I'd attribute their gaming culture over their dystopian digital surveillance tbh.
None of the games I play have this problem. So you're wrong. I'm not claiming that this proves the problem is culture specific, just knocking down your counter claim.
ooh! if you know of popular free to play games with no toxicity, im absolutely in! which games are these?
It is a huge problem in League of Legends especially at the lower ranks. I’ve almost quit several times due to it. They’d have a much larger player base if implemented worldwide.
Great, so I will never play your game.
It's amazing how many oblivious, ultra consumer, pro- getting scammed, pro-monopoly, pro- proprietary protocol, people are on this so-called hacker forum. The policy you are asking for is literally one of the highest things I've ever seen that go against the hacker ethos. If you pay more than $10/mo for a smart phone in the US (prime audience of this site), you are getting scammed, no even then it's a scam as you're getting something only worth 0.001 cents.
Not sure what the cell phone bit is about.
But of course. After all, we can’t risk giving certain cohorts of people too much self-determination before they’re fully indoctrinated into The Economy: http://www.gov.cn/xinwen/2019-11/06/content_5449157.htm
(Google Translate disclaimer)
“Implement the real-name registration system for online game accounts — To this end, the "Notice" requires strict real-name registration, and all online game users must use valid identity information to register for game accounts.”
Strictly control the length of time for minors to use online games — It is stipulated that no game service shall be provided for minors from 22:00 to 8:00 the next day, and the daily period of statutory holidays shall not exceed 3 hours, and other hours shall not exceed 1.5 hours per day.”
The comment about broad appeal is also a bit confusing to me. Why do things stop being games because they're designed to be accessible to many people?
For the broad appeal bit, I was thinking tragedy of the commons. A critical mass of actors (good and bad alike) has got to be one of the main drivers behind such a decision. So I'm thinking the more popular a game gets, the higher the likelihood that drastic actions like this are taken, ostensibly to defend against some boogeyman or other.
But it's pretty clear what Blizzard is going for here, since we know their platform is competitive and thus harsher on individuals viewed as bad actors. Blizzard knows full well that most people signing up to play only have one phone number, which is most certainly a real-life identifier for those players.
My point is that if players feel compelled to self-censor their interactions online for fear of repercussions[0], then they are not playing a game. They are instead representing themselves as individuals on a social network with competitive/gamified attributes. Requiring phone numbers to play is just a method to gently reinforce this.
To each their own - this might be exactly the type of game you like to play. But it departs pretty strongly from the classical definition of "video game" that I grew up with.
[0] For example, your primary phone number being disallowed access to all Blizzard services. Maybe they go even further and request that 3rd party services ban you for off-platform violations. Moved this down to a footnote so as not to spread FUD, I'm sure they don't currently do this, nor do I expect them to. But cross-referencing phone numbers would make it very easy to start.
If this helps censor the people who are interrupting the game to shout racist insults or read their manifestos, that seems like a win for gaming to me.
Putting something in a footnote doesn’t make it it FUD, for what it’s worth.
Well, it isn't. What people are saying in chat has no bearing on the quality of the game. I'm not even playing devil's advocate like you are doing in this sub thread either, I literally could not care what people say in game chats. I take more issue to this obnoxious, cancerous, USA opinion that someone saying the N-word is the end of the world and requires me as an innocent bystander to bear the costs (such as having to use phone identification to play a game). You see the problem is not being racist itself, but the "solutions" you people propose.
Saying that you find the game less enjoyable when people say racist shit just makes you sound like an annoying person.
The fact that you brought up racism and then used this strawman of "game being disrupted" is actually hilarious and shows what a thin spine you have.
No straw men here, and racism is only in the thread because it’s a common example of people being disruptive in chat.
All that matters for casual games is that the company actively does something to minimize cheating. Identity verification is not a way to do this as it is not an active measure. It just puts one hoop for people to jump through. More useful is to do typical statistical analysis as that will catch 99% of actual impactful cheating (subtle cheating doesn't matter much since the average player won't be able to tell the difference anyway) and rinse and repeat.
Nice job using in-kernel a/c to claim how advanced the problem is. When those came out 20 years ago, it was just a few small patches to bypass them. Even some of them were still only signature based so you could just change the signature of your cheat and bypass it. But I'll stop here since you don't seem to comprehend the concept of cat-and-mouse nor the fact that pursuing it to the end just makes the game unplayable for innocent players.
Yes, I know some games requires phone verification to play at all, and I'm against that. My initial reaction to this thread was "um we are just now caring about this? they're moving onto photo ID now, which creates real life fraud problems". Gee I can't wait until game devs start stealing my ID and the subsequent "fix" of using a trusted third party that's also abusive and blocks me from multiple games because they have monopoly, and has integration bugs causing the game not to work at all if I press the wrong button on their web page embedded into the game.
We've already established that it's not really a game (seems more like a sport), so whether it's a win for video gaming or not is irrelevant to my thinking, though I do tend to agree with regards to the actual in-game communication mechanics.
Footnotes are used to call attention to idiosyncrasies in written communication so I used one here, similar to how I described another sentence of mine as sarcastic in an earlier comment - just trying to be fair :)
Why not let stupid people shout stupid things ...
In-game chat isn’t bound by any requirement to support everything that stupid people can do in real life.
Do you seriously claim that "not preventing" already means "supporting"?!
I’m curious what your definition of a game is?
It is certainly not a FUN game (cough Apex) when beset by cheaters constantly. I’ll gladly give up anonymity to make the game fun again.
All that is to say, additional identifiers might be against the hacker ethos, but hopefully not the gamer ethos.
I feel there should be a new term to describe this type of game. Up until now "eSports" has been used but that seems passe. Metagame perhaps? Might have sounded dumb a few years ago, but there's strong precedent now :P
Yes. I've never played one, but from what I can tell it's like a forum where you go on with an identity and form clubs with people and chat about stuff, then you play some wonky subgame for 1 minute in that 3 hour session, then you go press a bunch of buttons to gamble for virtual prizes, etc.
I've played lots of MMOs when I was younger and it's always the same: the "game" doesnt really start until you hit the "endgame" (usually near max level with decent gear).
Until that point, you are often grinding and doing daily events, like a job.
And we often joke that once we get there: "Finally, I get to play the game".
Then there's fear of missing out with seasonal or other limited-time awards etc. which " forces" you to play when you don't want to.
Jonathan Blow has written about why this isn't fun game design.
And those are some reasons why despite having played a lot of these, I agree with the pithy comment that they aren't games.
Some hints: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massively_multiplayer_online...
But thanks for the downvote, you really got me there.
Luckily there's plenty of competitive games out there that are actually fun. The meatgrinder of matchmaking isn't actually the elite competitive environment these gamers think it is.
Real competitive video games are played IRL. Your online eSport PC game of the month does not compare to a real tournament at your local arcade/community college/bar/netcafe.
If your game doesn't have those, then it's probably a skinner box posing as a ladder with different colored badges as prizes.
It's a nice day outside, think I'll take my dog for a walk.
You know, some people can really feel and obsess to thee enjoyment when they learn, progress and eventually beat worthy opponents, such enjoyment dog walking will never endow.
If you’re arguing with someone who is making an analogy, you’re wasting your time because it's so easy to ignore their point.
Analogies only work between people cooperating to understand something, so just ignore ‘em if youre not working together
> heavily policed speech.
I also miss the days when there was no communication provided in-game. It's unnecessary for the vast majority of games. And if we wanted that, we used xfire or something external to collaborate, outside of what has now become yet another walled garden.
I have hosted several servers for several games over the years but they have huge disadvantages too. One of them being that server admins can see IP addresses of players, and that leads to DDoS. Admin can also be fickle and kick players for whatever reason, had a popular server(which turned into the only server as the game got old) where the admin would kick women if they didn't respond positively to his creepy flirting.
And there is no automated matchmaking that takes balance into account.
This also describes the behaviour of common game providers. The difference is: you can switch to a different server if you are annoyed by this, but cannot get rid of the game provider/publisher.
> And there is no automated matchmaking that takes balance into account.
This could in principle be implemented.
With multiplayer versus games that do not have a persistent world that players feel is their own, there's even less incentive for a player to want to host their own server. Minecraft is still an example of this: even without any Mojang hosted servers, the majority of players aren't joining random servers from a server list. They're joining the well-known and popular server networks, like Hypixel or Mineplex.
Just to be clear, you aren't paying for game server hosting, only for the console's lobby/matchmaking services. The game servers are still paid out of pocket by the devs.
This is why many games try to get away with player-hosted servers (which gamers misname P2P), where a player is assigned a host role by the matchmaking service and the rest connect to it for the duration of the match. Which means one other player can see your IP and if the server disconnects the match is interrupted.
Todays system certainly has trade offs but the competitive experience is so much better.
You can still have that relationship with your publisher, but if you want that in your multiplayer game, you have to go back to a day where people behaved differently on the internet. Those days are gone, and it's not the publisher's fault. It's ours.
In these former days where people behaved differently on the internet, the internet was an insanely weird and wild place where the people did and posted things that are typically not considered acceptable behaviour anymore.
To get just a glimpse on this topic, see, for example, the following linked article and its dicussion on Hacker News:
The 0.1% of cheaters ruin those games so much for the masses that it requires actions like this. Unaddressed cheating will literally destroy a game and bankrupt a company.
It's sad that we have come to needing this kind of measures to prevent cheating, but the companies aren't the ones to blame for it.
I think it’s tempting to look at policies like this and associate them with other trends that are broadly concerning. Minecraft comes to mind. But this seems like a very different situation, with legitimate arguments for why this may be a good thing.
Now, increasingly, the context seems to be that it's unacceptable/unfair for some reason. This feels wrong to me.
If I can't play the game the way _I_ want to play, what use is it as a recreational activity? It's supposed to be a "game" after all so I don't understand where are all the rules and revisions are coming from.
It must be because encountering alt accounts in an open-world MMO is very different than being paired with smurf accounts in a competitive matchmaking system.
This I can understand, but I hope the anti-smurf thing doesn't go _too_ far. Alt accounts are the only way to re-experience the bottom of the ladder/beginning of the story in certain types of games.
Games like Overwatch is skill based and have a skill-based matchmaking, a new player will play with other beginners, and as they get better the game will put them in matches with better opponents. A smurf in this context is someone that is already really good in the game, but because they just created a new account, they are put in matches with beginners just so they can steamroll them. And takes a good while for their account to reach the same rank as their main account.
While in MMOs there's still some skill involved, but it's much harder to compete with someone is better items, compare to Overwatch where two players with the same character have the same everything it all comes down to the player skill.
>If I can't play the game the way _I_ want to play, what use is it as a recreational activity? It's supposed to be a "game" after all so I don't understand where are all the rules and revisions are coming from.
I would argue that competitive games are less about recreation and more about getting good, which can be fun, but that seems to be secondary.
The context in which "smurf" is used these days is very different. But if you try to look at it from the original MMO definition of that term, that would explain why it might feel wrong to you.
In an MMO, people refer to using many characters on one account as smurfing. That's not the case with competitive multiplayer games, where it refers specifically to using a separate account to get (initially) put in a matchmaking pool with lower-skill people, in order to "have fun" obliterating them. As opposed to playing with people of your skill on your regular account with a calibrated MMR.
In an MMO, having a smurf doesn't ruin anything for anyone else. It is just a way to play a different character class, how else is a person supposed to do it? Asking users to restrict themselves to playing only one character class (e.g., mage) forever out of many available in the game is just strange. You still have to level up that smurf character, collect appropriate gear, etc.
In a competitive multiplayer game, like CSGO/League of Legends/Overwatch, etc., none of this is the case. You can play any character on one account. You aren't expected to play one character forever, that would make zero sense in a game like League. What smurfing refers to here is existing players with high MMR creating a separate fresh account, and tearing through new players (because new accounts, rightfully, get placed in a lower MMR matchmaking pool, along with other new players). It is basically an equivalent of Mike Tyson disguising himself perfectly to look like a newbie, and then going to a local boxing gym and just beating everyone there within an inch of death in the ring.
This is the context in which smurfing is being discussed these days as a negative, and I agree with this stance. Your example of smurfing in an MMO, however, is perfectly valid and causes no harm, so it is totally fine.
Considering the example that you just gave, the word "rightfully" in "because new accounts, rightfully, get placed in a lower MMR matchmaking pool, along with other new players" is exactly the bug in the game code that enables smurfing.
If such new players with win streaks far above than what is to be expected by their level ranked up very fast (and if they are not that good, get thus "picked apart"), smurfing "to have fun killing some low-level players" would be impeded by a lot.
That just tells me you haven't had much experience with this. You are correct, if they keep going on those massive win streaks, they will grow out of that new player MMR soon enough.
You know what's the simplest and most common workaround to this? Just tank a few games in a row intentionally by doing nothing or playing poorly on purpose.
It is even more annoying to deal with than with someone who is tearing through low MMR on a massive winstreak, because you can at least theoretically (but unlikely) beat those players. Cannot really win a game when your teammate plays poorly on purpose or doesn't do anything at all.
Not really.
A smurf who doesn’t lose will quickly rise to their appropriate rank and stop being a “problem”.
> If such new players with win streaks far above than what is to be expected by their level ranked up very fast
This is generally exactly what happens. But unfortunately it doesn’t prevent smurfing and is trivial to get around by simply losing placement matches and throwing just enough games to keep the winrate low enough to stay in the given rank the smurf wants to play in.
They screw over the other team when they’re playing to win. They screw over their own team when they need to lose. The only people having fun in these scenarios are the smurfs, and maybe their followers.
The only truly effective tool right now is a ban. And this is why measures to prevent ban evasion (like requiring a phone number) are on the table.
I don’t know what the ideal solution is, but do know that Blizzard has been trying to address this in various ways for awhile, with somewhat limited success.
I have and use alt accounts. I have two Overwatch accounts, but they’re around the same rank. I don’t intentionally go and play against players far below my rank for the sole purpose of being a troll and destroying the game for others.
Smurfs are another thing entirely. Some games like Rocket League have become borderline unplayable since going F2P because smurfs are everywhere in competitive. I once went on a 15 game losing streak with every one of those losses involving an obvious smurf. And I’m not talking about “they were just a better team” kind of matches - these were players that come in and 1v3 the entire other team, and who clearly are playing with game mechanics only found at the highest levels of the game - and I am not one of those pro level players.
And these aren’t just people with an alt account. They’re people on their 20th account (because the others have been rightly banned), and it ruins the game.
Smurfs existed when the game still cost money, but skyrocketed as soon as it didn’t.
Having an alt should should still be fairly easy. Getting a 2nd phone number isn’t hard with various VOIP options.
Smurfs in competitive shooters suck because the only reason you make a Smurf is to play in ranked lobbies of much lower skill level, ruining the experience for those who are actually playing around their rank level.
It's only because matchmaking has gotten so good that it's even a problem. In the old days you matched with whoever was available and that was that.
Smurfs are also different from alts in my mind at least, an alt is something like a low level WoW character when you have a main that is max level; a smurf is more like Carlsen signing up for a chess.com account under an assumed name to gleefully squish people until his rating gets high enough, then starting another account. It only really works in games where each "match" starts off fresh for both players.
I’m wondering if you even play overwatch?
100 players per game.
0.1% being cheaters means 0.01 players per game are cheating. If you play 100 games, then maybe a cheater will be in your game. In fact I have played 10K games in one BR and 2K in another, and these stats seem about accurate.
I have had far more games ruined by bugs due to irrational people being the developers.
I also beat most of these cheaters since they don't know how to play the game and they can just be outplayed.
Congratulations on proving how your outrage is over nothing. And your intrusive "fixes" are over nothing.
downvote why? out of arguments?
Is this a bad think? F2P games are more lottery than video games. There would be statistics how many kids play it. In the best case scenario this would result in regulation of those practices.
No longer are you simply one player among thousands, you are a uniquely identifiable individual who is allowed (or not) to participate only after identifying yourself to the platform stewards.
I don't think this is necessarily bad per se but it really escapes the realm of what I consider a "video game"
These competitive platforms with broad mainstream appeal are more akin to social networks, with strict rules around identifying yourself and policing of what's considered acceptable speech/interactions.
It makes perfect business sense but I wonder how many people are weirded out by having to explicitly identify themselves to sign up for a video game in the same way they would for a social network/plane ticket/hotel room/etc. It feels less like a game and more like a chore to me if I have to temper and guard my gaming experience because my real-life identity is on the line.
Next they will want scans of my photo ID and a picture of me holding the ID next to my face with a timestamp. I'm being sarcastic here but I also think this is a pretty realistic endgame. We all know that phone number verification won't stop anybody with an ounce of motivation to cheat/troll/whatever. It's just an annoying mandated virtue-signal for the real players, as well as a tacitly implied threat: obey the rules, or your real-life UUID goes on the naughty list.
To be clear, again I think this makes some sort of sense for an eSports platform, but competitive gaming as a whole kind of escapes me (old school gamer, not the target audience). Maybe they could keep the phone requirement for their professional ladder only?
I yearn for the days when my relationship with the game publisher ended when I walked out of the store with my purchase.