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Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

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Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#971

If you've got an automated vetting process with a 99.999% success rate, but are dealing with billions of accounts, that's still tens of thousands of false positives. At that level, "percentage" is an insufficient measure. You want "permillionage", or maybe more colloquially "DPM" for "Defects Per Million" or even "DPB". You'll still get false positives though, so you provide an appeal process. But what's to prevent t…

> Can you build any vetting process,

Yes, it's pretty simple. Create and enforce some consumer protection laws which require, for example, that any company larger than a certain size is required to establish support offices staffed by humans in every major town. And required to resolve every issue within X days either by fixing the problem or clearly documenting why not. If not, no arbitration allowed, so they are subject to lawsuits if the reason doesn't hold scrutiny.

Problem solved. Companies like goog, facebook et.al. can easily afford this and it'll stop this ridiculous behavior.

It also to some extent protects the companies. Spambots who create a million accounts can't replicate a million humans to show up at the support office, so it establishes a human:human relationship that's completely missing today.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#972
post #854
post #528

I feel like Google is a case study in an engineering only company. Everything is reduced to a technical problem. Incentives are aligned to solve technical problems. No one wants to work on something unless it is technically interesting and new. There is no incentive at all for delivering an excellent user experience over the long term - which usually can't be done with tech only, and involves a lot of dredge work of…

I wonder if it's the lack of a single founder? Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk - founders at the top who owned it. More directly, Gabe Newell and Valve. It might be that google started with Page/Brin and co-ownership might have weakened that a bit, and now they are not to be found. Not that a single founder is a surefire recipe.

Paul Allen, Steve Wozniak, "Paypal Mafia", For valve Mike Harrington would like to have a word with you.

Bill, Steve, Elon, Gabe, were never alone masterminds and definitely not single founders because in companies they created there always was someone else who had shares.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#973
post #528

I feel like Google is a case study in an engineering only company. Everything is reduced to a technical problem. Incentives are aligned to solve technical problems. No one wants to work on something unless it is technically interesting and new. There is no incentive at all for delivering an excellent user experience over the long term - which usually can't be done with tech only, and involves a lot of dredge work of…

Sort of, but it's really a goog HR problem.

That you can only be promoted by creating new things (even if entirely useless) and not by maintaining and supporting existing things (that customers actually want) is an HR problem.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#974
post #668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always afraid this will happen when I use a VPN or TOR. The internet in general is pretty hostile to any sort of privacy protecting measures, which they justify by saying your activity looks "suspicious". I've already been locked out of my Facebook account once because I forgot to turn my VPN off. The last time I used TOR it was almost impossible to do anything on the internet. Every Google search was met with "W…

Unfortunately, enabling TOR basically makes your traffic "malicious-shaped" these days. One of the largest users of privacy services are users (bot or human) who don't want their traffic easily traced because they're doing something malicious. It's definitely not the only use case for such services, but if a service provider sees that 90% of traffic shaped a certain way is malicious traffic, it's understandable they…

Interesting article, thanks, and especially at the end of the article:

> (Some cloudflare people) have proposed a solution to the Tor Project that moves part of the process of distinguishing between automated and human traffic to the Tor browser itself. The Tor browser could allow users to do a sort of proof-of-work problem and then send a cryptographically secure but anonymous token to services like CloudFlare in order to verify that the request is not coming from an automated system.

> By moving the proof-of-work test to the client side, the Tor browser could send confirmation to every site visited so that users wouldn’t be asked to prove they are human repeatedly

(+ Link to the suggestion)

The onion site Https cert idea is also interesting

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#975

Google needs a read only account mode that can be used instead of disabling/deleting accounts. Even if a user violated ToS, its pretty harmless to just let them export data which at least would mitigate the worse parts of this & free up energy from data recovery to time spend getting the account unlocked. I mean what's the harm if a bot has a read only account? Or an account than can send 1 email per hour - just enou…

Or if you could only email those who have emailed you already, or replied to you

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#976
post #932

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, the answer is to charge people a fee, in order to appeal a ban. A fee that covers the cost of investigating the incident, making it revenue-neutral. This way, Google would have every incentive to investigate thoroughly all appeals, including repeated appeals by the same person. From the user's perspective, it's still a pretty good deal. There's a 99.999% chance that you get to use gmail/youtube/etc for free…

Google One, which costs 2$ a month, as far as I can tell provides you with some level of support, which is definitely more than zero.

Do you even have access to your Google One support if your Google account is banned?

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#977

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The narrow "want to play games on my mac" problem could be solved if game developers chose to build the game cross-platform from the start and release a mac build. Many games are already cross-platform, as they run on both Windows and consoles. The fact that so many game companies don't even bother with a mac build shows they don't want to solve this for whatever reason (probably mac just not profitable enough). If a…

Because macs are terrible platforms for games. They have been very low end for a long time (m1 notwithstanding), and they have been killing off opengl, the only cross platform rendering API (before vulkan, which they don't support). Also their insistence on breaking changes means your back catalog needs constant maintenance. That's normal for app developers, but not gamedev. Oh, and if you do make the port, they will…

Maybe MacOS isn't a good push for gaming for either developers or Apple. I definitely think iOS is. The Apple Arcade Subscription plan seems to be part of that for gaming. I've seen a lot of people on the subway and even at work sometimes playing mobile games on their iOS device, from Call of Duty Mobile to racing games to tower defense.

I imagine when Apple expands their desktop and laptop lineup to M1 chips, it's going to include many of the games that are available from their mobile catalog.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#978
post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, in practice you always have to rely on someone. Even before the internet you'd have to rely on the USPS to carry your letters. Unless you are physically speaking to someone in person, then there is always a middleman.

Well you can always just create your own courier. If you want true free speech these days you need to build your own stack from the ground up anyway.

You start by creating the universe...

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#979
post #730

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's impossible that streamed games will find a market, but I think there are several hurdles that (unsurprisingly) weren't apparent to a company with no experience in the industry: 1) PC gamers tend to revel in owning (building, customizing, optimizing) their hardware; not just because it lets them play the games they want to play, but even for its own sake. RGB arrays, overclocking, custom case builds…

One quick nitpick: The latency in streaming isn't as bad as you'd think Most AAA games already have 200+ ms delays between pressing a button and anything happening on-screen. So there's plenty of room to redesign things to work around that latency in a lot of games (This obviously doesn't apply to high-end play on twitch shooters or fighting games though, those are pretty much screwed when it comes to streaming)

> So there's plenty of room to redesign things to work around that latency in a lot of games

This is one of the worst parts of game Streaming - games potentially being designed around it, making them worse for everyone else.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#980
post #932

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, the answer is to charge people a fee, in order to appeal a ban. A fee that covers the cost of investigating the incident, making it revenue-neutral. This way, Google would have every incentive to investigate thoroughly all appeals, including repeated appeals by the same person. From the user's perspective, it's still a pretty good deal. There's a 99.999% chance that you get to use gmail/youtube/etc for free…

So now banning people incorrectly is a revenue generator? The answer is to force google to be open and more transparent through regulations and have to scale up to deal with it and eat into their profits. The assumption up front should not be that we need to care about protecting their profits.

> So now banning people incorrectly is a revenue generator?

It need not be, as long as the fee is less than the cost. It could be symbolic (say $1). But the problem is that it would be seen as a revenue generator whether it is or not.

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