THAT actually probably was a translation error (unlike “oh, he is not a disgusting misogynistic piece of shit. You are just racist and so is google translate”).

Swen’s speech was (paraphrasing) about how an oracle told him that the future GOTYs will all be games made because they are games the studios wanted to make and were allowed to make without fear of layoffs (which is why it was ironic that a studio that came out of Sony gutting Team Japan won…).

But a lot of chuds and CCP mouthpieces keyed in on the “An oracle told me” narrative framing as an indication that it was all rigged. In large part because they are fucking morons who don’t realize they were voting on a different category when they rushed that vote harder than a gamefaqs poll with Aeris in it.

And Swen is head (?) of Larian who made Baldurs Gate 3.

Also: BG3 is, in scientific terms, gay as all fuck. So the chuds who were already focusing on BMWukong because “it understand that women should be sexy” and whatever other “anti-DEI” bullshit they are radicalizing people with, saw an opportunity to pick a fight now that the mass support of BG3 is somewhat waning.

… Is this a Poe’s Law scenario?

There’s that ass! Better be careful. You keep showing it and a certain dictator will think you are making Winnie the Poo references!

It is so fun giving people who try to pretend to be rationale and enlightened plenty of rope.

So… while you are showing your ass and defending someone who said shit like

I want to expand my circle and hire more people, get licked until I can’t get an erection.

(Hint: that is where you claim everyone is racist and just misinterpreted him without providing any other defense)

do you want to further show your ass and say why it would matter where I was physically born while explaining your “You just don’t understand our humor” defense?

There are definitely some large chunks. But there have been no signs of any of those outlets caring enough to try to vote as a bloc.

There are definitely a lot of flaws in how the jury is selected and many (most?) of the judges past and present have pointed that out. Stuff like how they are fundamentally not qualified to judge fighting games as fighting games or the mess that is the “simulation and strategy” category or whatever they call “PC games” where people are somehow comparing MS Flight Sim to Farm Simulator to Satisfactory.

But for stuff like the major awards? It is a pretty diverse crowd and there is no indication that any group cares enough to rig the vote beyond group discords where people pester other games media folk because they want to play Helldivers again and their usual crew are busy.

I’ll also add on that, for its many many flaws, the keighleys is pretty good about being aware of this kind of thing based on a few outlets that talked about how they were judges in the past and then suddenly never mentioned it again after an acquisition or the loss of a core editor.

Yeah… fuck off with that?

I am Chinese with a lot of Chinese family. This is not some unique and elevated humor that westerners do not understand. It is the same self deprecating humor that is increasingly prevalent in all cultures (that have been exposed to similar media…) combined with the equivalent of “ha ha, wouldn’t it be funny if we kissed .ha ha ha . What a joke. ha ha. But what if we did? Ha ha ha”.

Same with the truly disgusting misogynistic shit that asshole has said. It is a “joke” in the same way it was “just a joke” when people were testing the water on being magats.

The only thing that is “cultural” about this is the tendency for East Asians (but especially Chinese) to assume that everyone else is fucking stupid and that they just have to say it is a joke to ignore all consequences. And… that has been regularly demonstrated to be true so I guess the joke is on us?

Do I think he was tearing his shirt in agony and screaming in pain? No (although apparently Alannah Pearce and the people in her section saw him crying when he lost…). But there is very much the fundamental truth of “I deserved to win so this must be bullshit if I didn’t and I wasted my time by coming to an awards ceremony that doesn’t understand how amazing I am”.

Which… DOES have a lot of ties to East Asian culture (the idea that you are either best or worst) coupled with the fucked up number that the one child policy did on people.

The point is that you are constantly spewing largely unrelated nonsense that mostly just demonstrates a lack of understanding of what you are arguing against. But you are Righteous so anyone who points this out is clearly a bad person so let’s whip out the ad hominem.

Because I see you working toward the same conclusions I increasingly see people make: You don’t know what should be done and you don’t care what it does to the game industry. You just want politicians to make laws to make the things you don’t like go away.

And… I really don’t understand how ANYONE can be privileged enough to think that is a good idea. Especially when the people who DO feel strongly enough to maybe educate themselves on a topic refuse to. But hey, 50-60 year old politicians who just want a handy from the nearest lobbyist are sure to act in good faith and make a great solution, right?

Again, this is the DRM wars. We lost. Used games are not a thing in the PC space and are rapidly fading in the console space. But what we did get was a removal of the genuinely bad DRM models (Starforce) and the more egregious activation models (formerly Securom, now Denuvo) are increasingly restricted to A-AAA releases. And that didn’t happen because people got angry on a message board and thought about asking jack thompson to draft a bill for them.

It happened because there was actual discussion between devs and consumers. I don’t like that EVERYTHING activates to an account with Valve (even if I like valve) but it is a really good middle ground that provides utility to all sides.

Rather than people throwing up complete nonsense that has nothing to do with the technology they claim to be against while also coming right off a studio being sent to the shadow realm harder than a themed deck user because of… a bad beta and character designs that weren’t sexy enough.

Anti-viruses flag a lot of things. It is called a False Positive (or sometimes a “Someone didn’t pay us for an exception” Positive but…). It has nothing to do with something hooking into a kernel or just being a program you run in userspace.

Genshin Impact’s anti-cheat was literally used to stop anti-virus programs running on people’s computers and mass deploy ransomware,

I assume you are referring to https://www.trendmicro.com/en_us/research/22/h/ransomware-actor-abuses-genshin-impact-anti-cheat-driver-to-kill-antivirus.html

Which… I’ll just raise you https://www.polygon.com/22898895/dark-souls-pvp-exploit-multiplayer-servers-remote-code-execution which allows for ridiculously dangerous RCEs without needing any kernel level hooks at all. So…

and the gaming industry as a whole is extremely lax about the security of their users.

THAT I do not disagree with in the slightest. Which is why I am glad that most studios outsource anti-cheat because they are not at all qualified to handle it themselves.

. I choose not to spend my money at companies that enable this kind of crap in their games.

I mean this in the most inflammatory and blunt way imaginable:

Nobody gives a shit about you. Nobody gives a shit about me either.

We are two people. We don’t fucking matter. What matters is the people who play every single Riot game ever made for thousands of hours each. THEY spend money.

Like I said before: it is about accepting risk. Knowingly or unknowingly, it doesn’t matter any more than telling your parents that you must have gotten a virus from that pokemon cheat code rather than the hardcore pornography that came in exe form for some reason.

You don’t want to compromise your security more than you already do. Cool. Most people playing these games are fine with that if it reduces the odds that they have their free time ruined for them by aimbots and wallhacks. And… clearly there is merit to this approach if studios are willing to pay for it.

Because, at the end of the day? We’ve been through this. Back then it was DRM. DRM was bad and DRM was horrible and EVERYONE had a super obscure russian (?) cd rom drive that Starforce would brick. And the same arguments of “ideologically this is bad and it could ruin things for a very small percentage of people” came up. And the answer was always “I refuse to buy anything”

And… everyone else DID buy things. The genuinely bad shit like starforce went away in favor of activation model DRMs (which continues to this day) but also… alternatives were actually presented. Steam is basically a variation of GOO (which is also basically what GoG does) but Steam has the added benefit of people being scared shitless of getting caught by Uncle Gabe and having their account taken away.

And that is what we need here. Not asinine requests for politicians who understand nothing to solve this for us. We need actual alternatives that work better AND are less invasive.

As an aside: I increasingly notice that you say very inflammatory things based on a misunderstanding or misconception of the thing you are criticizing. That is a bad habit in general but it is a REALLY bad thing when it comes to cybersecurity (which this basically is). Because it gives you a false sense of security when you think you are following best practices but are actually spewing nonsense and ignoring all your other risk vectors.

There are a few layers to that

First: The crowdstrike issue had little to nothing to do with any kernel level hooks. The issue was one of software engineering and deployment. It could just as easily have… taken out an entire country by triggering false positives that prevent systems from connecting to the network.

Second: You’ll ALSO note that even after… taking out an entire country businesses still use crowdstrike. Because it is that damned good at its job.

Third: Yes, Current anti-cheat solutions are less than effective at hardware based hacks. It is lamost like there is a reason that the Delta Force (?) game made a big deal about banning people for thumb drives. That kind of scanning and testing is coming.

Fourth: Crowdstrike is not something you install on your personal device (unless your job’s IT department are idiots). It is something you install on company owned devices.

Additionally though, I am not buying products with kernel level Anti-cheat and that is intentional, so I am not agreeing to the TOS or EULA of those games.

Cool. I am also not. So no “rights” are being violated.

Cool

Also, it isn’t a straw man if you are arguing a completely different topic than the one the thread is about. But cool. You learned a word.

That’s the thing, you’re never going to catch everything

The problem is that the things that aren’t caught? People don’t say “Ugh. Easy Anti-Cheat suck”. they say “Ugh, fucking Battlefield is un fucking playable. BOYCOTT IT!!!”

There are alternative methods that may be even more effective (I personally think this is a genuinely great use case for “AI” to detect things like tracking players through walls and head snapping). They also have drawbacks (training and inference would get real expensive real fast since it needs to be fairly game specific).

Whereas kernel level bullshit? It clearly works well enough that the people who have the data (devs and publishers) are willing to pay for it.

And if it reduces the risk of a particularly bad exploit hurting the reputation of the game and tanking it harder than Concord?

Which is why “fighting back” is so difficult. We, as players, are asking for the devs/publishers to trust us. But we have also demonstrated, at every fucking step, that we won’t extend even an iota of trust back and will instead watch thousands of hours of video essays on why this game sucks because of a bad beta.

You agree to that in the EULA/TOS of the game you want to play (and how legally binding that is is anyone’s guess). You just never read it (because nobody does).

The reality is that it is just another layer of risk. You are or are not choosing to install software on your personal computer that may or may not increase your risk level. It is no different than going to that website that makes your GPU spin up real hard or grabbing something from itch that is actually malware and so forth. Its why people increasingly suggest having a dedicated device for taxes and anything else private.

Personally? I understand the benefits to kernel level anti-cheat and, while we have no data as consumers, it is clearly effective considering the state of games today versus games in the 00s and publishers are willing to allocate funds for it. I still firmly believe that there are better methods that involve analysis of player behavior but I also understand the compute costs of that will be insane.

But also? I don’t want that shit on my computer (not that it would work because… Linux). So I choose not to play the games that require it. It means I miss out on some games but the good news is that there are way more games out there than I can ever play.

All that said: I increasingly think the end state is going to be competitive multiplayer games being console exclusive due to a mix of exclusivity rights and having a walled garden ecosystem that actually CAN be controlled.

The problem is “pockets of the community”.

Back in the day, I LOVED Unreal Tournament (… I still do actually). And a lot of that is because I found servers with people who became friends I still chat with (hell, one of them is even in the same Warframe clan as I am).

But that is INCREDIBLY unapproachable and I know plenty of people who never “got int” UT or Quake or TF2 because they never found those communities and instead got stuck with random pubs full of assholes.

That said: That is not about anti-cheat. That is about matchmaking versus player run servers. Which is a very different discussion with nuances in all directions.

As something nice to have? I fully agree (and said as much)

As an alternative to anti-cheat solutions/“solutions” as was being presented?

No, it is not an answer. Because it would indeed be forcing people to tolerate “antisocial fuckwads” or forcing people ti find private servers to play with each other like in the good old days.

It is “overlooked” because it is a non-answer.

Nobody wants to play with all the cheaters and the people who got banned because they couldn’t stop talking about how much they love CSAM in the lobbies.

I mean, look at twitter. After the recent mass exodus to bluesky there is anger because they are realizing their quarantine zone is REAL shitty.

I do wish more games would provide player run servers as an option. but I am under no illusion that that is going to be good for anything other than “Hey, remember when we all played Chivalry 2 for a few years? What say we play that on Friday night and then ignore it for another decade?”

Was it Delta Force that made everyone lose their shit because it “accidentally” warned people would be banned for usb thumb drives?

Because… that is coming. No, not the thumbdrive. But scanning your various devices to detect hardware based cheats. Which… is likely also going to be pushed by logitech and razer to get ahead of the crowd that are sick and tired of needing their bullshit software to properly use mice and are looking toward alternatives.

This issue would be solved / non existent if matchmaking was not the only option for playing online game

This is incredibly false.

Back in the day? Counterstrike 1.6 was SO good that we played through it with rampant hackers everywhere. Finding the rare server where people weren’t using aimbots and wallhacks was a bigger find than a hyper attractive alien asking you to teach it what love is. Same with UT and Quake.

And none of those did “matchmaking”.

As a game? Astrobot is a VERY solid and polished platformer.

But mostly it is the nostalgia and target demographic. If you ever had a PS1 or PS2 growing up then you will have insane amounts of nostalgia for all the costumes and easter eggs while not realizing most are from the late PS3/early PS4 anyway.

So… it is basically a modern Nintendo game. Others do platforming and level design better. But only this has the excessive amount of references to nu-God of War and rare reference to Jumping Flash that makes your heart remember the happy times.

And… even though I see it for what it is, I am not gonna pretend I am above it.

For what it is worth? I think it IS the better game than Balatro (one would hope so since it had a full major studio and platform holder behind it…). But I still think Balatro was THE game of 2024 just for how much it pervaded everything and everyone.

Not sure if it was optional (I THINK I missed it my first playthrough at launch?) but as part of TW3 you put someone through the trials as an adult. And it basically liquifies their body and causes immense suffering so that magic can be used to turn a pile of Clarence Boddicker back into the person’s real form.

It wouldn’t be the first retcon or outright ignoring of lore in the CDPR series (or the author’s books for that matter…) but it just feels particularly egregious because Ciri very specifically is NOT a Witcher and her choosing to live that life was her rejecting destiny and taking control of herself. But also? She can never truly escape that destiny.

(I remember a quest where Geralt feeds a normal human a small dose of one of his potions.

https://witcher.fandom.com/wiki/On_Death's_Bed

Sadly, none of this denoted a happy ending. Though the wounds on Lena’s body healed, the toxins in the witcher’s brew had melted her mind. This was not the first time a cure had proven worse than the disease

The witcher potions are RIDICULOUSLY toxic