It's not logging into a server (MMORPG-like) that kills it for me, it's the push to link the in-game identity with a real-life identifier. It's not (in an almost literal sense!) a game anymore at that point.
For the broad appeal bit, I was thinking tragedy of the commons. A critical mass of actors (good and bad alike) has got to be one of the main drivers behind such a decision. So I'm thinking the more popular a game gets, the higher the likelihood that drastic actions like this are taken, ostensibly to defend against some boogeyman or other.
I’m not sure what definition of game you’re using, where having to validate your account with a real life identifier (which feels vague, since basically every multiplayer platform already has accounts tied to email addresses, because of course they do) makes something “not a game anymore”. But that’s not the definition that I’m aware of in use anywhere else.
Email addresses aren't real-life identifiers, although they could be used that way. And on the inverse, I can buy a burner phone with cash and defeat Blizzard's requirement easily.
But it's pretty clear what Blizzard is going for here, since we know their platform is competitive and thus harsher on individuals viewed as bad actors. Blizzard knows full well that most people signing up to play only have one phone number, which is most certainly a real-life identifier for those players.
My point is that if players feel compelled to self-censor their interactions online for fear of repercussions[0], then they are not playing a game. They are instead representing themselves as individuals on a social network with competitive/gamified attributes. Requiring phone numbers to play is just a method to gently reinforce this.
To each their own - this might be exactly the type of game you like to play. But it departs pretty strongly from the classical definition of "video game" that I grew up with.
[0] For example, your primary phone number being disallowed access to all Blizzard services. Maybe they go even further and request that 3rd party services ban you for off-platform violations. Moved this down to a footnote so as not to spread FUD, I'm sure they don't currently do this, nor do I expect them to. But cross-referencing phone numbers would make it very easy to start.
Overwatch’s only social features are in-game voice/text chat, whose purpose is primarily coordinating with your team.
If this helps censor the people who are interrupting the game to shout racist insults or read their manifestos, that seems like a win for gaming to me.
Putting something in a footnote doesn’t make it it FUD, for what it’s worth.
Well, it isn't. What people are saying in chat has no bearing on the quality of the game. I'm not even playing devil's advocate like you are doing in this sub thread either, I literally could not care what people say in game chats. I take more issue to this obnoxious, cancerous, USA opinion that someone saying the N-word is the end of the world and requires me as an innocent bystander to bear the costs (such as having to use phone identification to play a game). You see the problem is not being racist itself, but the "solutions" you people propose.
This doesn’t seem coherent. The team voice chat is used by players coordinating to play the game. If somebody is shouting nonsense into their mic, they’re interfering with people playing the game, which makes the game less fun. If they’re shouting slurs at other players, they’re making the game less fun for those people. And blizzard wants the game to be fun, as do I.
Why are you arguing like a lawyer instead of coming up with a valid point for me to rebuke? Obviously I was referring to just the general notion of people saying racist stuff in chat. It's no the end of the world when that happens.
Saying that you find the game less enjoyable when people say racist shit just makes you sound like an annoying person.
The fact that you brought up racism and then used this strawman of "game being disrupted" is actually hilarious and shows what a thin spine you have.
My point feels pretty clear: Blizzard is doing this to raise the effort required for people to evade bans by making new accounts. People get banned for cheating, for being disruptive in chat, or for throwing games on purpose. I support this decision by Blizzard, because those things make the game less fun to play.
No straw men here, and racism is only in the thread because it’s a common example of people being disruptive in chat.
Well congratulations, you prevented 0.01% of "bad things". I've been gaming for 20 years on competitive FPS. Cheating is a tiny issue. 99% of cheating reports are bogus.
not true. cheating is a HUGE issue in competitive games. call of duty also requires you to validate your phone number and they have a kernel-level anti-cheat called ricochet. games like tarkov are swarmed with chinese cheat accounts and undetectable radar cheats. there are monthly cheat subscription services where you pay hundreds of dollars for access to sophisticated aimbots, etc. counter-strike employs sophisticated frame-by-frame anti-cheat heuristics analyzing shot and input patterns, they have a system in place where good actors can review cases of alleged cheating (called overwatch) AND they ALSO require you to validate your phone number if you want to play comp matches. games like r6 siege and apex legend employ similar systems. stop pretending “cheating is a tiny issue”. either you don’t play competitive games as you claim or you have no idea what you are talking about.
Cheating is a tiny issue as in, its still rare. It's more rare than bugs in your typical shoddy post-2000 game. Any competent gamedev can deter it easily. Since they are deterring it, its rare for you to encounter a cheater. Remember, we're primarily concerned about general games here, not specific high ranked matches. Those are the _only_ place that any sort of extra validation would even start to be acceptable.
All that matters for casual games is that the company actively does something to minimize cheating. Identity verification is not a way to do this as it is not an active measure. It just puts one hoop for people to jump through. More useful is to do typical statistical analysis as that will catch 99% of actual impactful cheating (subtle cheating doesn't matter much since the average player won't be able to tell the difference anyway) and rinse and repeat.
Nice job using in-kernel a/c to claim how advanced the problem is. When those came out 20 years ago, it was just a few small patches to bypass them. Even some of them were still only signature based so you could just change the signature of your cheat and bypass it. But I'll stop here since you don't seem to comprehend the concept of cat-and-mouse nor the fact that pursuing it to the end just makes the game unplayable for innocent players.
Yes, I know some games requires phone verification to play at all, and I'm against that. My initial reaction to this thread was "um we are just now caring about this? they're moving onto photo ID now, which creates real life fraud problems". Gee I can't wait until game devs start stealing my ID and the subsequent "fix" of using a trusted third party that's also abusive and blocks me from multiple games because they have monopoly, and has integration bugs causing the game not to work at all if I press the wrong button on their web page embedded into the game.
I mean the real-world social aspect of the game - from eSports tournaments to casual/competitive play. Even the conversation we're having now. How others interpret gaming as a whole. A social system is created where only certain kinds of behavior is acceptable, and disputes are arbitrated by the platform-holder. When those disputes are won or lost, the platform-holder presumably will attempt to take action against individuals - not IP addresses, emails, or usernames.
We've already established that it's not really a game (seems more like a sport), so whether it's a win for video gaming or not is irrelevant to my thinking, though I do tend to agree with regards to the actual in-game communication mechanics.
Footnotes are used to call attention to idiosyncrasies in written communication so I used one here, similar to how I described another sentence of mine as sarcastic in an earlier comment - just trying to be fair :)
> If this helps censor the people who are interrupting the game to shout racist insults or read their manifestos, that seems like a win for gaming to me.
To be hopefully crystal clear: Overwatch voice chat is a privately hosted service that’s built to be used by players during overwatch games. Blizzard moderates the content of that chat to remove disruptive content, where disruptive means “chat that makes people not enjoy playing overwatch”. In general, that’s people shouting slurs at their teammates or rambling about nonsense. Changes like the phone number requirement are part of their approach to expand the preemptive blocking of this activity. And I am fully in favor of them doing this, because it improves the quality of the game.
In the case of Apex Legends, I think the experientially high incidence of cheaters and persistently active cheat manufacturers (as well as almost-cheats like using mouse and keyboard on consoles for superior aim assist) are both a compliment to the game and a side effect of battle royales. Larger lobbies and survival of the fittest equates to a higher likelihood of encountering the cheaters that exist. Even if less than 1% of players cheat, it is quite possible to encounter one during an evening of play. And it sometimes seems like the cheating comes in waves, where a new one will be wildly popular for a while before the team in charge of it catches on.
All that is to say, additional identifiers might be against the hacker ethos, but hopefully not the gamer ethos.
I'm sorry but this doesn't make any sense to me. Doubly so when, in this case, the goal is to identify you as a person by the platform holder who needs to validate to the best of their ability that you're not a ban-evading cheater ruining other people's games. You are not personally identifying yourself to other players.
No, you have it exactly right. I posit that a service run by a platform-holder who has a legitimate need to validate players' identity in this manner, for these reasons, is not quite the same as the video games (even the multiplayer ones) which have existed up until now. They have built something very different. And it's great! I just think it's also important to discuss what it really is, why, and the current+future implications.
I feel there should be a new term to describe this type of game. Up until now "eSports" has been used but that seems passe. Metagame perhaps? Might have sounded dumb a few years ago, but there's strong precedent now :P
How about we just call it a game? It’s not clear why we’d need to find a new term because you have a nostalgia for games based on their login requirements.
For the broad appeal bit, I was thinking tragedy of the commons. A critical mass of actors (good and bad alike) has got to be one of the main drivers behind such a decision. So I'm thinking the more popular a game gets, the higher the likelihood that drastic actions like this are taken, ostensibly to defend against some boogeyman or other.