This scenario is the same for nearly every multiplayer video game.
Here's a recent example in the Russian game Escape from Tarkov[1]. A player kills a developer and gets banned moments after for cheating. Luckily he manages to catch it on video, and posts it to reddit. He's subsequently unbanned. Why was he banned? "false alarm triggered". When asked for more details, BSG responds "Sorry, can’t tell you cause it’s part of anti cheat system, hope you understand". Which is ridiculous.
BSG is in Russia and therefore untouchable, but I don't have much hope for these other companies like ATVI who are doing the sort of abuse.
> "Sorry, can’t tell you cause it’s part of anti cheat system, hope you understand". Which is ridiculous.
This is how all fraud detection works. Outside of gaming as well. That doesn't mean the previous action was right, but the fact they can't tell you why means nothing at all. The whole industry is built on secrecy and having a few hidden tricks in the bag.
The cynic inside me thinks that the reason gaming companies fall back on this excuse is to help keep the costumer facing/dispute resolution staff as thinly manned as possible.
If your local GameStop posted a security guard outside the store to confiscate games from suspected shoplifters, and only had an error rate of 0.01%, I doubt people would be happy for GameStop to tell the 1 in 10,000 people who's newly purchased games have just been stolen that they can't discuss why and to just deal with it or GameStop will send someone else around to their house to steal all their other games.
Could also be a coincidence, actual devs have not commented yet afaik.
The banned guy can contact battleye and try to get unbanned if it was false, has happened before (usually a group of players with something in common are banned, last time it was s specific motherboard or a driver for it).
EFT is also very different in that they rely on a large grey market to drive sales. Real Money Trading is a huge problem, people will buy a cheat, use them to obtain lots of in game money, and then sell this in-game money to people for FIAT.
If EFT bans a cheater, they're effectively getting another sale, because the cheater will come back and make money off the grey market once more. The result is that you have tons of cheaters, and EFT only needs to make broad strokes efforts at curbing them to keep existing players happy.
This sadly is a bad idea, as it’ll get your entire store account banned (Steam, battle.net, etc). Chargebacks work great until the whole account matters.
I have actually been thinking if I should start a new Steam account or several. The blast radius of losing the current one for some reason would be devastating. Also wondering if it would be at all effective (not too hard to see the same credit card used between two accounts).
Steam could alleviate the new account requirement by having a "cheat" counter. If you do more than, say, five actions that look like a cheat, then a real person on their side looks at the problem. Or, have a cheat counter that waits until twenty or fifty cheating actions before auto-banning, if they want to make it cheaper for them.
Surely, taking escalatory retribution like that is illegal, somewhere...I hope...?
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Non-escalatory retribution would be banning you from the game you filed a chargeback for - I can't get mad over that.
But an online store doing unilateral revocation of access and licenses for a consumer's entire library (without refunding it 100%) in response to a single chargeback is just begging for countries' consumer protection agencies to come knocking, and even if that's a term in the store's EULA I can't see how they could be upheld by a court as an conscionable (and therefore legally enforcible) contract clause - especially given the dim-view to which online and click-through EULAs/TOS are viewed by most countries courts' today anyway.
Speaking as someone with too much time on my hands (thanks to a cushy job, I'm pleased to say, rather than funemployment) I secretely want to be dicked-over by a megacorp like this so I can get amusement (and a worthwhile life experience) by availing myself of the court system to hold these companies to account. Now I just need to find a similar way to make Microsoft undo the crappy shell in Windows 11.
I think the sort of "legal" argument here is imagine if you were running a SaaS and somebody did a chargeback despite using the service. I think most people _would_ lock the account and refuse to do business with the chargebacker as a default reaction!
Of course the reality of these other places being the marketplace and the service provider and the game publisher is a classic anti-trust issue.
Imagine if the SaaS charged 100x the agreed price for the last month, refused to fix the charge, and when you issued a chargeback, they deleted all your lifetime data.
Yes? I do not understand how you would think that anything but an extremely antagonistic relationship would result from a chargeback. Not saying they "deserve to keep the money" or whatever (of course not), but a chargeback is pretty much crossing the rubicon in terms of a business relation between two parties.
Not saying "don't chargeback ever", and obviously in your scenario the SaaS is at fault, really.
> accounts locked for Hardware chargebacks will not be unlocked until the associated hardware is returned.
Wait, does this mean that if someone hacks your Steam account, and uses your saved payment info to order a Steam Deck shipped to someone other than you, that you have to choose between losing your Steam account forever or losing the money?
Steam often asks for the card's CVV2 even for saved cards. I don't know what the exact criteria are, but I'm pretty sure any order over a certain amount (which a Steam Deck would definitely be) would trigger this.
In this case, it really looks like Activision's Anti-Cheat is broken and banning people unfairly (if we can trust OP, which I have no reason not to).
A related problem though is that game developers have a really hard time trusting anyone who says they've been banned unfairly. Almost everyone who gets banned for valid reasons will claim they did nothing wrong, etc. This is especially true for delayed bans, as the person doesn't even realize that their account got flagged to be banned weeks before the actual ban took place.
Given that problem, when a developer gets reports of users being banned unfairly, it's very easy to ignore them as salty cheaters. Ideally there is a way for them to know exactly what tripped the anti-cheat, but sometimes it's hard as the client has to covertly tell the server to ban itself.
Not as strong As you might think. The Cronus is a very strong cheating device for consoles, and it’s ubiquitous enough to be sold in some big-box retail stores.
Cronus gives a strong advantage to the cheater, basically turning recoil off. Sure there are more powerful cheats, but cheating is cheating and if you’re going to ban cheaters then Cronus users should rightfully be included in that.
“This particular cheat only helps people that are already good at the game” is also an ancient trope as far as rationalizing cheating goes, so hope you’re enjoying your Cronus lol.
I don't have a Cronus. Frankly, I don't really need one or care to have one.
Even with a Cronus, you still need to be able to aim and place your shots. It certainly helps you land more shots, but basic tactics easily overcome a Cronus.
I'm really surprised to see these repeated baseless accusations on HN. I can assure you that I've never used or own a Cronus. I have a 0.89 KD in WZ. I'd be much better with a Cronus.
I don't disagree that a Cronus is cheating. I'm simply stating there are different levels of cheating. Since Cronus is hardware it's both hard to detect and limited on its impact. Cronus also don't let you magically wall people or auto-headshot.
Software based cheats are significantly more impactful to the game play. Software cheaters can see you through walls, auto-aim, auto-shoot, auto-move. There's simply no way to counter someone who knows exactly where you are and can hit a perfect shot every time.
Activision should address both, but software cheating is a far larger problem.
In this scenario it sounds like Activision is addressing both by treating them both as a group. Not sure why you're trying to draw a distinction for actual Cronus use. If Cronus is cheating, it doesn't matter which cheat is a larger problem or whether there are different levels of cheating, the treatment for cheaters is the same: ban them.
I think it's reasonable for Activision to treat them as a group. I know I'm arm-chairing, but I think it's worth treating them as distinct.
Hardware based cheats, like recoil control, can be countered with in-game mechanics. For example, enforcing a minimum amount of recoil and using an RNG recoil pattern. My understanding is Cronus rely on grossly predictable recoil patterns.
Software cheating extends well beyond recoil control and requires active detection mechanisms.
Random recoil is less fun, it stops being a skill that rewards mastery and becomes another fudging factor in a skill-based game.
And for what? Because you think Cronus is too hard to detect?
No cheat should be tolerated, let alone compromised with to the point of fudging the game. Should racing games counter Cronus by removing difficult corners that rely on predictable turns? Should games avoid entire categories of mechanics just to work around Cronus? Fuck that, Activision should continue investing in protecting the creative integrity of their product, not conceding. Anti-cheat systems have gotten incredibly sophisticated with incredible gains in cheat detection, and it didn't get there by giving up.
"Should racing games counter Cronus by removing difficult corners that rely on predictable turns?"
Your argument is that games are bad so they should have serious restrictions on them to make them stay bad....
This is nonsense. Games should be, first and foremost, fun. You will build and play better, more interesting games where there are fewer predictable turns (literal or figurative), when there isn't such an unhealthy obsession with protecting terrible mechanics.
For a very few cases where there is e-sport(s) like activity, fine, create your TiVO like experience (in multiplayer, e.g. combat simulators, racing).
"Anti-cheat systems have gotten incredibly sophisticated with incredible gains in cheat detection".
Anti-cheat systems are a large part of why I rarely play any AAA titles - they are slow as all 'F, buggy, and honestly completely trashy games. And if I bought one of these games and was randomly locked out of it, you can bet I would be demanding the blood of the developers be spilled.
> I'm really surprised to see these repeated baseless accusations on HN.
I just made the hackusation because it seemed funny to me. Your insistence on further explaining the difference in severity between the different types of cheating just makes it seem even funnier.
The instant I found out that a device like the Cronus existed, it brought me great joy to know someone created it and turned it into a business.
That thing exists to solve a very real problem: the game mechanics the Cronus mediates or exploits are being used by game devs to cover up otherwise-boring gameplay.
Practically all anti cheat for a long time has primarily worked by monitoring what is running on the computer/device, and ensuring the integrity of the game and its data.
You don’t need anti-cheat with deep system hooks to monitor input. That can be done from the game itself trivially.
Denuvo, one of the primary cross-platform anti-cheat systems, deals with ensuring the integrity of offline progress, obfuscation and encryption to prevent data mining, and emulator prevention. In their own words:
> Protect sensitive game logic to reduce data mining and detect peripherals that give the cheater an unfair gameplay advantage.
A lot of these Cronus-like devices do more than just translate input these days, many of them will attempt to manage weapon recoil for you (by adding downward and/or side to side input to the virtual aiming stick input at the same rate as the weapon recoil is pushing it up and/or to the sides) or generate other input intermixed with the user's input like adding very subtle circular motion of the aiming stick to try to enhance the benefit of the reticle friction aim assist that exists within the games themselves.
These sorts of generated inputs could in theory be detected using heuristics to watch for inputs that appear too patterned to be fully human. Whether any company is bothering with this, I have no idea. The only one I'm aware of that even appears to attempt to detect these types of devices at all is Epic and I have no idea what methods they use.
That's what I mean by "modifying controller inputs". All it can do is change what a controller does. They can't change the video, or affect the game logic in any way.
And it seems like it would be pretty simple to detect this in the game itself; this sort of detection doesn't need any anti-cheat with deep system hooks.
> this sort of detection doesn't need any anti-cheat with deep system hooks.
Correct, it wouldn't need any deep system hooks, nor are the console manufacturers likely to ever give game developers the ability to hook into the system that deeply, nor do they really need to since modern consoles are secure enough in practice that wallhack/aimbot type system level code cheats haven't been a concern for a while now on the major console platforms.
There are various bits of anti-cheat logic that game developers could be putting into their console version like the aforementioned analysis of input devices to look for helper devices, and things like looking for likely "lag switch" attacks by keeping track of the ongoing latency of packets coming in and out, but these are all passive heuristic checks that would exist within the game itself, not driver or kernel level anti-cheat as is common on PC.
Banning based on user input seems the worst idea ever. Say hello to false positive. Also, in near future you'll probably have AI player that will beat most human players. If you ban based on that, you'll defacto put a upper bound to human skill you'll accept in the game, so competition will be restricted to not-so-good players.
I'm a stock Xbox Series X console player in DMZ mode. I also sometimes get the random crashes and "DEV ERROR" messages after being removed from the game. I also have been removed from games several times with the "Player kicked" message. I can share my userId with any Activision employee here who's looking into the matter where you can see my K/D ratio is far too poor to be a "cheater".
This is a feature! You and the other cheaters, whether you're actually baby or bathwater, will simply have to buy it again!!
IMO the only winning move is not to play. I loved calladoody back in university, but you've got to move with the times, yeah? OTOH, I'm not the one who really changed; I'm still all about dedicated servers, but they haven't been seen since Modern Warfare 1.
The winning move for the anticheat dev is shortly going to be not to play, either. It's one thing to implement increasingly invasive rootkits to find out who's watching your game's memory, but I've heard tell of devices that sit between the PC and monitor, using specialized ML to click M1 and fire when an enemy is detected in one's crosshairs. How can you check for something like that?
I've heard of work around using machine learning to analyze players and compare them to the actions of cheaters. It's not flawless but it can give some kind of probability of cheating so you can match make cheaters with other suspected cheaters.
Ah yes, vacnet, which couldn't even reliably ban spin-botters for YEARS. Vacnet is an abysmal failure and should be seen as such. The game is still brimming with cheaters, and you still basically cannot play a game on valve's official servers with high ratings unless you are willing to get matched with a cheater 1 out of 3 times and waste hours on unwinnable games that you get punished for abandoning.
Then we still end up here: someone who's naturally skilled gets some lucky kills, and the Computer Says No, so now he's out a game license. Appealing modern anticheat decisions is hard enough, but once it's less "the computer noticed your memory-editing" and more "the computer decided you need to be banned", it'll be impossible. TFA seems to suggest that future is Real Soon, if not now.
So go play games with dedicated servers, and local admins who can only locally ban anyone suspect. If players don't like it they can leave for another dedicated server.
This is currently very common for chess. Comparing players with AI decisions. It's less "You got lucky today, you're banned" and more "your movements matched up with AI patterns for a long time, so you're trust score has been lowered and you'll be put with other low trust players for a while".
There is more data than just win/lose here. Using ML you can analyze exactly how the player moves, etc and get some kind of probability
Hey, you'd better go let OP know that everything's OK! Me, I think that chess, a turn-based, 2D game which uses the same "map" every time, might have a few fewer inputs to analyze than an FPS, but what do I know.
Wow. So you are a good player, and you are matched against cheaters. What a justice. I don't understand this practice. Playing against cheaters, or being treated like one, what's worse?
It’s not about being a good player, they have datasets on how good players play, and datasets on how bots play. AI is extremely good at noticing patterns in complex data. It could be the way you move the mouse, cheaters might react to events with consistent timings while humans have more variability.
These bans also block the single player mode?! That is absolutely absurd. False bans for multiplayer aren't anything new (unfortunately), but also blocking the singleplayer mode, making the purchased product 100% unusable seems criminal.
This is what happens if you "buy" Activision/Blizzard software - they're driving the service model to the max and will exploit it as much and as deeply as possible. They're the worst of the worst and anyone familiar with their games will tell you the same.
In the end, there's nothing you can do but to put your money into games that respect you as a customer, which is very rare in AAA. These companies hate you. No one will listen to you and nothing will change, as it's extremely profitable. No one will regulate it. In 3 weeks, a dev there will notice that some updater code can break game files which flags people's accounts or something like that, it'll be quietly patched and everybody will forget about it.
Google is the worst of the worst. At least you can easily choose not to play Activison games. It's much harder to choose not to participate in the Google ecosystem, and actions in one service or account can have deep repercussions to other services and "associated" accounts. Appealing to an actual Google support human being is seemingly impossible
its not just Activision/Blizzard. Single player bans are in a lot of AAAs.
> In the end, there's nothing you can do but to put your money into games that respect
Could always pick up a copy of IDA...
> In 3 weeks, a dev there will notice that some updater code can break game files which flags people's accounts or something like that, it'll be quietly patched and everybody will forget about it.
As a side note if you want some fun you should fire up wireshark when you're playing a game and watch how much "metadata" is sent from your PC to the game company. They know more about you than your doctor in some cases. EasyAntiCheat and Denuvo seem to be the worst offenders.
It's a disassembler/binary analysis tool, widely used for creating, for example, cracks/executable patches for games and other programs. https://hex-rays.com/ida-pro/
This is why my games run in a Windows VM, which touches none of my personal info. The most they know about me is my dark mode preference, monitor size / model, CPU, and GPU. Everything else is abstracted. It can't see any of my storage space. Only the virtual disks I have for booting the VM, and games.
A lot of games anticheat detects and bans if you're in a VM. It seems like it is only for multiplayer though (for now anyway...until they think you might be getting free DLC pants for your single player character).
A lot of them are pretty easy to bypass. EAC is one. Been playing a game with a friend that uses it for the last month or so, and it's been smooth, ever since I must've discovered what they use to check.
Yeah, but then ActiBlizz has been doing the "online only" thing at least since Starcraft 2 (2010), also removing multiplayer not through Blizzard's servers in the process !
And they recently did the same with the Diablo 2 """remaster""", preventing multiplayer-heavy mods running in the regular online mode from operating !! (They are not allowed on battle.net, partially for anti-cheating reasons of course.)
Meanwhile other games still allow normal connection through IP/server name, provide a matchmaking server for players to organize their games, including modded ones, and provide an *optional* ban list for server owners using the official matchmaker to enforce on the worst offenders that in no way affects the singleplayer or the direct connection multiplayer experience !
I've always enjoyed playing and modding D2, so when D2R launched I bought it and again went into modding and what not, all single player. A while after that i got an email saying i had been banned. I tried hopping on a single player game and it worked so i didn't care too much since i don't play online anyways. However, to my surprise, 30 days after the ban when i tried to play i was greeted by a message saying that i had been offline for too long and needed to log back in to "verify ownership" of the game, which i obviously couldnt since i got banned, so i couldn't even play offline/single player.
Luckily i managed to get in touch with an understanding support rep who unbanned me, but not without a "stop modding if you don't wanna get banned again" message, which is absurd. I paid for the game and i should be able to do whatever i want with it within the confines of my own computer.
It's still your platform, though. "License" is not a contract, you paid them not the other way around. What they are doing is probably illegal nevermind immoral.
I.e. it is a form of slavery, which I guess you are paying for? Which is a type of scam. The mgmt who work at these AAA shops belong in the dumpster bin of humanity.
You hand over rights to your platform which you, not they, bought and paid for, and provide them with lucrative information, and are now bound to do whatever they say? Some hot nonsense, if I ever heard it.
Then why buy the game? It’s not like it’s a new thing for Blizzard/Activision/EA. It’s literally some unholy trifecta that I just do not buy games from any more.
While I agree you "shouldn't" buy the game, we shouldn't even be giving legitimacy to these practices at all. We generally try to prosecute snake-oil salesmen, shutdown hucksters, put con-men out of business, etc..
There are unfortunately many reasons why people might buy the game - false advertising, lack of proper research, peer pressure from a poorly informed populous. You may be tempted to say "you should do your research", and while I agree you generally should, its also true its impractical to research everything. The same way I shouldn't have to go into a grocery store and have to worry about if the peanut butter is poisoned with salmonella, a consumer be able to purchase a product, and have the reasonable expectation that they can do what they want with the product within the confines of their own home.
Finding out after you have purchased a game that it is arbitrarily locked down, and that you have little recourse to get your money back, is a form of fraud.
They want to be in control of the mods (for 'security' reasons). So they can sell you extra service on top of it. We're moving towards GaaS (gaming as a service) really quickly and it's disheartening to see.
My XBL 2001 account got permabanned with 10~ years of purchased content on there, all my network of friends and leaderboard achievements and the likes, the works. Lost access to literally everything that wasn't on-disc, and appeals didn't help.
I'd had one genuine temp-ban beforehand, and my theory is over the years I got enough reports from opponents that they just built up into saying t'ra to my account and purchases. Yay, right?
> And moderators of popular forums like r/ModernWarfareII refuse to allow posts that try to increase awareness of the issue, again, likely assuming we’re all a bunch of whining cheaters. I don’t think they’re aware of the disservice they’re doing to their community by actively suppressing these reports (or conspiratorially, they’re influenced by Activision itself).
I don't think this is very conspiratorially. It's very clear that the mods are coordinating with Activision on releases and information. I've had several posts taken down over the years because they don't tow-the-line.
Game community subs, especially for FPS games, often ban posts about cheaters, bugs or things like the submission. Not because they're conspiring with the maker, nefariously hiding negative info, but because if they don't the sub turns into a grievance filled "help forum".
People who had never visited the forum before, and likely never will again, drop in because they're mad and want a complaint venue where they can gripe. When a game has hundreds of thousands or millions of players, that sort of thing starts to swamp the sub and soon there is no community or sustained conversation and instead it's all 360 no scope drive by complaint drops.
I absolutely commiserate with the OP, and it 100% legitimately sounds like they got caught up in a flawed anti-cheat (maybe exacerbated by a storage system issue on their end, making it think they were trying to modify the system files). But on the other hand, and they recognize this, all the actual cheaters also do the I didn't do nothing routine. When a game is rife with cheaters (PubG, MW, Squad, etc), pretty soon you have a really skeptical approach to those appeals.
This has been going on since the release of MW2019. I myself was banned after trying to launch and play the single player campaign on Linux through Wine/Proton. I was unable to even launch the game to play the campaign again on Windows after that, and I no longer use Windows at all.
I emailed Activision support back and forth more than a dozen times explaining the issue, finally resulting in them saying they were escalating to another team. I sent them another four emails over three months, asking if there was any update, before asking if there was even anybody left alive at the company that my emails were reaching, with no response.
I really enjoyed the MW2019 campaign, but I won't be buying another game from Activision.
Unfortunately, this ban happened close to a year after the original purchase, and my intent and goal was to play the single player campaign of the game I purchased, not get my money back.
Good timing, I was just today considering playing Diablo III on my Steam Deck (or trying to)... based on your experience, I guess that might be a bad idea to even try.
I know Activision now owns Blizzard, but I don't know the extent to which these policies apply across other games. I know World of Warcraft has an active and thriving Linux user base still. I recommend checking https://appdb.winehq.org and https://protondb.org for reports on game compatibility.
I think the gameplay and architecture of WoW means there isn't a huge market for "competitive advantage" cheats. Macros let you do most of that stuff yourself, and something that would auto-interrupt a particular spell is probably detrimental at high levels of play.
The only "cheats" I ever really saw WoW care about was botting, and that's probably easier to catch server-side than client-side anyways. Why monitor inputs when you can just see who's been fishing for the past 24 hours in a row?
Ban frequently comes with ban reason "Caserma rhino" which looks like that they must know what happened given this weird specific string as you can see on picture below.
I as a player can say that game frequently crashes, shares a lot of bugs with previous version of call of duty and overall is just a copy od mw1 with worse UI and technical state.
I started the wiki linked in the article (codconsumer.org). Long time HN lurker and was pleasantly surprised to see this here!
I was only banned for a week, but I'm absolutely certain that there was nothing sketchy happening on my side. It's pretty annoying when they're charging money for time-limited events like Battle Passes, then you lose some of that time. Of course, it's a much bigger problem for the many who have been permabanned and don't know why. And it's still happening to others.
I would really like for this to end quietly with some better policies on account reviews, and more transparency on the findings of those reviews. I don't think that's too much to ask after being locked out of a $70 purchase. So far they have been completely silent on the matter. So the wiki stays up and we hope to someday get a word out of them.
Paying a few bucks doesn't give you a free pass to, say, spam racist epithets over and over in chat, or sabotage every multiplayer game you join by running into the enemy team every single match. That said, yeah, "being blocked from a $70 game for no actual discernible reason" should be prevented by some form of consumer rights that can't be waived by agreeing to a EULA.
The frustrating thing about this is that it's still extremely common for people to spam the n-word over voice chat, that's been a problem for years, and I haven't noticed any significant progress in reducing their numbers.
I recently got temporarily-chat-banned (and lost all Honor ranking) in League because the players on my team were sabotaging the game purposely and I swore at them. I didn't use any hate speech or slurs whatsoever, but apparently just swearing at people is enough to warrant such penalty, without even a warning first. Coincidentally I had actually just hit the highest possible tier of "Honor" in the game just days earlier, obviously indicating my swearing at people is not a normal thing. I haven't played since.
Oh, even more frustrating about this is, the game has a swearing filter enabled by default. If those players saw swear words from me, they quite literally specifically opted into that by turning off the swearing filter! Meanwhile they were allowed to sabotage the game for me and ruin my night AND get me chat-banned.
It's surprising to me to hear that LoL actually does something about chat moderation.
I play DotA, which seemingly does nothing (at at least, very little). I eventually decided to just disable text and voice chat entirely rather than put up with salt in every other game. Toxicity is contagious.
Not to mention that some languages(Chinese especially) have words which sound exactly like the n-word, so yeah, well done for being banned for not speaking English.
Also, some romance languages use some derivation of the latin word for black (niger), the same root as the English n-word - "negro" in Spanish, "negru" in Romanian, "negre" in Catalan.
It just means dark brown in italian, but it's not very used.
When i was small it was the normal word to refer to black people, but USA has decided that's racist so now it's "persona di colore", even though as a child i've always found it funny because every person is of some colour :D
If I refuse to serve you (eg in a shop when you want to buy a snack) because I think you are foul I don't get to take your money /then/ tell you while putting your money in my pocket. If I decide to withhold part of my service (eg stop mowing your lawn and leave because you are foul) I don't get to keep all the money for completing the job. This stuff isn't hard. Think about what it is in life when there is no "cpu attached to a network" as a necessary part of the transaction. It's the same.
Taking your money for no product delivery, charging you fees for no service is theft even if you are completely foul. Pointing to a "condition of entry" sign at the door of your premises does NOT change the law.
Your analogy falls flat and is a poor interpretation of the situation of being banned from online games for the reasons I cited.
When you buy a snack, you get a tangible good in exchange for money. The implied agreement is the most basic of exchanging goods for cash.
When you purchase an online multiplayer game, there's an agreement you have explicitly agreed to that you will not, for example, call other players the N-word or sabotage the match by repeatedly running into the enemy team (griefing). These are really quite clearly-defined rules you agreed to. You bought the game knowing full well these are the rules, also knowing you _will potentially permanently lose access to the game_ if you violate those rules.
In my prior example (and the one I just wrote here), there is zero comparison to buying a snack in a store and then the store owner snatching it back and keeping the money.
Like I said, I think there should be consumer rights in place to protect the player against losing access to the game they paid for if they were abiding by the rules. I'd say that is a pretty reasonable expectation.
Edit: A more apt analogy would be that you go into a store, buy a snack, eat some of it and then begin pouring hot sauce on other peoples' snacks and yelling in their faces. You don't get to just happily stick around and keep enjoying your snack while you're completely ruining the snacks of others.
If there was a legally-protected right to access the service you pay for unless violation of agreed-upon rules has occurred (barring other situations like "company going out of business" or "gaming shutting down forever"), this would almost undoubtedly elicit the need for better-defined rules and substantiation of claims when bans occur.
If random bans get more common the developer risks a game of whack-a-mole with private servers and cracked clients if not players packing up and leaving for a competitor.
Legal protection sounds like it would actually benefit the cheaters given how long an average court case takes.
In my experience, private servers deal with cheaters and bots better than Activision/Blizzard
>the developer risks a game of whack-a-mole with private servers and cracked clients
This would be Felony Contempt of Business Model[0], which would be enforced with every move in the legal playbook.
>Legal protection sounds like it would actually benefit the cheaters given how long an average court case takes.
I see the thought here, but it would do so by providing transparency to the license-revocation (banning) process, which greatly benefits customers who are getting screwed as hard as OP is. This in turn should lead to fewer cases of paying customers getting screwed.
>In my experience, private servers deal with cheaters and bots better than Activision/Blizzard
This is the case because they're moderated better. The companies are raking in cash. They can hire people to fix the problem. They don't because the current model maximizes profits.
Listing the "bad words" ahead of time (or even at all) is self-evidently not workable because people will just use different works to abuse/harass/bully people while evading the banned words list.
That said, it's important to tell the person after the fact "you're banned because you harassed / bullied someone" or "you were caught using anti-cheat software." Maybe some date ranges so the person understands what they did and why they won't be reinstated. BUT you don't need to list out the _exact things_ they did because you're just opening up the toddler argument of "why is that so wrong?" which is just bad actors trying to waste your time and "legalese" their way back into the system.
The lack of listing is fine, so long as the second half of the sentence, which you didn't quote, doesn't apply.
If the system matches on substrings, then you need to know what to avoid - you can't even self-censor, if everything is ambiguous. You end up with the memes of getting banned from Club Penguin, otherwise.
Except, Club Penguin does as you suggest - it tells you that you used a "rude or inappropriate word". Even if the regex is matching something that it shouldn't.
I do agree that insta-banning for _just_ using a rude word without warning is huge overkill. Giving fair warning (and telling them their account will be banned if they repeat offend) should be the baseline. The fact that it's not, in too many cases, is definitely something to criticise.
That's not the only thing you are doing. You are also creating an opportunity for false positives to justifiably challenge their bans.
If you are going to keep the user's money, I think you absolutely have to provide recourse for false positives because otherwise what you are doing is simply theft.
> Listing the "bad words" ahead of time (or even at all) is self-evidently not workable because people will just use different works to abuse/harass/bully people while evading the banned words list.
Tough: you have to stay ahead of the bullies if you want to get money for an online service. It's not in any way acceptable to ban people without telling them specifically what you are accusing them of, so that they can challenge you if you are in fact wrong. The fact that it makes the job harder is not in any way an excuse.
Now, if you were to return their money (or at least part of it based on how much time they actually played or something), then yes, you would have an argument that you have a right to unilaterally rescind the contract. But you can't keep the money and say "you know what you said".
So they can just re-buy the game under a new account and just carry on as before? Try this: go to a football match, shout racist abuse at a player then demand a refund for your season ticket. I know for a fact you won't get it.
> It's not in any way acceptable to ban people without telling them specifically what you are accusing them of
> "you know what you said"
Note that what I said wasn't "you know what you said" but "you violated these rules within these date ranges." For example:
* "You were detected using a cheat tool on 13th-15th November"
* "You harassed a player throughout March-August 2022"
* "You were repeatedly abusive in private chat in September 2022"
You're not being accused of murder in the Crown Court, you're being banned from interacting in a video game community. If you want access to the exact information, sue for it.
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Caveat
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Should you be banned from playing the game locally / single player? Absolutely not. This I would agree with you on.
When we move to GaaS (gaming as a service) as the norm, it will be more like purchasing multiplayer online = buying a ticket to a sporting event. If you misbehave, of course, you can get kicked out.
Fairly soon you'll need to maintain a subscription just to play.
When it becomes the norm, it will replace purchasing a game at the store [this has already started to happen for PC]. We will no longer be able to play games except through platforms like Xbox Live or PS Plus.
This will eventually give companies like Microsoft and Sony complete control over their platform's IP. When it happens, we'll never be able to collect these games as part of nostalgia growing up playing these games.
Usually yes, if it's deemed that you've been doing it maliciously (just like you would be kicked out of a real-life football match if you were the goalie for your team but you were consistently hovering next to the other team's goal trying to score).
Um, being benched by your coach is totally different than being banned by the organization putting the event together. Most sports have some sort of anti-cherry-picking rules. In your football example (I'm using the proper football here), there are offside rules. Hockey has the rule about the crease. NBA has the 5s rule for being in the paint. NFL has illegal formation. Baseball actually encourages getting into wrong positions by allowing stealing, but have other rules to ensure runners finish in proper order rounding the bases.
As many times as I would love to see a ref be able to issue yellow cards for continued blatant offside calls against a player, they cannot be kicked out for breaking said rule.
I'm not talking about a professional team (which would anyway absolutely kick a player out if they were repeatedly griefing their own team - a power which is usually not given to players in online team games).
I am thinking of an amateur tournament - I am quite certain a player who was blatantly acting against their own team would be kicked out by the organizers, even if they weren't explicitly breaking the rules of the game.
In real life, if you go to a sporting event or a show, and start harassing the other patrons and causing a disruption, you can expect to be kicked out without a refund.
Refunding people who deserve to be banned would only encourage them to create new accounts and continue causing problems.
Event ticketing is, imho, one of the most fundamentally corrupt industries I've ever encountered as a consumer so taking it as the example is problematic, (unless you know someone, right? Just queuing up for tickets is naive beyond my expectations of people around here).
But whatever. Do they confiscate the season tickets you were using with no refund? What if they weren't yours? What if they were stolen? What if you know the coach? Can they not like your "offensive beard", take your season tickets and re-sell them? How about your date's utterly vile "Ross Perot was right!" shirt? Can they terms of service you out of the cash for next week? (Wouldn't surprise me on one hand how bad that could be but I somehow doubt it).
Kick them the hell out for being foul by all means, your house, your rules.
"And you take your damn money with you and not come back because I ain't no thief, even from scum like you, you vermin!"
> Event ticketing is, imho, one of the most fundamentally corrupt industries I've ever encountered
That's irrelevant to the discussion. It's a thing that happens, people expect it and the only people who complain about being kicked out are... well being kicked out for being a horrible person.
> But whatever. Do they confiscate the season tickets you were using with no refund?
Absolutely, yes, they do.
On the other hand, they'll probably also tell you _why_ they're doing so. They also won't take your money for _future_ season tickets.
On the other hand, if you went to a sporting event or a show and due to some computer error on the organisers' part you were wrongly denied admission - you would expect a refund.
I can't simply start a fake theatre, sell tickets for $100 each, then turn away all ticket holders at the door even if legitimate theatres do have the right to (e.g.) turn away drunk patrons without breathalysing them.
If a venue kicks you out, you'll definitely have neen told what you did wrong. If venues started just escorting people who are doing nothing out and refusing to say why, people would get similarly frustrated.
Right to trial is a thing, though. The claim that the majority of bans are happening over racist epithets is unfounded, and honestly probably so much hogwash/bunk.
Activision/Blizzard aren't courts of law, but they do represent to some degree a "controller of a market", they are absolutely shirking their responsibility here. Maybe after the SBF fiasco Govts outside China will finally start cracking down hard on all these illict online markets with zero rules.
They should have to specify the cause and provide evidence. If, say, you’re a Nazi and spammed threats in chat that’s very easy to demonstrate and very few courts are going to even blink at the idea that it’s a terms of service violation which doesn’t warrant a refund.
Where that’s harder would be things like “our ML system thinks your input timing wasn’t humanly possible” and it’d be great if this forced companies to be more nuanced about how they handle things like that by doing things like requiring multiple independent checks.
Microtransaction games will happily ban players without recourse or explanation after they spend hundreds of dollars. No refunds, they make the rules and regulators don't care
In this particular case, we're talking about people being banned sometimes before ever even playing their first multiplayer game because of an anti-cheat system with a kernel-level driver and ML-assisted autobans producing a lot of false positives.
But yes, people who are actually using cheats are manipulating/attacking the service they're using and deserve nothing from the companies who are trying to defend against it.
This happened to me for a different reason, but it was the same level of frustrating.
After months of playing MW and Black Ops, one day I queue up with friends and after waiting 5+ minutes no server would be found. We try over and over finally we realize its me.
Googling around shows that I am "Shadow Banned" and everyone is like "go away cheater" online.
I've been playing online games with an in game name that contains the word "Erotica" for a while now (4+ years) and have had zero issues.
Turns out the word "Erotica" is BANNED by Activision, and they synced their identity management with Blizzard it got flagged.
I found ONE random thread on Reddit where a guy ran into the same problem and gave a link to directly log into their system.
Once logged in I got "Your username contains adult content and must be changed".
After changing it, and waiting 3 days, it 'synced' and my account was unbanned.
The whole thing was absolutely stupid, I had paid $60 and could not play any of their games.
It pretty much ruined the game for me, I haven't given them a dollar since.
That is insane. Had similar issues but not really banned... just "error-less" issues coming up that would lead you to believe the problem is something else entirely.
It usually doesn't take a lot of work for engineers to do some brainstorming around who will be affected and send a direct email letting users know what's up. That would have saved you days of fumbling around and frustration.
I have a growing enthusiasm for companies that consistently care for users, and conversely a callous distain for companies that don't.
I feel as though the list of companies that consistently care for users is shrinking by the day.
In fact, I can't really think of many businesses where I feel appreciated or cared for as a customer, but the few that I can are all small businesses and most of them are local to me.
Why would they care, if people still give them money, when they get banned, instead of demanding a refund, they search for workarounds, and even after that, they buy a new games when it's released.
When people start demanding refunds or even start a class-action suit (especially if getting banned in multiplayer prevents you from playing single player missions), things will change.
This is fundamentally a support and UX problem, not a dev failure. Big production user management and authentication systems can get pretty complicated and trying to figure out every weird edge case when combining them is not low-effort by any measure. "What if someone's username wasn't caught in their profanity filter but gets caught by ours" seems like a pretty rare edge case in a huge pool of big problems to solve. Their shortcoming was not giving their users proper guidance on how to address the inevitable kinks that pop up.
Anecdotally, having worked on identity management systems, and merged a number of them, this hasn’t ever seemed like an edge case for me. It’s pretty high up on the list. I’d imagine the folks they’ve got working on these systems are paid an order of magnitude more than myself.
> I’d imagine the folks they’ve got working on these systems are paid an order of magnitude more than myself.
I wouldn't assume that. Game companies are notorious for pinching pennies. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if these systems were outsourced completely.
You seem to be confusing when two systems don't mutually support certain names due to technical limitations, with what happened here.
It's not a bug that a filter caught names that the merged companies now collectively do not allow in their collectively owned games.
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The only miss here is more of a UX issue: they handled username bans the same way they handled all bans, with a shadowban.
Shadowbans are great for most infractions since you burn some time of the offender before they start again and give them little information to find loopholes with... but for something rectifiable there should be a way to nudge and explain why they're banned.
I don’t think it’s solely a dev responsibility, but having worked in a UX role on a project that merged two systems with user accounts and millions of users, we (UX, dev, product) spent a lot of time thinking of scenarios exactly like this.
You’re right, this was a support failure, but it was also a failure of the team(s) that performed the merge.
And who knows how many other scenarios they considered? The reason it's a lot of work to ferret these situations out is because there are a ton of things that can go wrong. Who knows how many other situations were considered? For this to be a development failure, we'd need to see a pattern. One instance doesn't make a pattern.
Sounds very annoying. Conversely, many of activision’s users are minors. In the games you mentioned it’s some what rare to encounter adults, especially as a new player. Perhaps not the best place to advertise ones love of erotica. Personally it bothers me when I walk past my 10 year old nephew and the other players in his squad have names that are sexual, racist or inflammatory; so I report them. If the people that I report have to work hard to realize that they are disrupting a community and making people uncomfortable I am ok with that too. +1 for activision in my books.
I really enjoy Call of Duty. Got extremely good at it in high school, along with my group of friends. Since then, I've had to move away and CoD has kept us connected multiple times per week. It's been a very enjoyable game for well over a decade.
In the past few years, it's become extremely clear to me that something is seriously wrong with CoD - and perhaps Activision as a whole. I'm willing to explain much of it away as "it's hard to run a big game at scale", but some the bugs are just inexcusable. Activision offers little to no insight or recourse when things break.
I have 700 hours in MW2/WZ1. I can't even stand to play the new game. It's just too broken.
If you can convince your crew to try something new, there are some great FPS games nowadays. I've enjoyed those, though I haven't been able to put in anywhere near your number of hours.
BTW... sometime ago there were people on Forums convinced they got banned on EFT due to WSL and Virtualbox, as there were hacks using VMs. Worth take a look first.
EFT requires a huge amount of free time, it feels like a day job. I would consider that before putting time on that game. Its nothing like COD.
Beauty with CoD is that you can turn it on, play for 10 minutes and then move on to other stuff in your life. None of those games (except maybe Rising Storm 2: Vietnam, I'm not familiar with that one) look like you'll be able to do so. CoD is essentially a arcade FPS, while the ones you listed are more on the "realistic" side of things.
+1 for Tarkov, its what CoD's new DMZ mode is a watered down imitation of.
I highly recommend single player mods/server emulators for EFT like Altered Escape, its a nice break from going up against meta geared super competitive players.
Nit: mw2 is the new game, you meant mw1 (2019) presumably.
Similarly for me cod has kept me connected with friends and family across the world as we travelled and went our own ways. But all of us have actually moved onto mw2 by now and are enjoying it a great deal. (We don’t play Warzone and only play s&d or prison rescue). There are bugs here and there but not too bad overall. We are a mix of PC and Xbox players.
I would still recommend giving the game a try in a few “seasons” as it will likely stabilize further.
I've been SUPER confused as to what this "Modern Warfare 2" is that people are talking about, because I played that in, well, 2009. At least they called it "II" instead of "2" (as if anyone will notice this difference)... >_>
I have a _bunch_ of issues with MW2 in warzone, but by far the most absolutely frustrating is a multiplayer bug. It seems that if I get a UAV and then die in a S&D style map (e.g. S&D, prisoner rescue, Knockout) then about 50% of the time I am soft-locked for the remainder of the _game_. By this I mean my HUD goes away, the game runs at 5FPS, and I _cant use the UAV I got_. I used to be able to unglitch it by killing myself and spectating a teammate before the next round, but that doesnt work any more. I just have to wait for the game to finish. So incredibly frustrating.
My old Counter-Strike 'clan' Mousesports became a 'team', then it became an 'organisation'. These kids make a lot of money now and travel the whole world to play in their 'clan'.
IMO, the release of Warzone 1, Call of Duty’s Battle Royale mode that released a few months after Modern Warfare 2019, has completely changed the priorities and incentives for the company. The goal is to sell in game cosmetics more so than the game itself, as many other games are turning to as well.
The yearly release cycle, which may be ending soon, leads to bugs that re-emerge each year and features that appear and disappear. Sure, the different studios which produce the games need some room to innovate, but the inconsistent base set of features is incredibly frustrating. CoD games are one of the games I play the most, with the other being a game which is the complete opposite, Old School RuneScape, that has been built on for ~20 years.
I play the current game MWII with friends a few hours a day most days of the week. Multiple times per session my game crashes at random, something I can’t remember with any other major games with a top of the line PC. Like many other pieces of software, chasing other revenue sources seems to have made the quality of the product take a nose dive, with consequences yet to be seen. This is disappointing to me as someone who enjoys playing the game with friends, who has competed in open-bracket events at major tournaments over a span of a few years, and worked directly with the professional league and teams (CDL and CWL) for analytics and software.
> The goal is to sell in game cosmetics more so than the game itself, as many other games are turning to as well.
This has nothing to do with cosmetics and everything to do with customer standards. We're living in an age where the average customer has absolutely zero standards for the products they purchase, they simply do not care if the game barely works and crashes every 10 minutes, they will happily enjoy it and praise it anyway because they probably do not have the intellectual capacity to notice or care.
The newest Pokemon game is a prime example of this, it has no cosmetics, no microtransactions, nothing, yet it's so much more of a technical trainwreck than any CoD game, you really have to play it to believe it. It costs $60 and looks and runs worse than many PS2 games, but it sold tens of millions anyway because the people buying it are effectively zombies that only exist to obey corporations and will happily consume whatever is sold to them no questions asked.
> We're living in an age where the average customer has absolutely zero standards for the products they purchase, they simply do not care if the game barely works and crashes every 10 min
Elder Scrolls titles have been selling very well for a long time. I don't think this is new.
Is there a name for the phenomenon of people thinking that some behavior of humans is new when it's actually always been that way? I feel like there should be since it's so common to see the word "nowadays" followed by a statement like that.
What a ridiculous statement to make about people who enjoyed the latest Pokemon games. Yes they perform like ass. Yes they're buggy. But they're still surprisingly fun.
I hated the frame rate issues and various bugs I ran into. I considered requesting a refund (like I did do for similar reasons very quickly after buying Cyberpunk 2077). But before I knew it I was hours into the game. This is actually the first mainline Pokemon game in 15 years that I've played up through the Elite Four on. For me, the fun of the gameplay was enough to outweigh the negatives.
Also, don't forget that even back when games were significantly simpler they were still loaded with issues. The original Pokemon games are a good example here. They had many bugs, some of which were quickly found to be exploitable. To me that's another data point to indicate that issues with the game's coding don't necessarily make the game bad.
Same experience here. I crash/bug-out multiple times per day. Every day I play, the first time I play a map it lags for the first 3-5 minutes, cycling between full speed and 20FPS. I have run into _several_ game breaking bugs in multiplayer, one of which locks me out of playing consistently (detailed in another comment in this thread).
I am big on boycotting and generally have avoided Activision games because of how they have milked things in the past. I'm incredibly frustrated with the state of the game, and disappointed I got talked into buying it by my buddies. Even worse, they just stockholm it saying things like "they just released it, you have to give it time". What? We played Halo 2 and Modern Warfare 2 at launch for a week straight and the only issue I can remember is server instability which was transient. I'm so tired of this public beta workflow, which if you are pushing a game per year you end up getting what, 9 months of _actual_ gameplay, and thats assuming the game doesnt need app-level modifications (vs fixing actual bugs) to smooth out the experience.
Its not just the bugs though. Its the glaringly obvious "move fast" mentality as a dev. There is no way anyone looked at the warzone 2 ping system and thought "thats good enough, ship it". In all of the dev-run cycles, or the playtesting, or the beta testing you are telling me it wasnt _glaringly_ obvious that the system was broken?
QA can file all the bugs and tickets they want but when management says you can't work on anything that doesn't stop someone from playing the game they won't be fixed. Video game management doesn't care, and why should they? Bethesda games have been hot garbage from a bugs standpoint since the very very beginning and they only get more successful. Even after Fallout 76, I promise you the new elder scrolls will have quests that are impossible to complete for no reason sometimes, will struggle to function after a 100 hours of playtime for unexplained reasons, will have trivial exploits (though I don't think that's a problem) and just be unreliable and bad, but it will make millions of dollars still.
I understand theres a limit to your influence as a dev, but I disagree they are powerless. My point is that they are theoretically closing tickets without fully testing the thing they are actually implementing. They are the ones introducing the bugs in the first place. They are also the first ones to actually use the designed systems (e.g. for the pinging issue). Its much faster to just fix it then.
I purchased the game and was met with casmera-rhino before even playing a match or seeing a screen to chose what to play I payed $70+ for the game Ive been playing cod for years and years and my stats arent crazy im a casual player and not even a second look at my account after I appealed my ban on activisions website my fate was sealed permanently banned account with over $300+ worth of microtransactions and games and im unable to appeal and Im not sure what to do Im researching class action lawyers and getting advice and how to get my account or my money back from the company if anyone has any advice or is currently talking to a lawyer or some type of representative id really appreciate some info, thank you.
Did you recently buy a refurbished piece of hardware like an SSD or something? Activision has hardware based bans, I was reading some reports of people buying a used SSD or even mixed-new-used stock SSD's that people had cheated on and then returned.
This seems like it could result in actual lawsuits. While the license for the game exists, a court wouldn't look too kindly on this situation. Courts have the power to void contracts if they're against "public policy", so that should be something everyone should keep in mind.
Chargeback should be a last resort but it should also be something you can reliably fall back on if the company fails to handle your complaint adequately. And the likes of Google seem to do that 100% of the time.
This essentially doesn’t work now either, unfortunately.
A lot of the latest AAA games will only allow you to play multiplayer if your account ALSO has a verified phone number attached, and they only let you attach each number to a single account, plus they filter out phones which are not postpaid (so no using services like Twilio).
When they launched Overwatch 2, you couldn't play if you tried to verify your account with a prepaid phone. This was problematic since they closed Overwatch 1 servers (it's a paid, online only game) for Overwatch 2, a free to play game.
Some people found themselves that they could no longer play the Overwatch franchise after having bought the $40 original game because of this. This was later rolled back and they allowed prepaid phones. So they can definitely distinguish them.
No. Overwatch 2 did this and rolled it back pretty much immediately. CS:GO and DOTA2 don't require it but it they gate competitive play behind it. That's not a lot of AAA games.
This is a consumer rights issue across our industry. Algorithmic customer support “decisions” should always be appealable to a human audience.
My Google account was banned years ago, “computer says no” - all of my attempts to appeal failed. I at no point broke their terms. Nobody cares, I lost all of my data.
I hope that a class action prevails against Activision. And I hope that across our industry consumers receive more robust rights. Not being able to reach a human at your company quickly escalates from a being cost optimization, to outright fraud.
Yes, and it was denied, with no explanation, no ability to defend against claims, etc. If there is monetary loss, then a proper appeals process should be put in place. If they refunded the money, then that’s one thing, but they kept the money, and so this is theft.
Yeah.. you can do a chargeback or take them to small claims court, but then you'll be blacklisted as a customer for life. There needs to be a better process
On the topic of unfair bans, Roblox bans kid accounts for having malicious scripts hidden in models in Roblox Studio. They can detect it in the kid’s game, but allow it in their toolbox. Accounts with premium membership are not refunded for the remaining time left.
On the topic of Roblox, it sounds pretty awful generally. Microtransactions don't (IMHO) have any place in a game for young kids.
In a previous job I dealt with a police request for information after a pre-teenager child sent an email to their school principal saying there was a bomb in the school that would explode and kill everyome unless they were given some number of Robux so they could buy a hat or something for their character.
> My 6 year old roblox account got banned 18 days ago because I made a game and a free model in the game had a script hidden from the owner that showed hentai on the screen.
Roblox Studio has a toolbox of free community models. Malicious scripts are hidden in models. Kids import free models in their games and get banned for malicious scripts.
It's worth keeping in mind that this is a company hit by government lawsuits alleging sexual harassment, discrimination and retaliation, plus a staff walkout for similar reasons.
You should expect them to behave poorly, as they have a history of doing so. It's unfortunate, but you just have to give up on buying their games.
Unfortunately we gave up our right to own software when we let companies own the servers. Back in the day you could get banned from a server and go find somewhere else to play. Now you'll get banned for life, and in some cases, even banned from the single player mode. Sorry, no refunds!
There's a reason pirate crews are hailed as heroes...and it's not the free software. Games legitimately work better when they are cracked almost 100% of the time.
Stop buying the games. It's really that simple. I can't understand the people who say "well, I'll try this game out but I hope they fix it next time". That's not how business works.
Only a handful of games in the history of gaming have had open source / openly available multiplayer servers. Nobody is playing multiplayer games if users vote with their wallets like you want them to.
And the reason for this is because multiplayer games are hard to maintain and without a profit motive it becomes long-term unviable.
I used to play a lot of a game called BZFlag, which was fully open-source etc, but it always struggled to keep up with any amount of advancement in the gaming world because it was entirely built by volunteers with limited time on their hands.
Well, for some time, the biggest titles in the industry had openly available multiplayer servers (Quake, UT, basically everything on QuakeSpy/GameSpy). I ran a Quake 3 server on my VPS for years on end (I forgot it was even running at one point) for a grand total of $15/year. Effectively zero maintenance and it was set up during a single afternoon of config. Friends and I played on it and it just.. worked...
Eventually "players actually getting to do what they want with the software they paid for" somehow became a thing of the past, though I don't really know why. I mean, I can think of reasons, but most of those reasons suck.
> Eventually "players actually getting to do what they want with the software they paid for" somehow became a thing of the past, though I don't really know why.
- Making servers that are somewhat resilient to getting hacked is difficult enough if you control the servers and the code and no one can see it, but publicly available server binaries? There are more than enough eyeballs from cheaters, griefers and other abusers to discover exploits.
- If you offer server binaries to people and people get hacked by cheaters, griefers and other abusers as a result, they may hold you liable for damages
- Giving away server binaries also means giving away leverage and income. With UT99-2003-2004-3, everyone can simply set up servers and you as a publisher have no way of forcing people to pay up (or to take down central servers so that people are forced to buy the successor game).
- Giving away servers also means you give away a significant amount of brand control. Parents won't care that pedophiles or Nazis can target their children because some random server admin doesn't give a shit about moderating, they will associate it with your brand.
- In a related vein, modding is also in the crossfire. Just remember the GTA San Andreas Hot Coffee mod and the parental outrage over a decade ago - and today the influence of "concerned parents" groups has gotten even worse, not to mention legitimate concerns about people distributing pedophile or hate mods. As a publisher you can't really afford people replacing e.g. every opponent with the image of Black people.
In the end, most of the reasons boil down to people (and, at least for pedophilia and pornographic content, also governments) expecting game publishers to pick up the slack of educating people that it's not OK to distribute or spread such content, or that it's not OK to DDoS server admins because they decided to ban players for spreading hate content.
This is all a canard because things like Roblox are a far more efficient means of connecting children to both undue sexual and economic exploitation than any of the old, distributed server methods.
All of those old games were rated for teenagers or adults. Some of the worst actual threats to young children come from things like Roblox that give parents a false sense that the company is moderating the content effectively.
Unfortunately, most of the industry has chosen to support two bad models: either pure P2P or the uni-corporate-server-farm model. Neither of them really provide the best experience for consumers. While the distributed dedicated server model does have its own problems, it also has many advantages, including that of outsourcing server management to small businesses and hobbyists rather than absorbing all those costs to the software maintainer.
> - Giving away servers also means you give away a significant amount of brand control. Parents won't care that pedophiles or Nazis can target their children because some random server admin doesn't give a shit about moderating, they will associate it with your brand.
Ah yes, Argumentum ad Pearl Clutchum. It never fails.
You don't need the server to be open source. You just need to be able to run it yourself without any central server involved.
This has been very much the norm from the nineties up until fairly recently. I spent my childhood and teens playing games over LAN or the Internet with self-hosted servers (Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Half-Life, GTA, Dungeon Siege, Red Alert, Warcraft 2, ...)
Minecraft (the best selling game of all time) lets your self-host servers. You can also bypass their user authentication system on your own servers fairly easily, but you generally don't need to.
There are also many hosting companies that let you create and manage Minecraft servers via a web interface and take care of stuff like rotating backups so even the most incompetent users can self-host.
Every game that had a LAN mode could generally be played either via a software VPN, or other methods. More often than not games (especially FPSes) would ship with dedicated server software. You still needed to buy the game, but then you could run the dedicated server on your favorite hosting platform and play.
I think it was the xbox-ification of shooters that changed everything. 2009 or so, if I had to guess. MW2 was the first game that I remember really pushed company owned servers hard. Coincidentally this was also used to sell overpriced, often useless, DLC. At least back then the DLC was maps though.
It might be my age but I find it easier to remember games that DID have dedicated servers, rather than those that don't.
As I recall MW2 was the first game that did away with servers entirely, so you were always served P2P by someone’s PC, leading to constant multiplayer issues (unlike MW1, which had dedicated servers)
Oh man, I remember BZFlag. I loved that game. Even with the poor graphics it was still so much fun because the gameplay was slow paced enough that text chat was possible along the chaos. It felt like competitive battles over IRC. Haven’t experienced anything quite like it since.
> Only a handful of games in the history of gaming have had open source / openly available multiplayer servers.
It was actually the norm in the 90s. Other comments have cited examples but it’s worth noting that consoles supported running local servers too.
What changed was subscription based online services and stupid loot (et al) boxes meant companies could extract a continuous stream of money from gamers without having to put out much, if any, additional content. So everything became online first.
Source: I ran several games servers in the 90s and early 00. (Still do in fact but only for Minecraft these days).
That’s an unfairly dismissive comment given we are still talking about thousands of multiplayer games throughout the 90s and early 00s.
In fact I’d go further than that and say: to old timers like me, this practice of locking multiplayer games to the studios servers feels more like a recent trend than what used to be the norm.
It’s true people should just stop. I like the idea that people who like content will stick with it as it gets worse and worse, but once they go over the cliff of being done with it, they never come back. It takes time though.
Like we just stopped buying toys with lead paint? Or just stopped buying cars that voided warranty if you used an independent mechanic? Or just stopped patronizing businesses that have a willfully unsafe working environment?
There's a tested solution to these issues, and it's not "act as isolated consumers".
Or to ensure that consumers get at least a refund when denied the goods they paid for. Or you can insist on the most uncharitable interpretation of my comment, sure.
Or like we stopped buying huge phones to encourage the manufacturers to produce smaller models, right. Voting with your wallet doesn't work when everything on the market is equally bad.
I lament this as well. I wish I could get something shaped like an iPhone 4 again.
While I was initially excited about the release of the iPhone mini, I ended up not buying one because I had bad experiences in the past using apps that were clearly never tested on the smaller screen sizes, and I couldn't trust that it wouldn't happen again.
Add to that the fact that I can't stand iOS. I currently use a Pixel 4a because that was literally the smallest Android phone money could buy at the time, and one that still had a headphone jack.
Toys with lead paint is a sad example since we did ban lead paint in toys, then Mattel was caught selling Chinese toys with lead paint and then a law was passed to requiring 3rd party inspections to prevent lead paint which created a burden for small toy sellers. And then Mattel was made exempt from having to test (could use their own in house testing) even though they were the whole reason the law was created.
Well, the argument with Diablo 3 was that the game had an in-game auction house on launch, where you could sell in-game items for real money. So the game had to be fully online to make sure items are only generated when really earned. Of course the auction house disappeared and the requirement to always be online didn't(having said that, the console versions of diablo 3 don't require being online - but from what I understand significant portion of the game was rewritten to allow the game to work online, on consoles, and with a gamepad)
And, tbh, wtf does it matter if I wanted to "cheat" in single player mode? Oh no - it would be unfair to some AI NPCs? At one point "cheating" in single player mode was called modding -- and it drove communities and made software publishers money by keeping games fresher longer.
I agree. What I find unfortunate is that most single player games are now designed to be incredibly grindy: the developers want player retention so there’s more buzz about the game, resulting in more purchases.
I’m in my mid thirties, and I have career ambitions and hobbies and relationships that I want to nurture. While I would love something I can play and enjoy for 15-30 minutes every other day, I don’t have time for something that takes 5+ hours just to feel the slightest amount of reward. Cheats can take a game that’s designed to be grindy and addictive and instead make it something that can be enjoyed in smaller chunks.
An excellent example of this is Breath of the Wild. BotW requires a ton of slow terrain traversal (at least until you’ve unlocked more fast travel points, and even then the walking/gliding takes quite a while). Playing the game with a mod to enable 5x movement speed makes it a game that I can actually enjoy playing for 15 minutes at a time. Also, it takes something like 45-60 seconds for the game to reload when you die, so temporarily having an invincibility cheat on makes it feasible for me to figure out an enemy’s move set, whereas without I would either have to cheese the enemies or give up on the game entirely: what I’m not going to do is sit down with a hard cap of 15 minutes, die fifteen times, getting a total play time of maybe a minute of actual game play plus 14 minutes or so of loading screen, and then come back the next couple nights to do same thing over again.
A touch of cheats make modern games actually playable to someone who has a busy schedule, but still wants something to decompress with.
Breath of the Wild has probably in part been designed the way it was because Nintendo knew you could take your switch with you during travel; 15mn seems like a difficult goal to achieve for an exploration-focused game.
That said, I agree that anyone should be able to modify a local (that is, local coop/multiplayer or singleplayer) game's behavior to suit their needs.
Some metric on the steam marketplace used to put games on the front page include concurrent users and hours played. I've seen people actively coordinating their customer base to boost concurrent users. It's madness that games are falling in the advertisement trap and even indie need to play the ball to survive
I was with you and imagining you were talking about Ubisoft-style games (the last of which I played in 2014, but apparently they've been reskinning the same game since!). But Breath of the Wild's appeal to me is precisely the exploration! Why would you want to skip that x)
You can save anywhere, so you can make sessions as short as you'd like anyway. There aren't even classic Zelda dungeons anymore! Just 5-10min challenges in the form of a shrine.
Yeah. And it becomes silly the other way around as well. Take the WadjetEye adventures. People complain that the games are just 4 - 8 hours long. But on the flip side, it's 4 - 8 hours filled with charm, content and gameplay. It doesn't contain 30 minute dry stretches every once in a while. And for 10 - 20 euros, it's entirely fairly priced.
And the games tend to be structured by acts, so it's easy to play it for half an hour to an hour until an act is completed. Then it can sit for a day or two and then you continue through the next act.
Many roguelikes feel like they have a similar time structure in mind. Sigil of the Magi, Slay the Spire, Peglin and such have an hour run time generally and that's it. Game sizes like Witcher 3 have grown kind of disheartening to me, as much as I want to like it.
Claiming that you can’t get to places quickly in breath of the wild before you’ve unlocked the warp towers implies to me you’re complaining that you can’t zip through new areas that you’ve never even explored before.
In a world where content is locked behind actual repetitive grinds of the same content for numbers to go up, this strikes me as a preposterous example.
I also can’t think of any game that asks for 5+ hours for any payoff for anything tbh.
> I also can’t think of any game that asks for 5+ hours for any payoff for anything tbh.
MMOs are usually an example of this, where there is rarely any true fun to be had in the opening hours (where either gameplay is extremely slow, many people are zipping through power-levelling, etc.). They're hardly an example of a modern game though.
I vehemently disagree - single player games are generally far less grindy than they used to be (with significant exceptions such as Genshin Impact). Basically all single player games now have a story and a rather linear path through it, and tend to carefully design their progression such that completing that main story itself is enough to be able to take on the next steps in it, with at most a small amount of side-content. Even difficulty and saving options are usually tuned such that it is very rarely necessary to re-do the same content, you will almost always be able to finish it in the first try, or 2-3 at most.
A good example is in comparing the newer Final Fantasy games with the older ones. In the older ones, it was 100% required to occasionally run around the map and just fight random encounters to level up and be able to face the next bit of the story. The newer ones eschew this completely, and some don't even have random encounters for most of the time. Save points were also placed such that you would often have to redo an entire gauntlet of fights if you failed once, which is a thing of the past as well.
Also, your example of BotW is not an example of what is normally called grinding. The exploration, the terrain traversal, is, to most people I've seen praise it, the core appeal of BotW, not some repetitive grind the games makes you go through to enjoy the good bits.
On the other hand, I'm not trying to say "you're playing the game wrong". I fully agree that we all have a right to "cheat" in single-player (or LAN) games to make them fit our preferences, regardless of the designer's intentions or the preferences of other gamers.
Lol we were lucky we had the ability to host our own servers back in the day. The IP owners have always had to full right and power to do whatever they want to extract as much profit as possible. We have never had any power over what they do.
Keep in mind that there wasn't flexible infrastructure on demand in those days. User run servers was sort of a low cost market based demand scaler for IP owners. If the game is really a dud, they didn't buy N servers and M bandwidth. If it's a hit, they can add an official hosted distinction if it makes sense.
Having community hosted servers with their own moderation was just so much better. Sure, the moderation level would vary from server to server, sometimes with immature admins giving out bans for no reasons, but you would ultimately find your way to servers that match you the best. And often, people would become regulars, finding the same players on the same servers, that was the best aspect of online gaming, finding a community.
Games stopping to provide self-hosted servers is also what made LAN parties increasingly difficult. Having to rent game servers, provide decent bandwidth and not being able to run third party tools (for recording scores or set modifiers) made it impossible to use modern games in a 50 people LAN party with a low budget.
Generally speaking, if you are a suspected cheater, I can see why you would be barred from online-play.
There's always going to be false-positives though. How often that happens and what means of recourse one has (or should have) is IMO another discussion. And in this particular case, it seems Activision is doing pretty much all the wrong things(tm) though.
> even banned from the single player mode.
The fact that an account (and a server) is required to play a game you've bought in single-player mode is on another level outragious.
That itself should be illegal.
> Sorry, no refunds!
Again. Clearly this needs to be illegal.
If you take away a product you've allowed someone to "buy", then you've broken your end of the bargain.
> If you take away a product you've allowed someone to "buy", then you've broken your end of the bargain.
Obviously doing it for no valid reason is a breach of contract, but I'm sure the legalese is pretty thick. No one "buys" anything obviously and the license agreement will clearly say you forfeit your license if you cheat. And here I'm pretty sure the legalese would say "Whether or not you actually cheated is up to us to decide so we define it as when our tools say you did".
So basically: you have a license, and that license is valid until their tools say it isn't.
Now, will such a license agreement hold up if tested legally? Maybe not. But it's likely what I clicked "Accept" on.
> Unfortunately we gave up our right to own software when we let companies own the servers.
Some games managed to balance this quite well despite no self-hosted servers, for example BF4 which allows community managed "rented" servers.
But one thing to note though is that nearly all of them will very quickly adopt global blacklists with cheaters. So for a community BF server you'd hook your server to a global anti cheat database, and any bans from the server would end up on the global cheater blacklist. While the choice of using a global blacklist was of course up to the administrators, it wouldn't be very easy to find a server that didn't use this type of system if you happened to be blacklisted.
So the community will invent exactly the same kind global bans that the game studio has. I never saw a problem with that (likely because I wasn't a false positive).
I really can't blame them entirely. Perhaps you could blame companies for not using a hybrid model where players can host privately plus maintaining their public servers.
Why? Because in a similar vein to how social media needs to be moderated to prevent the bad apples from spoiling the bunch, games now need to be moderated to maintain reputation among the community. If a player hearing about CSGO for the first time has no idea what they're getting into finds only a public server running 24/7 CS_OFFICE with Warcraft Mods they might get a bad impression of what the game is. Having consistency in user experience is highly important, and public servers being maintained and moderated by the developer is probably the most important part of that. What about all those servers that have massive latency issues? That's a bad look on the game because most players won't recognize community run servers are the reason the game behaves buggy.
Do I dislike it? Yes. I think it has created irreparable harm to the ability for gaming communities to build organically but so long as central hubs like Reddit or Discord continue to pop up I figure they've just offloaded the community aspect to external sources. Is that better? I'm not sure. Partially yes. Losing contact with a friend because they stopped logging into your preferred server isn't really a thing if you're Discord friends or Steam friends.
As long as there's a clear UI separation, there's no harm in providing both first and third party servers for brand perception & user experience. A similar issue is content provenance. In StarCraft II, for example, official maps and custom maps live in separate tabs. No one expects a Dragon Ball-themed map to be made with the same standard as an official Blizzard map.
I suspect it's simply to control monetization and without the extra engineering cost of private server releases.
This is one of the main reasons Minecraft is still one of the most popular games to this day, after over a decade. Open-source third-party servers and their development contribute to development of new fun plugins, which allows more and more independent server creators to build cool unique servers.
And best of all: you can only get yourself banned from individual servers.
This isn't the case anymore since version 1.19.1 [1], where "reported players can now be banned from online play and Realms after moderator review": https://i.redd.it/hoyh22jsh9791.png
> Anyone who’s played (at least the PC version of) Modern Warfare II is fully aware of the instability and bugginess of the release
I’ve casually played this game quite a few times since release and not had any issue. Perhaps I’m too casual but I login, hope into a random quick match, shoot, die, repeat and turn off the console when I’m satisfied.
I think console vs PC is definitely one part of the problem. My buddy on console (xbox) definitely experiences much fewer game breaking bugs and crashes than the rest of us in the squad who are on PC.
Activision has been criticized for its faulty anti-cheat software, which has resulted in permanent and unappealable account bans for players of its game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II. Affected players are unable to access the single-player game, even though they paid $70 or more for it. The bans come with no explanation or ability to communicate with Activision. The issue has been met with "shut up and go away, cheater" responses on social media, and attempts to raise awareness are being suppressed on forums. Players are organizing to file reports with the Better Business Bureau and the Federal Trade Commission.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 329 ms ] threadHere's a recent example in the Russian game Escape from Tarkov[1]. A player kills a developer and gets banned moments after for cheating. Luckily he manages to catch it on video, and posts it to reddit. He's subsequently unbanned. Why was he banned? "false alarm triggered". When asked for more details, BSG responds "Sorry, can’t tell you cause it’s part of anti cheat system, hope you understand". Which is ridiculous.
BSG is in Russia and therefore untouchable, but I don't have much hope for these other companies like ATVI who are doing the sort of abuse.
[1]. https://www.reddit.com/r/EscapefromTarkov/comments/zawwc5/i_...
This is how all fraud detection works. Outside of gaming as well. That doesn't mean the previous action was right, but the fact they can't tell you why means nothing at all. The whole industry is built on secrecy and having a few hidden tricks in the bag.
The banned guy can contact battleye and try to get unbanned if it was false, has happened before (usually a group of players with something in common are banned, last time it was s specific motherboard or a driver for it).
If EFT bans a cheater, they're effectively getting another sale, because the cheater will come back and make money off the grey market once more. The result is that you have tons of cheaters, and EFT only needs to make broad strokes efforts at curbing them to keep existing players happy.
at least that way they're not profiting from their scummy behaviour
and honestly who cares these days if their battle.net account is lost
(as long as you get some of your money back)
Surely, taking escalatory retribution like that is illegal, somewhere...I hope...?
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Non-escalatory retribution would be banning you from the game you filed a chargeback for - I can't get mad over that.
But an online store doing unilateral revocation of access and licenses for a consumer's entire library (without refunding it 100%) in response to a single chargeback is just begging for countries' consumer protection agencies to come knocking, and even if that's a term in the store's EULA I can't see how they could be upheld by a court as an conscionable (and therefore legally enforcible) contract clause - especially given the dim-view to which online and click-through EULAs/TOS are viewed by most countries courts' today anyway.
Speaking as someone with too much time on my hands (thanks to a cushy job, I'm pleased to say, rather than funemployment) I secretely want to be dicked-over by a megacorp like this so I can get amusement (and a worthwhile life experience) by availing myself of the court system to hold these companies to account. Now I just need to find a similar way to make Microsoft undo the crappy shell in Windows 11.
Of course the reality of these other places being the marketplace and the service provider and the game publisher is a classic anti-trust issue.
Not saying "don't chargeback ever", and obviously in your scenario the SaaS is at fault, really.
Wait, does this mean that if someone hacks your Steam account, and uses your saved payment info to order a Steam Deck shipped to someone other than you, that you have to choose between losing your Steam account forever or losing the money?
A related problem though is that game developers have a really hard time trusting anyone who says they've been banned unfairly. Almost everyone who gets banned for valid reasons will claim they did nothing wrong, etc. This is especially true for delayed bans, as the person doesn't even realize that their account got flagged to be banned weeks before the actual ban took place.
Given that problem, when a developer gets reports of users being banned unfairly, it's very easy to ignore them as salty cheaters. Ideally there is a way for them to know exactly what tripped the anti-cheat, but sometimes it's hard as the client has to covertly tell the server to ban itself.
Cronus certainly makes many things easier, but it does not give you magic. You still have to be decent at the game for a Cronus to be of any help.
“This particular cheat only helps people that are already good at the game” is also an ancient trope as far as rationalizing cheating goes, so hope you’re enjoying your Cronus lol.
Even with a Cronus, you still need to be able to aim and place your shots. It certainly helps you land more shots, but basic tactics easily overcome a Cronus.
I don't disagree that a Cronus is cheating. I'm simply stating there are different levels of cheating. Since Cronus is hardware it's both hard to detect and limited on its impact. Cronus also don't let you magically wall people or auto-headshot.
Software based cheats are significantly more impactful to the game play. Software cheaters can see you through walls, auto-aim, auto-shoot, auto-move. There's simply no way to counter someone who knows exactly where you are and can hit a perfect shot every time.
Activision should address both, but software cheating is a far larger problem.
Hardware based cheats, like recoil control, can be countered with in-game mechanics. For example, enforcing a minimum amount of recoil and using an RNG recoil pattern. My understanding is Cronus rely on grossly predictable recoil patterns.
Software cheating extends well beyond recoil control and requires active detection mechanisms.
And for what? Because you think Cronus is too hard to detect?
No cheat should be tolerated, let alone compromised with to the point of fudging the game. Should racing games counter Cronus by removing difficult corners that rely on predictable turns? Should games avoid entire categories of mechanics just to work around Cronus? Fuck that, Activision should continue investing in protecting the creative integrity of their product, not conceding. Anti-cheat systems have gotten incredibly sophisticated with incredible gains in cheat detection, and it didn't get there by giving up.
Your argument is that games are bad so they should have serious restrictions on them to make them stay bad....
This is nonsense. Games should be, first and foremost, fun. You will build and play better, more interesting games where there are fewer predictable turns (literal or figurative), when there isn't such an unhealthy obsession with protecting terrible mechanics.
For a very few cases where there is e-sport(s) like activity, fine, create your TiVO like experience (in multiplayer, e.g. combat simulators, racing).
"Anti-cheat systems have gotten incredibly sophisticated with incredible gains in cheat detection".
Anti-cheat systems are a large part of why I rarely play any AAA titles - they are slow as all 'F, buggy, and honestly completely trashy games. And if I bought one of these games and was randomly locked out of it, you can bet I would be demanding the blood of the developers be spilled.
I just made the hackusation because it seemed funny to me. Your insistence on further explaining the difference in severity between the different types of cheating just makes it seem even funnier.
That thing exists to solve a very real problem: the game mechanics the Cronus mediates or exploits are being used by game devs to cover up otherwise-boring gameplay.
It isn't software running on the console, which is what anti-cheat generally protects against.
Practically all anti cheat for a long time has primarily worked by monitoring what is running on the computer/device, and ensuring the integrity of the game and its data.
You don’t need anti-cheat with deep system hooks to monitor input. That can be done from the game itself trivially.
I would be surprised if they aren't using heuristics on input.
> Protect sensitive game logic to reduce data mining and detect peripherals that give the cheater an unfair gameplay advantage.
https://irdeto.com/denuvo/console-games-protection/
They also have a common list of cheats on the general information page, none of which are really related to Cronus.
These sorts of generated inputs could in theory be detected using heuristics to watch for inputs that appear too patterned to be fully human. Whether any company is bothering with this, I have no idea. The only one I'm aware of that even appears to attempt to detect these types of devices at all is Epic and I have no idea what methods they use.
And it seems like it would be pretty simple to detect this in the game itself; this sort of detection doesn't need any anti-cheat with deep system hooks.
Correct, it wouldn't need any deep system hooks, nor are the console manufacturers likely to ever give game developers the ability to hook into the system that deeply, nor do they really need to since modern consoles are secure enough in practice that wallhack/aimbot type system level code cheats haven't been a concern for a while now on the major console platforms.
There are various bits of anti-cheat logic that game developers could be putting into their console version like the aforementioned analysis of input devices to look for helper devices, and things like looking for likely "lag switch" attacks by keeping track of the ongoing latency of packets coming in and out, but these are all passive heuristic checks that would exist within the game itself, not driver or kernel level anti-cheat as is common on PC.
IMO the only winning move is not to play. I loved calladoody back in university, but you've got to move with the times, yeah? OTOH, I'm not the one who really changed; I'm still all about dedicated servers, but they haven't been seen since Modern Warfare 1.
The winning move for the anticheat dev is shortly going to be not to play, either. It's one thing to implement increasingly invasive rootkits to find out who's watching your game's memory, but I've heard tell of devices that sit between the PC and monitor, using specialized ML to click M1 and fire when an enemy is detected in one's crosshairs. How can you check for something like that?
I've heard of work around using machine learning to analyze players and compare them to the actions of cheaters. It's not flawless but it can give some kind of probability of cheating so you can match make cheaters with other suspected cheaters.
So go play games with dedicated servers, and local admins who can only locally ban anyone suspect. If players don't like it they can leave for another dedicated server.
There is more data than just win/lose here. Using ML you can analyze exactly how the player moves, etc and get some kind of probability
In the end, there's nothing you can do but to put your money into games that respect you as a customer, which is very rare in AAA. These companies hate you. No one will listen to you and nothing will change, as it's extremely profitable. No one will regulate it. In 3 weeks, a dev there will notice that some updater code can break game files which flags people's accounts or something like that, it'll be quietly patched and everybody will forget about it.
> In the end, there's nothing you can do but to put your money into games that respect
Could always pick up a copy of IDA...
> In 3 weeks, a dev there will notice that some updater code can break game files which flags people's accounts or something like that, it'll be quietly patched and everybody will forget about it.
As a side note if you want some fun you should fire up wireshark when you're playing a game and watch how much "metadata" is sent from your PC to the game company. They know more about you than your doctor in some cases. EasyAntiCheat and Denuvo seem to be the worst offenders.
Even more of a reason to bust out the IDA
And they recently did the same with the Diablo 2 """remaster""", preventing multiplayer-heavy mods running in the regular online mode from operating !! (They are not allowed on battle.net, partially for anti-cheating reasons of course.)
Meanwhile other games still allow normal connection through IP/server name, provide a matchmaking server for players to organize their games, including modded ones, and provide an *optional* ban list for server owners using the official matchmaker to enforce on the worst offenders that in no way affects the singleplayer or the direct connection multiplayer experience !
Luckily i managed to get in touch with an understanding support rep who unbanned me, but not without a "stop modding if you don't wanna get banned again" message, which is absurd. I paid for the game and i should be able to do whatever i want with it within the confines of my own computer.
Most of the time you buy a one time license to use the software, which is tied to your account and platform.
I.e. it is a form of slavery, which I guess you are paying for? Which is a type of scam. The mgmt who work at these AAA shops belong in the dumpster bin of humanity.
You hand over rights to your platform which you, not they, bought and paid for, and provide them with lucrative information, and are now bound to do whatever they say? Some hot nonsense, if I ever heard it.
While I agree you "shouldn't" buy the game, we shouldn't even be giving legitimacy to these practices at all. We generally try to prosecute snake-oil salesmen, shutdown hucksters, put con-men out of business, etc..
There are unfortunately many reasons why people might buy the game - false advertising, lack of proper research, peer pressure from a poorly informed populous. You may be tempted to say "you should do your research", and while I agree you generally should, its also true its impractical to research everything. The same way I shouldn't have to go into a grocery store and have to worry about if the peanut butter is poisoned with salmonella, a consumer be able to purchase a product, and have the reasonable expectation that they can do what they want with the product within the confines of their own home.
Finding out after you have purchased a game that it is arbitrarily locked down, and that you have little recourse to get your money back, is a form of fraud.
I'd had one genuine temp-ban beforehand, and my theory is over the years I got enough reports from opponents that they just built up into saying t'ra to my account and purchases. Yay, right?
I don't think this is very conspiratorially. It's very clear that the mods are coordinating with Activision on releases and information. I've had several posts taken down over the years because they don't tow-the-line.
People who had never visited the forum before, and likely never will again, drop in because they're mad and want a complaint venue where they can gripe. When a game has hundreds of thousands or millions of players, that sort of thing starts to swamp the sub and soon there is no community or sustained conversation and instead it's all 360 no scope drive by complaint drops.
I absolutely commiserate with the OP, and it 100% legitimately sounds like they got caught up in a flawed anti-cheat (maybe exacerbated by a storage system issue on their end, making it think they were trying to modify the system files). But on the other hand, and they recognize this, all the actual cheaters also do the I didn't do nothing routine. When a game is rife with cheaters (PubG, MW, Squad, etc), pretty soon you have a really skeptical approach to those appeals.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/nfeupc/modern...
I emailed Activision support back and forth more than a dozen times explaining the issue, finally resulting in them saying they were escalating to another team. I sent them another four emails over three months, asking if there was any update, before asking if there was even anybody left alive at the company that my emails were reaching, with no response.
I really enjoyed the MW2019 campaign, but I won't be buying another game from Activision.
Not a good look for Activision, in my opinion.
The only "cheats" I ever really saw WoW care about was botting, and that's probably easier to catch server-side than client-side anyways. Why monitor inputs when you can just see who's been fishing for the past 24 hours in a row?
https://imageup.me/i96
I as a player can say that game frequently crashes, shares a lot of bugs with previous version of call of duty and overall is just a copy od mw1 with worse UI and technical state.
I was only banned for a week, but I'm absolutely certain that there was nothing sketchy happening on my side. It's pretty annoying when they're charging money for time-limited events like Battle Passes, then you lose some of that time. Of course, it's a much bigger problem for the many who have been permabanned and don't know why. And it's still happening to others.
I would really like for this to end quietly with some better policies on account reviews, and more transparency on the findings of those reviews. I don't think that's too much to ask after being locked out of a $70 purchase. So far they have been completely silent on the matter. So the wiki stays up and we hope to someday get a word out of them.
Oh, even more frustrating about this is, the game has a swearing filter enabled by default. If those players saw swear words from me, they quite literally specifically opted into that by turning off the swearing filter! Meanwhile they were allowed to sabotage the game for me and ruin my night AND get me chat-banned.
I play DotA, which seemingly does nothing (at at least, very little). I eventually decided to just disable text and voice chat entirely rather than put up with salt in every other game. Toxicity is contagious.
When i was small it was the normal word to refer to black people, but USA has decided that's racist so now it's "persona di colore", even though as a child i've always found it funny because every person is of some colour :D
Taking your money for no product delivery, charging you fees for no service is theft even if you are completely foul. Pointing to a "condition of entry" sign at the door of your premises does NOT change the law.
When you buy a snack, you get a tangible good in exchange for money. The implied agreement is the most basic of exchanging goods for cash.
When you purchase an online multiplayer game, there's an agreement you have explicitly agreed to that you will not, for example, call other players the N-word or sabotage the match by repeatedly running into the enemy team (griefing). These are really quite clearly-defined rules you agreed to. You bought the game knowing full well these are the rules, also knowing you _will potentially permanently lose access to the game_ if you violate those rules.
In my prior example (and the one I just wrote here), there is zero comparison to buying a snack in a store and then the store owner snatching it back and keeping the money.
Like I said, I think there should be consumer rights in place to protect the player against losing access to the game they paid for if they were abiding by the rules. I'd say that is a pretty reasonable expectation.
Edit: A more apt analogy would be that you go into a store, buy a snack, eat some of it and then begin pouring hot sauce on other peoples' snacks and yelling in their faces. You don't get to just happily stick around and keep enjoying your snack while you're completely ruining the snacks of others.
The list of "bad words" isn't listed for you, and the matching of bad words is not necessarily well tokenised.
You're not always sure what you've said or done, to be removed. And in some cases, they won't tell you what sin you have committed, either.
Legal protection sounds like it would actually benefit the cheaters given how long an average court case takes.
In my experience, private servers deal with cheaters and bots better than Activision/Blizzard
This would be Felony Contempt of Business Model[0], which would be enforced with every move in the legal playbook.
>Legal protection sounds like it would actually benefit the cheaters given how long an average court case takes.
I see the thought here, but it would do so by providing transparency to the license-revocation (banning) process, which greatly benefits customers who are getting screwed as hard as OP is. This in turn should lead to fewer cases of paying customers getting screwed.
>In my experience, private servers deal with cheaters and bots better than Activision/Blizzard
This is the case because they're moderated better. The companies are raking in cash. They can hire people to fix the problem. They don't because the current model maximizes profits.
[0]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/felony-contempt-busine...
"You want E2E encryption? Why are you sticking up for the terrorists and child porn rings?"
Terrible, terrible argument all around.
is totally different to:
> You're not always sure what you've said or done
Listing the "bad words" ahead of time (or even at all) is self-evidently not workable because people will just use different works to abuse/harass/bully people while evading the banned words list.
That said, it's important to tell the person after the fact "you're banned because you harassed / bullied someone" or "you were caught using anti-cheat software." Maybe some date ranges so the person understands what they did and why they won't be reinstated. BUT you don't need to list out the _exact things_ they did because you're just opening up the toddler argument of "why is that so wrong?" which is just bad actors trying to waste your time and "legalese" their way back into the system.
If the system matches on substrings, then you need to know what to avoid - you can't even self-censor, if everything is ambiguous. You end up with the memes of getting banned from Club Penguin, otherwise.
Except, Club Penguin does as you suggest - it tells you that you used a "rude or inappropriate word". Even if the regex is matching something that it shouldn't.
That's not the only thing you are doing. You are also creating an opportunity for false positives to justifiably challenge their bans.
If you are going to keep the user's money, I think you absolutely have to provide recourse for false positives because otherwise what you are doing is simply theft.
Tough: you have to stay ahead of the bullies if you want to get money for an online service. It's not in any way acceptable to ban people without telling them specifically what you are accusing them of, so that they can challenge you if you are in fact wrong. The fact that it makes the job harder is not in any way an excuse.
Now, if you were to return their money (or at least part of it based on how much time they actually played or something), then yes, you would have an argument that you have a right to unilaterally rescind the contract. But you can't keep the money and say "you know what you said".
So they can just re-buy the game under a new account and just carry on as before? Try this: go to a football match, shout racist abuse at a player then demand a refund for your season ticket. I know for a fact you won't get it.
> It's not in any way acceptable to ban people without telling them specifically what you are accusing them of
> "you know what you said"
Note that what I said wasn't "you know what you said" but "you violated these rules within these date ranges." For example:
* "You were detected using a cheat tool on 13th-15th November"
* "You harassed a player throughout March-August 2022"
* "You were repeatedly abusive in private chat in September 2022"
You're not being accused of murder in the Crown Court, you're being banned from interacting in a video game community. If you want access to the exact information, sue for it.
--- Caveat ---
Should you be banned from playing the game locally / single player? Absolutely not. This I would agree with you on.
Fairly soon you'll need to maintain a subscription just to play.
When it becomes the norm, it will replace purchasing a game at the store [this has already started to happen for PC]. We will no longer be able to play games except through platforms like Xbox Live or PS Plus.
This will eventually give companies like Microsoft and Sony complete control over their platform's IP. When it happens, we'll never be able to collect these games as part of nostalgia growing up playing these games.
Wait, you can be banned for being bad at the game?
As many times as I would love to see a ref be able to issue yellow cards for continued blatant offside calls against a player, they cannot be kicked out for breaking said rule.
I am thinking of an amateur tournament - I am quite certain a player who was blatantly acting against their own team would be kicked out by the organizers, even if they weren't explicitly breaking the rules of the game.
Refunding people who deserve to be banned would only encourage them to create new accounts and continue causing problems.
But whatever. Do they confiscate the season tickets you were using with no refund? What if they weren't yours? What if they were stolen? What if you know the coach? Can they not like your "offensive beard", take your season tickets and re-sell them? How about your date's utterly vile "Ross Perot was right!" shirt? Can they terms of service you out of the cash for next week? (Wouldn't surprise me on one hand how bad that could be but I somehow doubt it).
Kick them the hell out for being foul by all means, your house, your rules.
"And you take your damn money with you and not come back because I ain't no thief, even from scum like you, you vermin!"
That's irrelevant to the discussion. It's a thing that happens, people expect it and the only people who complain about being kicked out are... well being kicked out for being a horrible person.
> But whatever. Do they confiscate the season tickets you were using with no refund?
Absolutely, yes, they do.
On the other hand, they'll probably also tell you _why_ they're doing so. They also won't take your money for _future_ season tickets.
I can't simply start a fake theatre, sell tickets for $100 each, then turn away all ticket holders at the door even if legitimate theatres do have the right to (e.g.) turn away drunk patrons without breathalysing them.
Activision/Blizzard aren't courts of law, but they do represent to some degree a "controller of a market", they are absolutely shirking their responsibility here. Maybe after the SBF fiasco Govts outside China will finally start cracking down hard on all these illict online markets with zero rules.
Where that’s harder would be things like “our ML system thinks your input timing wasn’t humanly possible” and it’d be great if this forced companies to be more nuanced about how they handle things like that by doing things like requiring multiple independent checks.
But yes, people who are actually using cheats are manipulating/attacking the service they're using and deserve nothing from the companies who are trying to defend against it.
After months of playing MW and Black Ops, one day I queue up with friends and after waiting 5+ minutes no server would be found. We try over and over finally we realize its me.
Googling around shows that I am "Shadow Banned" and everyone is like "go away cheater" online.
I've been playing online games with an in game name that contains the word "Erotica" for a while now (4+ years) and have had zero issues.
Turns out the word "Erotica" is BANNED by Activision, and they synced their identity management with Blizzard it got flagged.
I found ONE random thread on Reddit where a guy ran into the same problem and gave a link to directly log into their system.
Once logged in I got "Your username contains adult content and must be changed".
After changing it, and waiting 3 days, it 'synced' and my account was unbanned.
The whole thing was absolutely stupid, I had paid $60 and could not play any of their games.
It pretty much ruined the game for me, I haven't given them a dollar since.
I have a growing enthusiasm for companies that consistently care for users, and conversely a callous distain for companies that don't.
In fact, I can't really think of many businesses where I feel appreciated or cared for as a customer, but the few that I can are all small businesses and most of them are local to me.
When people start demanding refunds or even start a class-action suit (especially if getting banned in multiplayer prevents you from playing single player missions), things will change.
You can thank a clever lawyer for thinking of mandatory arbitration clauses that are making class-actions a thing of the past.
Those "lawyers" aren't nearly as clever as they seem to think they are: https://www.cernovich.com/patreon-lawsuit-owen-benjamin/
I wouldn't assume that. Game companies are notorious for pinching pennies. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if these systems were outsourced completely.
It's not a bug that a filter caught names that the merged companies now collectively do not allow in their collectively owned games.
-
The only miss here is more of a UX issue: they handled username bans the same way they handled all bans, with a shadowban.
Shadowbans are great for most infractions since you burn some time of the offender before they start again and give them little information to find loopholes with... but for something rectifiable there should be a way to nudge and explain why they're banned.
You’re right, this was a support failure, but it was also a failure of the team(s) that performed the merge.
2. Why do you think that B/A haven't spent a lot of time thinking of scenarios like this?
I really enjoy Call of Duty. Got extremely good at it in high school, along with my group of friends. Since then, I've had to move away and CoD has kept us connected multiple times per week. It's been a very enjoyable game for well over a decade.
In the past few years, it's become extremely clear to me that something is seriously wrong with CoD - and perhaps Activision as a whole. I'm willing to explain much of it away as "it's hard to run a big game at scale", but some the bugs are just inexcusable. Activision offers little to no insight or recourse when things break.
I have 700 hours in MW2/WZ1. I can't even stand to play the new game. It's just too broken.
- Squad
- Escape from Tarkov
- Rising Storm 2: Vietnam
EFT requires a huge amount of free time, it feels like a day job. I would consider that before putting time on that game. Its nothing like COD.
Tarkov looks great, but you need to plan. You can't hop on after a long day of work and realize you're too tired to play a good match.
I highly recommend single player mods/server emulators for EFT like Altered Escape, its a nice break from going up against meta geared super competitive players.
Similarly for me cod has kept me connected with friends and family across the world as we travelled and went our own ways. But all of us have actually moved onto mw2 by now and are enjoying it a great deal. (We don’t play Warzone and only play s&d or prison rescue). There are bugs here and there but not too bad overall. We are a mix of PC and Xbox players.
I would still recommend giving the game a try in a few “seasons” as it will likely stabilize further.
I've been SUPER confused as to what this "Modern Warfare 2" is that people are talking about, because I played that in, well, 2009. At least they called it "II" instead of "2" (as if anyone will notice this difference)... >_>
Though, MW2 (og) is where I got hooked on cod.
It was a neat idea where the clan was the focus and less so the game.
The yearly release cycle, which may be ending soon, leads to bugs that re-emerge each year and features that appear and disappear. Sure, the different studios which produce the games need some room to innovate, but the inconsistent base set of features is incredibly frustrating. CoD games are one of the games I play the most, with the other being a game which is the complete opposite, Old School RuneScape, that has been built on for ~20 years.
I play the current game MWII with friends a few hours a day most days of the week. Multiple times per session my game crashes at random, something I can’t remember with any other major games with a top of the line PC. Like many other pieces of software, chasing other revenue sources seems to have made the quality of the product take a nose dive, with consequences yet to be seen. This is disappointing to me as someone who enjoys playing the game with friends, who has competed in open-bracket events at major tournaments over a span of a few years, and worked directly with the professional league and teams (CDL and CWL) for analytics and software.
This has nothing to do with cosmetics and everything to do with customer standards. We're living in an age where the average customer has absolutely zero standards for the products they purchase, they simply do not care if the game barely works and crashes every 10 minutes, they will happily enjoy it and praise it anyway because they probably do not have the intellectual capacity to notice or care.
The newest Pokemon game is a prime example of this, it has no cosmetics, no microtransactions, nothing, yet it's so much more of a technical trainwreck than any CoD game, you really have to play it to believe it. It costs $60 and looks and runs worse than many PS2 games, but it sold tens of millions anyway because the people buying it are effectively zombies that only exist to obey corporations and will happily consume whatever is sold to them no questions asked.
Elder Scrolls titles have been selling very well for a long time. I don't think this is new.
I hated the frame rate issues and various bugs I ran into. I considered requesting a refund (like I did do for similar reasons very quickly after buying Cyberpunk 2077). But before I knew it I was hours into the game. This is actually the first mainline Pokemon game in 15 years that I've played up through the Elite Four on. For me, the fun of the gameplay was enough to outweigh the negatives.
Also, don't forget that even back when games were significantly simpler they were still loaded with issues. The original Pokemon games are a good example here. They had many bugs, some of which were quickly found to be exploitable. To me that's another data point to indicate that issues with the game's coding don't necessarily make the game bad.
I am big on boycotting and generally have avoided Activision games because of how they have milked things in the past. I'm incredibly frustrated with the state of the game, and disappointed I got talked into buying it by my buddies. Even worse, they just stockholm it saying things like "they just released it, you have to give it time". What? We played Halo 2 and Modern Warfare 2 at launch for a week straight and the only issue I can remember is server instability which was transient. I'm so tired of this public beta workflow, which if you are pushing a game per year you end up getting what, 9 months of _actual_ gameplay, and thats assuming the game doesnt need app-level modifications (vs fixing actual bugs) to smooth out the experience.
So it's time to find a new game to play, I guess..
This allows me to
* issue a chargeback without worries
* sell the account when I'm done with the game
Just the same with Google devices. NEVER buy a Google Pixel on your own account, as issuing a chargeback will cause them to block your whole account.
A lot of the latest AAA games will only allow you to play multiplayer if your account ALSO has a verified phone number attached, and they only let you attach each number to a single account, plus they filter out phones which are not postpaid (so no using services like Twilio).
Is there some way they can check with the provider for a given number? Seems less than ideal from a privacy perspective.
Some people found themselves that they could no longer play the Overwatch franchise after having bought the $40 original game because of this. This was later rolled back and they allowed prepaid phones. So they can definitely distinguish them.
No. Overwatch 2 did this and rolled it back pretty much immediately. CS:GO and DOTA2 don't require it but it they gate competitive play behind it. That's not a lot of AAA games.
My Google account was banned years ago, “computer says no” - all of my attempts to appeal failed. I at no point broke their terms. Nobody cares, I lost all of my data.
I hope that a class action prevails against Activision. And I hope that across our industry consumers receive more robust rights. Not being able to reach a human at your company quickly escalates from a being cost optimization, to outright fraud.
What I can say is that a lot of people say they don't cheat but they actually cheat.
Only acceptable anti-cheat is the one with ZERO false positive.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ROBLOXBans/comments/vqw1sj/my_6_yea...
I created a Tell HN thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33861309
In a previous job I dealt with a police request for information after a pre-teenager child sent an email to their school principal saying there was a bomb in the school that would explode and kill everyome unless they were given some number of Robux so they could buy a hat or something for their character.
Roblox Studio has a toolbox of free community models. Malicious scripts are hidden in models. Kids import free models in their games and get banned for malicious scripts.
You should expect them to behave poorly, as they have a history of doing so. It's unfortunate, but you just have to give up on buying their games.
https://lifeasageek.github.io/papers/seonghyun-blackmirror.p...
https://web.cse.ohio-state.edu/~lin.3021/file/SYSTEX16.pdf
There's a reason pirate crews are hailed as heroes...and it's not the free software. Games legitimately work better when they are cracked almost 100% of the time.
And the reason for this is because multiplayer games are hard to maintain and without a profit motive it becomes long-term unviable.
I used to play a lot of a game called BZFlag, which was fully open-source etc, but it always struggled to keep up with any amount of advancement in the gaming world because it was entirely built by volunteers with limited time on their hands.
Eventually "players actually getting to do what they want with the software they paid for" somehow became a thing of the past, though I don't really know why. I mean, I can think of reasons, but most of those reasons suck.
- Making servers that are somewhat resilient to getting hacked is difficult enough if you control the servers and the code and no one can see it, but publicly available server binaries? There are more than enough eyeballs from cheaters, griefers and other abusers to discover exploits.
- If you offer server binaries to people and people get hacked by cheaters, griefers and other abusers as a result, they may hold you liable for damages
- Giving away server binaries also means giving away leverage and income. With UT99-2003-2004-3, everyone can simply set up servers and you as a publisher have no way of forcing people to pay up (or to take down central servers so that people are forced to buy the successor game).
- Giving away servers also means you give away a significant amount of brand control. Parents won't care that pedophiles or Nazis can target their children because some random server admin doesn't give a shit about moderating, they will associate it with your brand.
- In a related vein, modding is also in the crossfire. Just remember the GTA San Andreas Hot Coffee mod and the parental outrage over a decade ago - and today the influence of "concerned parents" groups has gotten even worse, not to mention legitimate concerns about people distributing pedophile or hate mods. As a publisher you can't really afford people replacing e.g. every opponent with the image of Black people.
In the end, most of the reasons boil down to people (and, at least for pedophilia and pornographic content, also governments) expecting game publishers to pick up the slack of educating people that it's not OK to distribute or spread such content, or that it's not OK to DDoS server admins because they decided to ban players for spreading hate content.
All of those old games were rated for teenagers or adults. Some of the worst actual threats to young children come from things like Roblox that give parents a false sense that the company is moderating the content effectively.
Unfortunately, most of the industry has chosen to support two bad models: either pure P2P or the uni-corporate-server-farm model. Neither of them really provide the best experience for consumers. While the distributed dedicated server model does have its own problems, it also has many advantages, including that of outsourcing server management to small businesses and hobbyists rather than absorbing all those costs to the software maintainer.
Ah yes, Argumentum ad Pearl Clutchum. It never fails.
This has been very much the norm from the nineties up until fairly recently. I spent my childhood and teens playing games over LAN or the Internet with self-hosted servers (Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Half-Life, GTA, Dungeon Siege, Red Alert, Warcraft 2, ...)
There are also many hosting companies that let you create and manage Minecraft servers via a web interface and take care of stuff like rotating backups so even the most incompetent users can self-host.
I think it was the xbox-ification of shooters that changed everything. 2009 or so, if I had to guess. MW2 was the first game that I remember really pushed company owned servers hard. Coincidentally this was also used to sell overpriced, often useless, DLC. At least back then the DLC was maps though.
It might be my age but I find it easier to remember games that DID have dedicated servers, rather than those that don't.
It was actually the norm in the 90s. Other comments have cited examples but it’s worth noting that consoles supported running local servers too.
What changed was subscription based online services and stupid loot (et al) boxes meant companies could extract a continuous stream of money from gamers without having to put out much, if any, additional content. So everything became online first.
Source: I ran several games servers in the 90s and early 00. (Still do in fact but only for Minecraft these days).
In fact I’d go further than that and say: to old timers like me, this practice of locking multiplayer games to the studios servers feels more like a recent trend than what used to be the norm.
There's a tested solution to these issues, and it's not "act as isolated consumers".
While I was initially excited about the release of the iPhone mini, I ended up not buying one because I had bad experiences in the past using apps that were clearly never tested on the smaller screen sizes, and I couldn't trust that it wouldn't happen again.
I appreciate this typo on a spiritual level.
I’m in my mid thirties, and I have career ambitions and hobbies and relationships that I want to nurture. While I would love something I can play and enjoy for 15-30 minutes every other day, I don’t have time for something that takes 5+ hours just to feel the slightest amount of reward. Cheats can take a game that’s designed to be grindy and addictive and instead make it something that can be enjoyed in smaller chunks.
An excellent example of this is Breath of the Wild. BotW requires a ton of slow terrain traversal (at least until you’ve unlocked more fast travel points, and even then the walking/gliding takes quite a while). Playing the game with a mod to enable 5x movement speed makes it a game that I can actually enjoy playing for 15 minutes at a time. Also, it takes something like 45-60 seconds for the game to reload when you die, so temporarily having an invincibility cheat on makes it feasible for me to figure out an enemy’s move set, whereas without I would either have to cheese the enemies or give up on the game entirely: what I’m not going to do is sit down with a hard cap of 15 minutes, die fifteen times, getting a total play time of maybe a minute of actual game play plus 14 minutes or so of loading screen, and then come back the next couple nights to do same thing over again.
A touch of cheats make modern games actually playable to someone who has a busy schedule, but still wants something to decompress with.
That said, I agree that anyone should be able to modify a local (that is, local coop/multiplayer or singleplayer) game's behavior to suit their needs.
You can save anywhere, so you can make sessions as short as you'd like anyway. There aren't even classic Zelda dungeons anymore! Just 5-10min challenges in the form of a shrine.
And the games tend to be structured by acts, so it's easy to play it for half an hour to an hour until an act is completed. Then it can sit for a day or two and then you continue through the next act.
Many roguelikes feel like they have a similar time structure in mind. Sigil of the Magi, Slay the Spire, Peglin and such have an hour run time generally and that's it. Game sizes like Witcher 3 have grown kind of disheartening to me, as much as I want to like it.
In a world where content is locked behind actual repetitive grinds of the same content for numbers to go up, this strikes me as a preposterous example.
I also can’t think of any game that asks for 5+ hours for any payoff for anything tbh.
MMOs are usually an example of this, where there is rarely any true fun to be had in the opening hours (where either gameplay is extremely slow, many people are zipping through power-levelling, etc.). They're hardly an example of a modern game though.
A good example is in comparing the newer Final Fantasy games with the older ones. In the older ones, it was 100% required to occasionally run around the map and just fight random encounters to level up and be able to face the next bit of the story. The newer ones eschew this completely, and some don't even have random encounters for most of the time. Save points were also placed such that you would often have to redo an entire gauntlet of fights if you failed once, which is a thing of the past as well.
Also, your example of BotW is not an example of what is normally called grinding. The exploration, the terrain traversal, is, to most people I've seen praise it, the core appeal of BotW, not some repetitive grind the games makes you go through to enjoy the good bits.
On the other hand, I'm not trying to say "you're playing the game wrong". I fully agree that we all have a right to "cheat" in single-player (or LAN) games to make them fit our preferences, regardless of the designer's intentions or the preferences of other gamers.
Yeah, I know why I don't buy anything from some of the major publishers anymore.
Some companies sell XP boosters and other P2W crap for even SP games nowadays.
[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/horse-armor
People gave up on software ownership when they stopped demanding the source code. The source code is the software, not the binary.
Games stopping to provide self-hosted servers is also what made LAN parties increasingly difficult. Having to rent game servers, provide decent bandwidth and not being able to run third party tools (for recording scores or set modifiers) made it impossible to use modern games in a 50 people LAN party with a low budget.
Generally speaking, if you are a suspected cheater, I can see why you would be barred from online-play.
There's always going to be false-positives though. How often that happens and what means of recourse one has (or should have) is IMO another discussion. And in this particular case, it seems Activision is doing pretty much all the wrong things(tm) though.
> even banned from the single player mode.
The fact that an account (and a server) is required to play a game you've bought in single-player mode is on another level outragious.
That itself should be illegal.
> Sorry, no refunds!
Again. Clearly this needs to be illegal.
If you take away a product you've allowed someone to "buy", then you've broken your end of the bargain.
Obviously doing it for no valid reason is a breach of contract, but I'm sure the legalese is pretty thick. No one "buys" anything obviously and the license agreement will clearly say you forfeit your license if you cheat. And here I'm pretty sure the legalese would say "Whether or not you actually cheated is up to us to decide so we define it as when our tools say you did".
So basically: you have a license, and that license is valid until their tools say it isn't.
Now, will such a license agreement hold up if tested legally? Maybe not. But it's likely what I clicked "Accept" on.
Some games managed to balance this quite well despite no self-hosted servers, for example BF4 which allows community managed "rented" servers.
But one thing to note though is that nearly all of them will very quickly adopt global blacklists with cheaters. So for a community BF server you'd hook your server to a global anti cheat database, and any bans from the server would end up on the global cheater blacklist. While the choice of using a global blacklist was of course up to the administrators, it wouldn't be very easy to find a server that didn't use this type of system if you happened to be blacklisted. So the community will invent exactly the same kind global bans that the game studio has. I never saw a problem with that (likely because I wasn't a false positive).
I really can't blame them entirely. Perhaps you could blame companies for not using a hybrid model where players can host privately plus maintaining their public servers.
Why? Because in a similar vein to how social media needs to be moderated to prevent the bad apples from spoiling the bunch, games now need to be moderated to maintain reputation among the community. If a player hearing about CSGO for the first time has no idea what they're getting into finds only a public server running 24/7 CS_OFFICE with Warcraft Mods they might get a bad impression of what the game is. Having consistency in user experience is highly important, and public servers being maintained and moderated by the developer is probably the most important part of that. What about all those servers that have massive latency issues? That's a bad look on the game because most players won't recognize community run servers are the reason the game behaves buggy.
Do I dislike it? Yes. I think it has created irreparable harm to the ability for gaming communities to build organically but so long as central hubs like Reddit or Discord continue to pop up I figure they've just offloaded the community aspect to external sources. Is that better? I'm not sure. Partially yes. Losing contact with a friend because they stopped logging into your preferred server isn't really a thing if you're Discord friends or Steam friends.
I suspect it's simply to control monetization and without the extra engineering cost of private server releases.
Because they allow it
And it was great part of their cs 1.6 succesa
I bet devs are scares that too many people would play private servers
And best of all: you can only get yourself banned from individual servers.
[1]: https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/minecraft-1-19-1-pre...
I’ve casually played this game quite a few times since release and not had any issue. Perhaps I’m too casual but I login, hope into a random quick match, shoot, die, repeat and turn off the console when I’m satisfied.
Activision has been criticized for its faulty anti-cheat software, which has resulted in permanent and unappealable account bans for players of its game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II. Affected players are unable to access the single-player game, even though they paid $70 or more for it. The bans come with no explanation or ability to communicate with Activision. The issue has been met with "shut up and go away, cheater" responses on social media, and attempts to raise awareness are being suppressed on forums. Players are organizing to file reports with the Better Business Bureau and the Federal Trade Commission.