annoying, then 3 dodges and 1 disconnect nearly every attempt at playing.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.