This may be an interesting idea to pivot and apply as an assistive technology for users with disabilities, I'm not sure how many modern games are easily accessible to them.
Launch HN: Senpai.gg (YC S21) – Personal gaming coach for PC gamers
141–150 of 215 posts
Re: Launch HN: Senpai.gg (YC S21) – Personal gaming coach for PC gamers
#142I spent a year looking into how to build esports business and related technology. The real problem with apps like this is that your business is at the whim of another business to decide if you're within terms of service. This is what happened to Visor when they tried to do the same thing with Overwatch. Moreover, even if the business doesn't think it's hacking (or you don't say it's hacking) there's the community perception of whether it's hacking as well. If you don't have the support of top tier players, they'll significantly influence perception of your product. There will also be no brand loyalty. If you are suddenly banned and can't support Valorant tomorrow, your community won't drop Valorant. They'll drop your product.
However, even if you manage to navigate all of that...each game is bespoke. There's little synergy between games to be had, so to expand into a new game requires, more or less, working from scratch. You also need game expertise in the product team to know how to expand into said game. It doesn't scale.
Finally...what's the exit plan? Who wants to take on the liabilities of this business? Perhaps you could sell back to the game makers...but why would they buy? It would be cheaper and easier to integrate what you're doing themselves, because let's be honest...what you're making is omitted by choice by the game's dev team.
This makes for a good hack project, but there's really no business here, as much as I wish there could be.
Re: Launch HN: Senpai.gg (YC S21) – Personal gaming coach for PC gamers
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for sharing your opinions and we truly share your concerns about ethics. In our opinion, we're providing analytical support and assistance. We don't lead unfair advantage among gamers.
If you’re providing something in game, regardless of what it is, and not all players have equal access without external software too .. it’s an unfair advantage.
Just to play devil's advocate here what about somebody who has a superior DPI laser mouse versus somebody who has a standard rollerball mouse. What about people who use monitors with higher refresh rates like 144 Hertz, what about keyboards that have no ghosting and unlimited key rollover.
Do players who can afford these premium gaming and hardware devices have an unfair advantage?
Just to be clear I don't really have any skin in the game I don't play competitive multiplayer video games at all.
Re: Launch HN: Senpai.gg (YC S21) – Personal gaming coach for PC gamers
#144Do y'all have interest in fighting games, specifically SSBM?
Unfortunately, we don't plan to support fighting games in near future.
Re: Launch HN: Senpai.gg (YC S21) – Personal gaming coach for PC gamers
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea of: > For example, we have an "Early Ganker" tag for the gamers who tend to gang in the early game. [...] We provide these tags based on only publicly accessible data on the official game publisher API. For example, any gamer can search for the opponents’ game data and conduct a similar analysis. also seems questionable to me. Is it common/practical to do this kind of thing in these games? It seems to me tha…
As a League of Legends player, it's very common. Virtually everyone that I know that plays this game has some sort of overlay(LolWiz, Porofessor, Blitz.gg, etc.) that provides unimaginable level of detail about the enemy team and my team before the game even begins. I can find out what the enemy players like to do("invade", or initiate cheese fights early), roam to other lanes in the map, and more. I know what their…
Couldn't you look yourself up and adjust your playstyle accordingly? Like "oh, these guys will be expecting me to do X, but now I'm going to do Y instead to throw them off".
Re: Launch HN: Senpai.gg (YC S21) – Personal gaming coach for PC gamers
#146To get to be a good player in a game, you need to master the basic skills. In LoL this would've been laning (or jungling), CSing, team fights, 1v1s, having a clue what to build, warding. If you got good at these, you could get gold or plat. Past that, it's strategy and the small things, for which an AI will never help. There's too many things to keep track of, and AIs are simply not as good as humans at context and a…
> So in other words, a bad player will not improve as he doesn't need to train what the AI is trying to get him to, and a better player already has a better instinctual understanding than the AI This is what I realized when I tried to create a similar product. In my opinion there is no real audience for casual analytics products in gaming that are focused on improvement. If they're serious, they'll do their own analy…
I think there's some value in a product that lets you make data driven insights. My own analysis usually means VOD review, which is great, but if I had useful data to explore in a more unstructured way I suspect I could derive some value for myself.
But every product I see is hyper focused on doing the actual analysis for you in a way that is always overly simplistic and virtually never useful.
Re: Launch HN: Senpai.gg (YC S21) – Personal gaming coach for PC gamers
#147The current marketing pitch (a personal gaming -coach-) has nothing to do with the current functionality of e.g. voicing timers or providing notifications. That's more akin to a personal assistant. I would also say that what it's doing with Valorant is cheating. It's providing additional cues and advantages automatically, that other players have to keep tabs on manually. The other players have to risk glancing at the…
Thanks for your feedback. We understand your concern, but we do not share any information that is not available on your screen. In a sense, we provide an alternative interface so you can learn about the game dynamics to improve faster. All the features that we develop aims to accelerate the learning curve - so we do not share any information about your opponent, their location etc. that is not available to you while…
Providing an alternative interface is exactly why it sounds like cheating.
Re: Launch HN: Senpai.gg (YC S21) – Personal gaming coach for PC gamers
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So in other words, a bad player will not improve as he doesn't need to train what the AI is trying to get him to, and a better player already has a better instinctual understanding than the AI This is what I realized when I tried to create a similar product. In my opinion there is no real audience for casual analytics products in gaming that are focused on improvement. If they're serious, they'll do their own analy…
I think there's some value in a product that lets you make data driven insights. My own analysis usually means VOD review, which is great, but if I had useful data to explore in a more unstructured way I suspect I could derive some value for myself. But every product I see is hyper focused on doing the actual analysis for you in a way that is always overly simplistic and virtually never useful.
What do you consider "useful data"? Most of the time raw data is easily accessible on a lot of different websites.
The problem with augmenting the raw data in some way is that you have to make opinionated assumptions which won't necessarily be relevant to everyone.
Re: Launch HN: Senpai.gg (YC S21) – Personal gaming coach for PC gamers
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's clearly cheating. As you point out, the numerous disclaimers and reassurances should be all anyone needs to see to know that they know they're doing wrong. They're seem to think they're merely near to the edge of cheating but actually they're well over the line. In private matches, with friends, these cheats would be acceptable. But any time unsuspecting players are on the other end, using these should be a bann…
Thanks for sharing your opinions and we truly share your concerns about ethics. In our opinion, we're providing analytical support and assistance. We don't lead unfair advantage among gamers.
In your opinion, what would constitute unfair advantage?
Re: Launch HN: Senpai.gg (YC S21) – Personal gaming coach for PC gamers
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you’re providing something in game, regardless of what it is, and not all players have equal access without external software too .. it’s an unfair advantage.
Just to play devil's advocate here what about somebody who has a superior DPI laser mouse versus somebody who has a standard rollerball mouse. What about people who use monitors with higher refresh rates like 144 Hertz, what about keyboards that have no ghosting and unlimited key rollover. Do players who can afford these premium gaming and hardware devices have an unfair advantage? Just to be clear I don't really hav…
Cheating can be one of those "I know it when I see it" things that can require judgement from experts in difficult cases. Competitive chess players are the best ones to judge what constitutes cheating in chess, for example.
But what this startup is doing is the Wikipedia definition of cheating, with no reasonable room for debate:
Cheating in online games is the subversion of the rules or mechanics of online video games to gain an advantage over other players, generally with the use of third-party software.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheating_in_online_games
And it seems pretty obvious that they know what they're doing is wrong. They just seem to be very determined to try to push forward, and seem to think they have cleverly concealed their bad behavior, hence the cover story bs about "coaching" when they clearly know what anyone would actually use their software for.
I'd guess that they also rationalize selling cheats because others do it, which is obviously no ethical defense at all.
YC probably needs to be the ones to set them straight, since they are in a position to do so, and have explicitly made it a goal to avoid funding unethical startups.