ampersandrew

Having seat belts is objectively better than not having seat belts. It doesn’t mean that the way transportation is structured around cars in the US, for instance, is safe enough. Having kernel level anti-cheat may result in fewer cheaters or less obvious cheaters, but it doesn’t mean it’s worth giving that company such deep access to your computer, as the video shows.

There are plenty of ways to curb cheating. It still happens in fighting games too, but the way the genre works makes it far less prevalent. FPS games these days are largely designed around things that are hard for humans but easy for computers to do while looking like humans. Just spitballing, but if aiming was less of a concern, like it might be in the likes of old James Bond games or Metroid Prime, there are other ways to build competitive strategy around an FPS besides how well you can get your tiny crosshair to line up over a tiny target. Otherwise though, I’m with you on it being inevitable. There’s no way to truly stop it.

Cars are actually a great analogy here but probably not in the way that user intended. The way we use them and the scale at which we use them are inherently unsafe, but seat belts and air bags are an illusion sold to make us believe that we solved the problem as best we can, even though we didn’t.

From my experience with fighting games, people are also prone to mislabeling others as smurfs when they just know one or two more things about the game that give them an edge. I’ve observed replays in Street Fighter 6 that people claimed were smurfs, but they were absolutely playing at the level their rank said they were.

They’ve all got server side anti cheat too.

Fortunately, since it’s playable offline, it doesn’t seem to matter how many people will be playing in a month.

There are, but the incentives put in place by public companies tend to favor short-term results when they’re releasing quarterly earnings, something that some big investors have pushed back against for that very reason. Public investors may not be more corrupt either, but they may be less knowledgeable about the harm they’re doing when they make changes to the product to get more revenue, like that infamous investor call where someone suggested charging $1 to make Mario jump higher. Microtransactions are clearly a business model that customers are willing to pay for, so it makes sense that person would raise the question, but I doubt that guy plays Mario games in his spare time, because no one who does would suggest that.

Public shareholders are no more corrupt nor less moral than private shareholders, but all of their incentives and information end up being based on more short-term results. Valve is every bit as driven by money as any other company, but they’re thinking long-term, and they believe that there’s more money to be made long-term by treating customers better than their competitors do. That means they release open hardware that isn’t locked down, unlike what their competitors do. They want to mitigate business risk by decoupling PC gaming from a dependency on Microsoft, and all sorts of very capitalist entities mutually benefit from a healthy, usable Linux ecosystem that they can each make work for their own needs.

Well, you can stick to instances that federate with Threads even if/when they misbehave then, but having the option not to is pretty great, from my perspective.

I’m a Linux user. That “fragmentation” is probably a good reason for why that hasn’t been extinguished either. So as far as I can tell, yes, I’ll enjoy the resilience that that implies without fear of it being extinguished.

I always saw that as a feature, not a bug. The feature that prevents it from being the last E.

And we’re free to move to another instance that has the access, or lack thereof, that we want.

That’s not really an issue though; or at least, I’m not yet convinced it’s one. We’re here because we don’t want to have compatibility with Reddit, and I’m on Mastodon because I don’t want to have compatibility with Twitter.

But then if other instances don’t want those features, isn’t the worst that can happen that instances just de-federate from Threads? I know the history of EEE, but I don’t see how that can even work here.

PC gaming has only had a slow, steady rise since Steam entered the scene. But perhaps one other catalyst might have been the Games For Windows initiative (not “Live”) that standardized controller support, added some extra marketing oomph, and gave more incentive to make the same game on PC and console rather than making two entirely different games (sometimes with the same title, like Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter).

None of these solutions are lazy, and I promise you they have large server side components too. From what I can tell, shooters are just especially cursed when it comes to cheating, and there’s no real way to stop it.

As a co-op game, it used to not even have anti cheat, but then they decided to add leaderboards, and it hasn’t worked on Proton since.

The controller lag might just be a symptom of the same problem, but it’s strange regardless. Bummer. In my neck of the woods, Proton has been so good that I often find myself not even checking compatibility ratings before buying a game. I’m actually struggling to remember the last time that Proton failed me, since the things it struggles with these days, like certain kinds of anti-cheat or DRM, are the exact reasons I wouldn’t buy a game even if I was on Windows. Kubuntu/AMD, if you were curious.

Prior to Proton, it was a popular recommendation to use GPU passthrough to a virtual machine running Windows, with Linux as the host OS, but I never did it myself. Which games are your holdouts? Live service stuff with anti-cheat?

Rather than tinkering, I often just omit the games that don’t work well and buy AMD rather than Nvidia. I’ve got a Windows partition, but the last times I’ve booted into it were to update firmware on a fighting game controller and to play Dragon Ball FighterZ, which is basically the only game I have left in my library that I’ll play with friends and won’t work on Proton (online, anyway). Tinkering isn’t even a thing I’m thinking about one way or another, but the nagging and removal of control that Microsoft annoys me with is something I actively seek to avoid. Different stokes, I suppose.