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Thank You, Valve

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Re: Thank You, Valve

#361

Post by dijit »

oehpr wrote: post #353
dijit wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment deserves a much more detailed response than I'm able to give at the moment, but I can give some very brief thoughts: Let me say that I have been working in AAA online game development for more than 7 years now; I have worked on games that had 10's of millions of players, and these were full fat $60 AAA games. Cheating was the second[0] biggest issue of our games, it sucked the entire enjoyment out- getti…

I would submit that this is more an issue of trust than it is an issue of forcing client machines into compliance. Because of the industries persistent belief that anti-cheat is somehow an effective strategy, let alone a morally acceptable one, has meant that development of systems that develop player trust in others has totally atrophied. This patterns of thinking "Well I'll just download a binary onto my clients ma…

Sure. But people want to run games on general purpose machines.

I’m not saying it’s impossible to cheat on consoles but it wasn’t a problem for us (lag switching aside; which was actually easy to detect).

Things like stadia help the platform more than consumers think; but people resoundedly rejected Stadia for a myriad of reasons.

I think everyone here paints a rosy picture of what content moderation is, and maybe we stretched our hand a bit thin regarding having enough humans involved (despite games taking 700-1400 people 4+ years to make in the first place)- but the rub is that people can’t have everything.

We can’t expect you not to try to tamper with the binaries and ruin games for others.

You can’t expect us not to try preventing it.

Because at the end of the day; people do submit reimbursement claims because of cheaters ruining their experience, and if there’s one thing that I can promise it’s that no amount of human review will ever be sufficient, we already put 70 or so humans on reviewing reports, and even then it was difficult to punish people, because if you ban someone they just buy another key from a Russian third market reseller for €3 (or if you make the game free god help you)

Re: Thank You, Valve

#362

Post by iamdbtoo »

ribit wrote: post #351
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Linux Desktop community has had 20 years to make Linux Desktop a reasonable, if not attractive, platform for gaming and game development and they have consistently and utterly failed at it. Valve did the only thing that was going to work.

That is true. Proton is a pragmatic solution. But it hardly a satisfactory solution, and I worry that it is not sustainable solution either. I do not really have a horse in the run personally, as I am not a Linux user (my platform of choice is macOS), but as a GPU programming enthusiast I dislike anything that gives Microsoft more power. And of course, let us not mistake Valve's intensions. They couldn't care less ab…

It doesn't have to be forever. The biggest problem with Linux gaming was simply the games you want to play don't run and the ones you did want to play the, makers had no incentive to distribute a linux build. This bridges that gap, removes a lot of friction for game makers to support linux and with the steam deck it could give them millions of new users to target. It's a massive step in the right direction, IMO.

While these moves are incredibly beneficial for Valve, I applaud them for doing it in a way that benefits the community as a whole and not just themselves.

Re: Thank You, Valve

#363

Post by skinkestek »

cinntaile wrote: post #354
skinkestek wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> OK, but Steam has a near-monopoly on games, Playstation, XBox and Nintendo all want a word with you first. After that Fortnite and PUBG developers are waiting. > Spotify has a near-monopoly on music, ITunes wants a word with you too it seems. > and both of these are working great for me as a consumer. Good. That is because both Valve and Spotify know how vulnerable they are. > Netflix had a monopoly, but now not, a…

I think he means Steam on PC.

It is still wrong.

Gog, Microsoft, probably Funcom and a number of others (I'm not into gaming, I'm just pointing out he was extremely wrong, so wrong even I could see it. Or there is some missing context that I failed to see despite trying twice now in which case a clarification might be needed.)

Edit: Blizzard and Activision publishes outside of Steam (too)? (I don't know if the publish on Steam.)

Re: Thank You, Valve

#364

Post by patrickk »

riidom wrote: post #12

I feel like I am in a "late-game" stage of gaming. I have sort of an overview of what is going on, but a major percentage of games simply look not interesting (anymore) to me. The collection of games I end up playing is somewhere between special and weird, I'd say. And, to get back to the topic, for people in a comparable situation like me, Linux is a great alternative. So if hear or read other people comparing pros…

> I feel like I am in a "late-game" stage of gaming. I have sort of an overview of what is going on, but a major percentage of games simply look not interesting (anymore) to me.

I feel similar. I usually play slightly older AAA games with the bugs ironed out, indie or AA, or games 5-20 years old based on the amount of interesting looking mods available. Reliving games from your childhood with quality of life improvements, new game modes, campaigns and better graphics is a blast. Browsing the most modded games on ModsDB or NexusMods is great for inspiration. /r/patientgamers is good too.

So many AAA developers and publishers are pushing out nonstop cash grabs with no respect for players, especially with sequels in previously beloved franchises. EA, Rockstar, Ubisoft etc are all at it. It was inevitable when gaming became so mainstream and more profitable than Hollywood.

Re: Thank You, Valve

#365

Post by kbenson »

charcircuit wrote: post #155
scrollaway wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incorrect, there’s lots of cheats that are completely seamless and just improve your performance without being a completely binary “perfect headshot” vs “always miss” or something. I guess your last encounter with aimbots was in the early 00s…

If other players can't tell someone is cheating then it's not actually a problem since everyone will feel the game was fair.

The area between thinking others are "absolutely not cheating" and "definitely cheating" is huge, and where most online gamers end up spending their time. Absolutely cheating is not a problem, because most games allow you to report people, and they'll get enough reports and be banned shortly. Not being able to tell is the problem, because you feel something was unfair (which you might also feel when it actually is fair), but you feel it more often and it leads to poor experiences and people quitting the game.

Cheaters quit after a while because the game loses its challenge, and people being cheated leave because the game.feela unfair, and eventually there's not much of a community left.

Re: Thank You, Valve

#366

Post by dijit »

foxfluff wrote: post #272
dijit wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment deserves a much more detailed response than I'm able to give at the moment, but I can give some very brief thoughts: Let me say that I have been working in AAA online game development for more than 7 years now; I have worked on games that had 10's of millions of players, and these were full fat $60 AAA games. Cheating was the second[0] biggest issue of our games, it sucked the entire enjoyment out- getti…

I've had good experience in games with human moderation and recorded demos that you can play back to catch and report cheaters. After building some reputation and trust in the community, you'd be permitted to join a server with fewer random new users and practically no cheaters (and usually far more skilled players). No need for intrusive anti-cheat solutions (that IME just gave legit users trouble and still failed t…

We did record demos and play them back, but cheaters are intelligent and will do things like change their ID after a game. They use IDs like “iIiiIiliiiiIii1” too, which means getting your report from someone who just takes a screenshot and doesn’t use the in-game report is just noise.

Cheaters also do things like buy CD codes/stolen accounts which are sold cheaply on various websites.

It also doesn’t help when there are promotional campaigns that let people play the game for free or very cheaply.

We even had a problem with people buying the game with stolen credit cards.

Regardless of that, human moderation efforts are a full time job, personally I’d be happy to release the server, but the server requires 40 cores and 256G of ram to boot, many people don’t have that, and that’s not including the kinds of nefarious things people did with the binaries of other games gameservers we gave out (like saving garbage back to our persistence, or trying to inject statistics to the leaderboards systems if there are any.)

It sounds easy from the outside; if you think it’s easy I really do have a job for you. Maybe I’m stupid.

But I was not told (for business reasons anyway) to hold on to the game server binaries.

We did it because making the game was easier/possible that way and the gameserver itself is nearly impossible to load for most people anyway.

I promise you that it is not cheap to host gameservers — if we could we would have pushed that burden onto players. (Speaking purely economically)

Re: Thank You, Valve

#367

Post by deltaonefour »

Keep in mind valve is a business first. There interest is profitability. Its just that the direction of their interest happens to align with Linux. This is good, but if at some point in time it doesn't align, don't be surprised.

Re: Thank You, Valve

#368

Post by ikurei »

busterarm wrote: post #82
dagw wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I played competitive video games seriously I would absolutely want them to take cheating seriously and take any necessary measure to stop it. At the same time I think they should also make the most serious kernel/driver level anti-cheat software optional. If you don't to want to install it you can still play the game, just not on any of the 'pro' servers. Think of it a bit like doping tests in sports. As long as y…

The serious cheats in competitive games these days don't rely on hacking the game anymore. They use a separate computer connected taking your HDMI out as an input and then controls your mouse and keyboard inputs. They use ML models and OpenCV. You watch the second computer's monitor and it draws huge boxes around things you shoot and it assists your aim. It doesn't even have to be a PC game, you can do the same with…

And aren't the existing anti-cheat technologies the reason that cheats take that form?

You see no cheap aimbots and conclude the anti-cheat is not relevant anymore. May be the right conclusion is that they're working.

Not saying this justifies the kernel drivers. I don't trust my gaming computer precisely for this reason. I wonder if some form of containerization/virtual machine could make it possible to both allow for this kind of kernel-level anti-cheat without exposing my whole system to untrusted code.

Re: Thank You, Valve

#369

Post by nerdponx »

webkike wrote: post #329
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Oh please. Any time a company does something good. "Let's not kid ourselves. It's all for the money, honey!" I didn't say that I'm not happy for what Valve is doing, but I don't trust any billion dollar tech megacorp like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Nintendo, Valve, etc. to have the best interest of the consumer in mind, regardless of how fun their IP is for my entertainment. Pro-consumer actions on their end are alwa…

I wouldn’t exactly consider valve a billion dollar mega corp. For one, they aren’t public and therefore aren’t beholden to the whims of share holders.

They are still beholden to the whims of those who stand to benefit the most from the company making a profit, even if they aren't "shareholders" as such.

Re: Thank You, Valve

#370

Post by nerdponx »

danuker wrote: post #61
robertlagrant wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and we're not their friends. We'll go elsewhere as soon as we see a better deal. So what?

There is no elsewhere, when you consider network effects. The largest platform has the most to gain, when it makes use of social interaction.

Consider also that Steam is the only place to go for Valve games like CS:GO and Dota 2.
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