Thread

1. 2OEH8eoCRo0 · 1790945910 · focus · HN ↗

   When did video games get so serious that we need to do these things? Ridiculous.

   1. vjsrinivas · 1790946288 · focus · HN ↗

      I wonder if it has anything to do with the rise of e-sports and the monetary aspect of "professional" multi-player games?

      1. 2OEH8eoCRo0 · 1790946568 · focus · HN ↗

         That's one of my theories. Money got involved and here we are. Now games are serious business! Remember when they were just fun?

         1. xeonmc · 1790949120 · focus · HN ↗

            Esports used to be just fun grassroots competition until Riot Games bulldozed over the nascent self-sustaining scenes and started the rat race of astroturf-bankrolling "professionalized" scenes lacking the foundation of any sort of viable business model, propped up only by VC sponsors. When those ran dry, the Saudi oil funds swooped in to buy up all the tournament rights as part of their sportswashing campaign.

            Riot Games was also the one that introduced the nanny policing of "if you deviate from the squeaky clean advertiser-friendly image we stipulate, we'll make sure you have no future in the pro scene ever again" tribunal, presenting themselves as the bastion of "pre-eliminating all toxicity from online gaming", which is ironically hypocritical considering their scandals after scandals of toxic workplace culture.

            1. 7bit · 1790951053 · focus · HN ↗

               Esports was serious loooong before Riot games existed.

               1. xeonmc · 1790951524 · focus · HN ↗

                  Serious competition as a fulfilling grassroots activity? Sure it existed before Riot.

                  Artificially propped-up unsustainable "professionalization" whose eventual conclusion is to enforce spyware on casual participants? That's Riot's gift to the world.

                  1. orbital-decay · 1790955429 · focus · HN ↗

                     Kernel spyware is at least 2 decades old, and manual scrutiny of casual participants is as old as networked competitive gaming and cheating themselves (id games had that from the start!). It has nothing to do with money. Moreover, people are paying north of $1k/mo to cheat in video games.
                  2. vel0city · 1790967696 · focus · HN ↗

                     I remember watching Counterstrike tournaments in CPL in the early 2000s and Intel Extreme Masters in 2007.

                     LoL (Riot's first big "esport" game) didn't really start having large tournaments until 2011. LoL didn't even come out until a few years after ESL started hosting regular professionalized Counter Strike tournaments.

         2. mmmlinux · 1790956838 · focus · HN ↗

            They were never just fun though. there were always hackers and cheaters.
      2. Eridrus · 1790960763 · focus · HN ↗

         No, people cheat at multiplayer games that have no stakes pretty regularly.

         This is more necessary with the rise of freemium games where the base account is trivially replaced and so banning people's accounts does nothing.

         Not that paid games don't have cheating issues, but there's a limit on how much people are willing to spend getting rebanned regularly.

   2. nancyminusone · 1790948441 · focus · HN ↗

      Probably around the time individual games started to have the term "billion dollars" associated with them in some way.
   3. bigmadshoe · 1790949868 · focus · HN ↗

      As someone who has played a decent of competitive games in the past, it is less about them being extremely serious, and more about how much people cheating ruins the fun for everyone else.

      For example, a soccer Sunday league might not be that serious, but you still wouldn't want someone frequently running on the pitch with a golf club and whacking the ball into your goal with no consequences.

      1. cronin101 · 1790951548 · focus · HN ↗

         Definitely not frequently, but once or twice a lifetime would provide a measurable uplift.

         1. ElevenLathe · 1790954009 · focus · HN ↗

            GTA Online has this feeling at times. I always find it a refreshing distraction when somebody comes into a public server with obvious hacks and starts spawning bizarre weapons, vehicles, giving out money, changing the weather or day/night cycle abruptly, teleporting everyone to the same location. It's easy to leave to another server when it gets boring or frustrating, but these are the times when I put out the call on Discord for other non-currently-online friends to join me!
         2. Eridrus · 1790960649 · focus · HN ↗

            People buying cheats do not stop at once.
   4. orbital-decay · 1790954138 · focus · HN ↗

      Anticheats started moving into ring0 and became rootkits in early 2000s with nProtect GameGuard, HWID checks started in mid-2000s with myAC (or even earlier? I think myAC first appeared during CS 1.5).

      1. Sohcahtoa82 · 1790960431 · focus · HN ↗

         First anti-cheat I ever ran into was PunkBuster. I don't remember when I first used it, but apparently it was released in 2000.
      2. tadfisher · 1790960433 · focus · HN ↗

         Those were easily worked around with unsigned drivers or physical hardware. Now Secure Boot is required to run Valorant games, which should be a harbinger for what will happen to your online banking experience if consumers allow this to continue.

         1. orbital-decay · 1790962269 · focus · HN ↗

            Yeah that's why I stopped playing and hosting those games, ESEA Bitcoin mining scandal made me buy a physically isolated gaming machine with constant monitoring, and VM banning in EFT was the last drop. Valorant is the most paranoid and the biggest offender, but the others are close.
   5. RicoElectrico · 1790954794 · focus · HN ↗

      When tryhards flocked to ranked games; more broadly in the world with no opportunity for the young people e-sports emerged and they saw it as one.
   6. sippingabonedry · 1790959356 · focus · HN ↗

      When people ruined multiplayer games for everyone by cheating.
   7. happytoexplain · 1790960993 · focus · HN ↗

      In PVP games, it's hard to have fun when there is any non-negligible amount of cheating, even if you're not playing seriously. This comment is a little like saying people who won't let you cheat in a board game are being "too serious". Maybe the more relevant disconnect is that you just don't like PVP games much...?

      If on the other hand you're trying to imply that cheating in popular PVP games can be prevented without measures this extreme, as far as I know that's just wrong. It's an arms race and we've been at it long enough that we're at the hardware level now.

   8. deltoidmaximus · 1790962437 · focus · HN ↗

      We're talking about a free to play (no cost to being banned) game without dedicated servers (no intimate community to police the servers). Cheaters always existed but the business model used exacerbated the problem.
   9. nkrisc · 1790970120 · focus · HN ↗

      Because competitive games with a cheater problem are dead games. I understand the desire to prevent cheating, and I think most players of those games are okay with it.
   10. mrguyorama · 1790975356 · focus · HN ↗

       When it became more profitable to sell a 3D model for game's character than it was to sell the actual game.

       The only point to these systems is companies wanting a total stranglehold on any way to play the game so that you cannot bypass their skin market.

       Otherwise, they wouldn't be doing any of this, because it costs more to develop a root kit than it costs to just hand out a shitty server exe and let the community figure it out like was common in the past.

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