Replacing the terminology is the first step to this methinks. You'll always be able to buy a bagel, but not a video game. It's still shitty, but it's not deceptively shitty.
That is quite literally illegal where I live. Any annex to the contract (including base salary changes) must be _voluntarily_ signed by the employee. Forcing signing is illegal.
When covid started, my company gave all employees annexes to reduce our pay by 20%, but keep our workload the same. I told 2 bosses, the HR employee and the director of HR mobbing me I will not sign and to piss off. I was the only one to do so out of ~150 employees. I kept my full salary until I quit my job because I don't like working for cunts.
Some of the Rayman games will allow you to control a silhouette of the character while loading. You can just run around a bit and attack, nothing major, but it's something to do.
It's been recommending that movie to me, and it looks excellent, but I know if I watch it it's gonna end up with me throwing the TV out the window out of rage.
I know it's just a figure of speech, but I'd also like to add a reminder if someone needs to see it: channeling that same rage into investing time and effort into making a change is the very reason why such an enraging show is made and why it should be watched. Just raging into the wind is pointless, specially after choosing not to invest anything into making a change
Gamers arent demanding this. There are tons of ways to detect cheaters, the most effective one being human moderation. But no, companies wont do MaNuAl WoRk because it doesnt sCaLe, even though they have more than enough cash in the bank.
This absolutely happens already. The problem with finding statistical outliers is that plenty of legitimate players are outliers too. And if you're banning/segregating players for being outliers, you get a very angry player base.
Riot has a pretty indepth blogpost about their anti-cheat systems, they've had years to mature them on some of the most demanding competitive gaming platforms ever made. Requiring players install kernel anti-cheat was very far down the list of possible solutions, but that's what it came to. It was either this or stop being free to play.
The server is all-seeing, if there is no way for the server to discriminate cheater from other player, then no player can possibly know there a cheater on the server, thus cannot complain about cheating is either irrational or the server-side detection is severely flawed.
> The server is all-seeing, if there is no way for the server to discriminate cheater from other player, then no player can possibly know there a cheater on the server, thus cannot complain about cheating is either irrational or the server-side detection is severely flawed.
It's impossible to tell in-game if a baseball player is using steroids, yet there's a laundry list of banned substances and players who got banned for taking them because the MLB believes it gives them an unfair advantage. It's called competitive integrity.
Since it sounds like you don't play games, at least not competitively, I'll clarify that "cheating" in this case isn't the obvious stuff like "my gun does 100x damage" or "I move around at 100mph" or "I'm using custom player models with big spikes so I know everyone's location" that you would've seen on public Counter-Strike 1.6 servers in 2002. Cheating is aim assistance that nudges your cursor to compensate for spray patterns in CS, it's automatic DPs and throw breaks in Street Fighter 6 that are just at the threshold of human reaction timing, it's firing off skillshots in League of Legends with an overlay that says if it's going to kill the enemy player or not. All of this stuff is doable by a sufficiently skilled/lucky human, but not with the level of consistency you get from cheating.
> It's impossible to tell in-game if a baseball player is using steroids, yet there's a laundry list of banned substances and players who got banned for taking them because the MLB believes it gives them an unfair advantage. It's called competitive integrity.
This is relative to meat-space, not videogame, but we could go there and say caffeine or Adderall use is cheating, thus making anti-cheat a little more invasive…
And there another difference, you're referring to professional sport. I have no problem with invasive anti-cheat for professional gamer, even better it the gaming device is provided by tournament organization.
But we're talking about anti-cheat used for all players, akin to asking people playing catch in their garden or playing baseball for fun an the local park to take a blood sample for drug test.
> All of this stuff is doable by a sufficiently skilled/lucky human, but not with the level of consistency you get from cheating.
That's the point, there no difference for the other players between playing against a cheater and playing against a better player. Any ELO-based matchmaking will solve this, cheater will end-up playing against each-other or against very skilled player.
You could argue that they could create new account or purposely cripple their ELO ratting, but this is the exact same problem as smurfing.
Many games have ranked ladders now which are taken fairly seriously. Success at high levels of ladder player often translates into career opportunities, especially in League of Legends.
> Any ELO-based matchmaking will solve this, cheater will end-up playing against each-other or against very skilled player.
Well, first, you're wrong, because cheating only makes them good at one part of the game, not every part of the game. e.g. in League of Legends, a scripting Xerath or Karthus who hits every skillshot is going to win laning phase hard. However, scripting isn't going to help if they have bad macro and end up caught out in the middle of the game, causing their team to lose. Most cheaters don't end up at the top of the ladder, they end up firmly in the upper-middle.
Secondly, you're basically saying "cheating is OK because they'll end up at the top of the ladder." You don't realize how ridiculous this sounds?
Third, ranked and competition aside, playing against someone who's cheating isn't fun, even if you end up winning because they make mistakes that their cheats can't help them with.
You don't play competitive games, that's fine, but a lot of people do and they demand more competitive integrity than casual players.
> You don't play competitive games, that's fine, but a lot of people do and they demand more competitive integrity than casual players.
Little difference : I don't play competitive game with completes strangers on company run servers.
I've played competitively on community based server, with people being screened by other players and the community able to regulate itself (ban or unban players).
The problem space is vastly different, you don't need intrusive ring 0 anti-cheat for this.
The whole kernel-level anticheat stuff is a poor solution to a self-made problem by the developer : they wanted to be the one in charge of the game and servers, so they needed to slash human moderation need. They also wanted to create a unique pool of player and didn't want the community to split between itself and play how they want.
> Little difference : I don't play competitive game with completes strangers on company run servers.
People don't consider playing around with your friends to be competitive. You don't get to choose who else is competing in the game or what strategies they use. This is just an area that you are clearly not familiar with.
> The whole kernel-level anticheat stuff is a poor solution to a self-made problem by the developer : they wanted to be the one in charge of the game and servers, so they needed to slash human moderation need. They also wanted to create a unique pool of player and didn't want the community to split between itself and play how they want.
This wasn't self-made by the developer, it was demanded by the players. Competitive games have almost exclusively moved to online, skill-based matchmaking with a ladder system because that's what players want.
> People don't consider playing around with your friends to be competitive.
I didn't say friends. Please don't modify my argument to refute it.
> You don't get to choose who else is competing in the game or what strategies they use.
I, as a single player, no, but us, as a community, yes, and it's the same for any game or sport, different group run different tournament with different rules about who play and how.
> This is just an area that you are clearly not familiar with.
Please refrain to use ad hominem, especially when you have no idea who you are talking with.
> This wasn't self-made by the developer, it was demanded by the players.
I don't know any players who asked for the disappearance of community run server or human moderation, neither that wanted do lose agency on the way they play.
I don't they these players doesn't exist, but I don't make gross generality about players.
> Competitive games have almost exclusively moved to online, skill-based matchmaking with a ladder system because that's what players want.
They're not a hive mind, lots of them didn't or doesn't like matchmaking in any form, and even for the ones that wanted it, that doesn't mean developers have to remove other mean of play, like server browser and private server.
You're basically ignoring the past 30+ years of the gaming and cheating industry. Everybody already does log behaviour, try to find outliers, and have some systems to try to keep cheaters outside from the general player pool. That's what gaming companies have been doing since at least the early Halo days. That has its own set of side effects, such as creating a horrible experience for the most talented and active players — also the ones most likely to stream and advocate for your game, to produce youtube videos to complain about bad experience, and to have a very influential profile in the community.
The state of game cheating has professionalized A LOT, it is extremely competitive and cheating companies produce extremely good quality tools compared to what we had 20 years ago. There is a lot of money to be made, we are at the point where you can just pay a cheap monthly subscription and you get access to actively maintained cheating tools. I know people working on the anti-cheat side, it is a really messy, highly dynamic (the bad actors are constantly adapting), complicated problem that isn't solved once and for all. We are far from the situation where just a few people are using some hacked-together software that will obviously be spotted as cheaters.
Game dev companies (at least US/European ones) have zero interest in developing or paying for kernel-level anti-cheat. That's a massive barrier of entry for the player base and they know this. It's also far from being cheap.
(Note: ignoring geopolitical factors, Chinese companies such as Tencent or Russian companies could definitely have interests in developing kernel-level anti-cheat for information gathering)
While there are solutions, I won't comment on Valorant - free to play games are a whole can of worms the companies have nobody but themselves to blame.
I will comment on a game I used to play though: Escape from Tarkov. The game costs somewhere between 40$ and 250$+tax, depending on what pack you buy. Banning cheaters for this game is literally a profit center. Every time you ban a cheater and they re-buy the game, you made at least 40$. The majority of cheating in the game was due to real money trading - cheaters would make in-game millions quickly, sell them, get banned, buy the game again at a profit.
The solution to this is brain-dead simple - more manual moderation (these cheaters are very obvious to spot). What the developers did instead just killed the game.
The market going belly up with prices falling off a cliff would be just about the best thing to happen to young families in the last decade, financially.
Free-form text like Reddit posts contains a whole load of PII. Since there is absolutely no regard for what goes into a LLM, naturally, they also contain this PII.
Captcha is nothing like a lock. It's a little guy that gives you a run around before you get to insert your key. It does very little to stop the bad actors (if there's a payday at the other end of the runaround, they'll do it), but annoys (and is a slap in the face for) every single legitimate user.
It takes a script kiddy considerably more effort to circumvent a captcha than just automating a site via curl or chromium. This difference is the increase in cost of an attack. This is the security gain.
And then google changes something in the Captcha code and it stops working, then you change solve libraries and then you get it back up but need more complex hosting infra because solves take 10 seconds and you have to simulate human behaviour, then that goes down, then you have to use some new solve service which is a paid API, and then your VM is detected by Google as a bot and suddenly you are blocked across all websites using Recaptcha, so then you have to rebuild your infra...
It's now so trivial to solve them, and extremely cheap. You can install a chrome extension, give some solving service a $1 and basically never need to reload.
Not only that, but adding insult to injury - the whole captcha process is being abused by Google for their surveillance capitalism.
Just load a captcha-blocked page in a fresh browser with no google accounts every being used - you got like a 1% chance of getting through. Login to google, and BOOM you're in.
"In terms of cost, we estimate that – during over 13 years of its
deployment – 819 million hours of human time has been spent on
reCAPTCHA, which corresponds to at least $6.1 billion USD in
wages. Traffic resulting from reCAPTCHA consumed 134 Petabytes
of bandwidth, which translates into about 7.5 million kWhs of
energy, corresponding to 7.5 million pounds of CO2. In addition,
Google has potentially profited $888 billion USD from cookies and
$8.75-32.3 billion USD per each sale of their total labeled data set."
You could make the exact same argument about locks (which are trivially defeated) - add up all the time that people spend unlocking doors and I'm sure you'd end up with a huge amount of time; add up all the money that people spend on locks and keys and I'm sure you'd end up with a huge amount of money. Should we logically conclude that locks are just a giant grift by Big Key? I'm sympathetic to the ickiness of captchas, but the paper never addresses the counterfactual of what might happen if there were no captchas at all.
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