>Moreover, I noticed that some merchants refuse my payment when I use e.g. Google Pay with my Amex instead of my MasterCard.
In my experience this is normally due to either how the card machine provider has set up the device or due to the lack of certification of the mobile wallet functionality on the "acquirer" backend ("host") that speaks to the card schemes.
It's annoyingly tricky to get the end-to-end transaction working properly across all schemes, all payment methods and devices. Different card schemes support different "payment kernel" parameters and have different certification requirements.
It could also be an attempt to save money on transaction fees, amex is generally significantly more expensive for merchants.
Historically, Amex always required a separate retailer relationship and to act as its own acquirer. I don't know how true that is any more. They've just always been the awkward one, with higher fees and special relationships. Also they used to use ANSI standards on some stuff where everyone else used ISO... but that's going back 20 years!
Yes, that is still true – AmEx own their own payment processing network, and they do not allow outsiders into it, even banks they have the brand sharing agreements with, hence a separate retailer relationship.
>Different card schemes support different "payment kernel" parameters and have different certification requirements.
Those certification requirements are one of the biggest hurdles because they can change quite often, and unless you are a high-volume gateway, there may be no leniency for you, making simply refusing the transactions cheaper than processing them and being fined.
The digital cryptogram requirements for visa caused some major engineering expenditures for a few payment processors I'm aware of.
When I briefly had my own store I blocked amex because of their ridiculous fees. And they are pretty merchant hostile re: chargebacks too. The overhead and headache wasn't worth dealing with them. That was a while ago so maybe they have improved, but I still occasionally run into places that don't take them so I guess not.
I think this bit in the baseline section applies to the Java one too
>Note that that’s a best-of-five measurement, so I’m allowing the file to be cached. Who knows whether Linux will allow all 13GB to be kept in disk cache, though presumably it does, because the first time it took closer to 6 seconds.
Yea, I assumed that. Which makes the parallel version improvements still interesting but surely it's very artificial. You can't processes all the data at the same time if you don't have it all yet.
I think that enforcing what you're suggesting is incredibly hard and I don't think can scale, it's what PCI-DSS and similar are meant to tackle, it really doesn't work in my experience.
This is a protocol/product problem, it's wild that to make a payment all the crown jewels need to be put on the wire. It's about time that payment devices and the whole ecosystem adopts some sensible cryptography that, at minimum allows signing payment requests, and ideally keeps its keys private.
Although this whole problem is kind of already solved by 3DS2, albeit not in a great way.
I think that there are very few tasks in competitive multiplayer games that humans perform better than machines[1], I don't think your statement holds true unless you exclude a huge amount of game genres or you take all the fun out of them. (E.g. no FPSs or ..FPSs with no aiming?)
[1] Unless we're talking about captcha solving competitions, for now, maybe. :)
You're right in that, if your server rejects inputs that are too fast, too precise, too robotic to be human, bots will emulate the top-playing humans ever more closely.
But the question I want to ask is: Is that a problem?
If all the bots and cheaters are playing indistinguishable from high-level real humans, where's the harm?
Or, to quote Westworld: If you can't tell the difference, does it matter?
> If you can't tell the difference, does it matter?
There is a difference in skill level distribution. If everyone playing at a highly skilled player level, then it's simply not fun and doesn't provide an opportunity to get better.
Anyways, playing with cheaters isn't fun and if you want to play without them then you need anti-cheat and/or game to not be free.
But not everyone is cheating. There will always be enough players that even if you just match players based on their skill level, you'll always have someone at your own level to play with.
In fact, I'd like to see the same bots developed by cheaters be used for NPCs as well.
I don't think it would be very hard to develop AI bots which can "see" through walls or one shot snipe you from 200 meters away while you're running. Why would anyone want that, though?
You missed 90% of my comment, and I'm not entirely sure why.
1. It's easily possible to limit cheaters to the same skill level as the top human players. Send no information to the client that they don't need, prevent super-human reaction times.
2. If all cheaters can do is play at the level of the top human players, matchmaking will automatically balance the game for you without requiring any further anticheat.
3. If cheaters have bots that play at the same level as the top human players, you could use the same bots as NPCs and have much better NPC teammates and enemies in singleplayer.
It's irrelevant. I play a lot of destiny 2 and the trials were extremely annoying before anti-cheat.
Imagine you're one win away from going flawless (7 consecutive wins) and some asshole jumps in the air and headshots your entire team in as fast as the gun allows it.
That's not fun. That means you have to start over. You get lucky if you only get cheater(s) in your first game, so there isn't any progress lost.
This resulted in a very shallow matchmaking pool with large skill gaps because casuals and mid-tiers didn't want to deal with this bullshit.
You're complaining about superhuman cheaters. Again, that's something that can be easily prevented.
And if the cheaters can't play any better than the top human players, there's no harm done. At that point it doesn't matter if it's a cheater that's breaking your streak or a top human player that's doing the same.
> Again, that's something that can be easily prevented
Yeah, with anti-cheat.
I think you have never seen destiny 2 PVP maps. They are small. The majority of times, you see the cheater and the cheater sees you. The difference, between cheaters and not-cheaters - you're dead by the time you ADS.
Uhm, yes, I think it is a problem because unfairly losing isn't as fun as fairly losing or fairly winning. Ignorance about the fairness of a game may work in a few instances but would not scale.
You don't have to reach pro levels, it often only takes small assists to turn a balanced game on its head, ruining someone's experience with a game. Repeat often enough and the userbase will leave, feeling cheated or at least demoralised for being unable to compete or improve.
And allowing machine-assists, thus leveling the playing field, turns the game into a completely different one that is (imho) drastically less fun whoever may not be interested in (or may be unable to) running/coding their bot.
Why would you be unable to compete? The matchmaking system will still put you against users on a similar level to yourself. Whether they're your level through cheats or natively doesn't matter.
A player playing cs go at 1280×720 at 30 ps on a ball mouse will always loose to one on playing at 2560×1440 240fps with a high-quality mouse.
Now there's one more dimension of unfairness. But who cares? You're still going to be winning ~51% of the time, that's why matchmaking systems exist.
> Now there's one more dimension of unfairness. But who cares? You're still going to be winning ~51% of the time, that's why matchmaking systems exist
No. That's not how it's going to work. You'll lose 100% games against cheaters Elo and then win 80% (or similar) against lower-level players you get matched against because your Elo goes down due to cheaters. Overall yeah, you might end up with a 50% win rate but that doesn't really matter.
Of course that would be more pronounced in RTS or other 1v1 or team games with small number of players (then again nobody would play them anymore because it would just be waste of time, when you're matched against a cheater because you'll be forced to waste X min before you figure that out).
You don't seem to understand the situation, and I'm unsure why.
If your anticheat prevents any superhuman reactions, you'll have cheaters that will be indistinguishable from the top human players.
How often do the top human players ruin your gameplay experience as an average player today?
Why would it be any different with cheaters indistinguishable from the top humans?
Matchmaking will just give cheaters a relatively high ELO so that the highest ranked matches will be cheaters playing against each other with a few of the top human players thrown into it, competing at the same level.
While for the average player, nothing will change.
Probably not worth anyone's time to remove ads but I can't convince myself that the premium subscription is worth buying, I feel like many are in a similar situation and struggle due to how addicting (and useful) the platform can be.
About two years ago, pre-adblocking crackdown, I was having a great time with YouTube and I considered buying the premium subscription because I really liked the product.
Then the number of ads and their frequency changed massively, ruining the whole experience for me, the premium subscription went from feeling like "something I want because of perceived value" to "something I now need because YouTube has been made unusable in an attempt to coerce me into paying".
I went from checking out the prices and planning the purchase to blocking the whole domain on my pihole for all devices except my workstation.
I was also very disappointed by the subscription model: no yearly plan, no way to bundle it with the Google One subscription that I already pay for, the price of a family plan Vs individual subscription is predatory and anti-consumer (325% higher per individual).
Was anyone here impacted by this and could kindly describe what they've experienced?
Was it just actually DNS resolution issues - meaning that stuff working with IP addresses was fine? Or was it just all unreachable and a black hole?
I would imagine DNS plays quite a key role in the internal operations of literally everything in a public cloud but I could be wrong.
In my experience this is normally due to either how the card machine provider has set up the device or due to the lack of certification of the mobile wallet functionality on the "acquirer" backend ("host") that speaks to the card schemes.
It's annoyingly tricky to get the end-to-end transaction working properly across all schemes, all payment methods and devices. Different card schemes support different "payment kernel" parameters and have different certification requirements.
It could also be an attempt to save money on transaction fees, amex is generally significantly more expensive for merchants.