sp3ctr4l

Do NOT network-enable TempleOS.

God will get angry if you do.

Well there you go haha.

I got that part wrong.

Thanks for the update =)

Ding ding ding!

Winner winner, idiot dog barfing up your chicken dinner.

So uh, skipping a bunch of excess lore:

“Dogs are one of the most beloved pets in the world. They are loyal, friendly and make great companions. Despite their differences, all dogs share a few key traits – they are affectionate, protective of their owners, and eager to please. Dogs require proper care, including regular exercise, grooming, and veterinary checkups. In return, they provide unconditional love and can even improve their owner’s physical and mental health. Whether as a family pet or a working animal, dogs have been an integral part of human society for thousands of years.”

The chat bot is named after a dog because a dog-named chatbot is more likely to make users treat it with patience, kindness, and understand that it does silly things sometimes, but it means well.

Its marketing. PR.

Yeah, it has always had a cartoonish, exaggerated art style, almost every character has limbs, hands and feet that are far more voluminous than a more realistic character, color schemes are usually quite bold and highly contrasting, and all weapons and armor also have comically accentuated proportions and excess to them.

Its a shame Blizzard seems to have just decided that all its IPs now basically follow the WoW style conventions, abandoning the earlier, distinct styles of their other IPs.

It is especially weird because their concept art for much of their stuff… often doesn’t have the weird cartoony proportions … but by the time it ends as an ingame asset, it does.

I mean, anybody could verify it by spending a few hours each on the respective games… But yes, any empirical data would be nice.

No, thats an anecdotal experience, and all it would tell you is the players’ perception of how prevalent cheating is… not how prevalent it actually is, not how effective an anti cheat system is at blocking cheaters.

But yes, any empirical data would be nice. For example, a study on the amount of blatant hackers found on lobbies joined in comparable ranks

“It would be great if there was any valid data/research to back up or disprove that thing I said earlier, but there isn’t, therefore I am completely justified in saying whatever as I want and acting as if its indisputable!”

Anyway, this isn’t exactly misinformation to anybody who has played both games at any decent rank. It’s unproved but immediately discernible information.

Again, no.

You made a claim that a particular anti cheat system is better than another.

You keep saying that ‘oh anyone can just tell’.

No.

What you are describing is again, at best, player perceptions of cheating prevalence.

The logic you are using is exactly the same logic that people who believe in astrology or woo woo nonsense medical treatments use to justify their efficacy.

… You have nothing but vibes and anecdotes, which you admit are unproved and have no basis in fact, beyond ‘i think this is obvious’.

You’re just bullshitting.

It is indeed pointless to attempt to get a bullshitter to admit they are bullshitting, when they’ve already backpedalled by moving goal posts, dismissing the importance of the discussion after being called out for making a specific claim which they can’t back up.

You could just admit that ah well shit yeah, I guess I don’t have any actual valid reasoning or data to back up my claim, but nope you keep trucking on, doing everything you can to talk around that point instead of addressing it.

So … your previous assertion that OW2’s AC is superior to VAC was in fact just based on vibes.

Anti Cheat developers typically do not like to explain how exactly they work, how effective they actually are.

Their data is proprietary, trade secrets.

There will almost certainly never be a way to actually conduct the empirical study you wish for, save for (ironically) someone hacking into the corporate servers of a bunch of different anti cheat developers to grab their own internal metrics.

But that should be obvious to anyone with basic knowledge of how Anti Cheats work, both technically and as a business.

… None of that matters to you though, you have completely vibes based anecdotes that you confidently state as fact.

Please stop doing that.

When someone has no clue what they’re talking about, but confidently makes a claim about a situation because it feels right, this is typically called misinformation.

… Buuut you can still defeat Kernel level Anti Cheats.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RwzIq04vd0M&t=2s&pp=2AECkAIB

Which means that you still have to end up relying on reviewing a player’s performance and actions as recorded by the game servers statistically via complex statistical algorithms or machine learning to detect impossibly abnormal activity.

… Which is what VAC has been doing, without kernel level, for over a decade.

All that is gained from pushing AC to the kernel level is you ruin the privacy and system stability of everyone using it.

You don’t actually stop cheating.

It is not possible to have a 100% full proof anti cheat system.

There will always be new, cleverer exploitation methods, just as there are with literally all other kinds of computer software, which all have new exploits that are detected and triaged basically every day.

But you do have a choice between using an anti cheat method that is insanely invasive and potentially dangerous to all your users, and one that is not.

Oh it was initially classed as insanely intrusive malware when kernel level AC was introduced about a decade ago, by anyone with a modicum of actual technical knowledge about computers.

Unfortunately, a whole lot of corpo shills ran propaganda explaining how actually its fine, don’t worry, its actually the best way to stop cheaters!

Then the vast, vast majority of idiot gamers believed that, or threw their hands up and went oh well its the new norm, trying to fight it is futile and actually if you are against this that means you are some kind of paranoid privacy freak who hates other people having fun.

I would love to see any kind of documentation that can somehow prove OW2’s AC is better than VAC, something that isn’t based on vibes or immediacy bias.

Or, even better, when you let a whole bunch of devs have acces to the kernel…

… sometimes they just accidentally fuck up and push a bad update, unintentionally.

This is how CrowdStrike managed to Y2K an absurd number of enterprise computers fairly recently.

Its also why its … you know, generally bad practice to have your kernel just open to fucking whoever instead of having it be locked down and rigorously tested.

Funnily enough, MSFT now appears to be shifting toward offering much less direct access to its kernel to 3rd party software devs.

VAC is not kernel level, because surprise you don’t actually need kernel level to do anti cheat well.

VAC games would just get the standard AC message banner, not the scary yellow kernel level warning banner.

… I am pretty sure VAC games have indicated on their store page that they use VAC for well over a decade.

However, it’s only being forced for kernel-level anti-cheat. If it’s only client-side or server-side, it’s optional, but Valve say “we generally think that any game that makes use of anti-cheat technology would benefit from letting players know”.

I will always love Valve for their ability to use corpospeak against corpos.

Your game has anti-cheat?

Wonderful!

I’m sure that always only results in an improved experience for all gamers, lets let them all know!

=D

Hey, I appreciate your honesty and integrity!

I suppose it is still possible that the Concord themed Secret Level episode will still air…

I still doubt it.

I’m still willing to bet 2¢ it won’t air, haha.

But yeah… the marketing (the video presentations of staff and developers, their public statements etc) seemed to me to very much indicate that the whole plan was to create an entire Concord Expanded Universe.

The game was supposed to have weekly story/character progression updates like some older MMOs, they talked about being in many different media formats, they literally used the phrase Concord Universe or Universe of Concord.

When you go all in on a new IP and … its the biggest failure in the history of gaming… all your plans are done, kaput. You have to wait for people to forget about it and then ‘reimagine’ it a decade later if you even want to try to resurrect it.

From a game design standpoint… it wasn’t designed to work as a heavily MTX dependent game.

That’s actually a whole lot more development, more content, more UIs, more testing… and thus money you have to throw at it to get it to be that… and it already has failed, and been stupendously expensive to develop, has a horrific general reputation/perception.

But as to at least the Secret Level episode airing?

You do have good arguments that basically boil down to it already being completed or mostly complete, and the … who gets paid by what contract with who for what… that kind of set up … may lead to it making more business sense to just air it anyway.

But I would still counter that Sony wants to memory hole this IP from collective knowledge, and that they value that, as a means of improving their public perception, more than whatever they’d lose from breaking their contracts with Amazon.

Unironically, this is why I no longer work in tech.

Another user pointed out ‘Found the business major’ and while that may or may not be 100% accurate… this person’s mindset is absolutely, hilariously, stereotypically common amongst MBAs.

They know almost nothing about the actual business sector they end up in, they know almost nothing about the nature of any given employee’s actual work, they just view everything through the lense of ‘maximize next quarter profits’…

… It’s all just 100% cocksure narcissistic bravado + 'the way i was taught how to things work is correct, stop arguing with me.’

And these people are almost always your boss, or your boss’s boss.

… and they’ve now deleted all their posts.

I do have to say this has been amusing… haven’t seen this caliber of very obviously wrong but actually no you’re wrong in a while.

EDIT: Wow, no, holy shit, their entire account is gone now.

… What?

It… it goes into the company.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/13/24197477/valve-employs-few-hundred-people-payroll-redacted

They run an absurdly profitable business.

They make approximately $15 million in profit per each of the roughly 360 employees.

That’s after wages.

Nobody knows exactly what an average Valve salary is (they’re a private company, they have no obligation to disclose that), but they almost certainly just continue to accumulate a stupendous amount of money, which they can then throw at any ideas that require all kinds of potential material or licensing or technical costs.

The employees are not making $15 million dollars a year. Probably more like 1/10 to 1/100 of that.

Do you really, truly believe that everything that’s never been done before is a 100% sure bet to invest time and money into?

Do you really have no idea of how complex, untested, but potentially viable ideas come to fruition, come to be found out as coherent and workable vs incoherent and non workable?

… You are aware that matchsticks were essentially invented by the scattershot approach of a man who just had the time, funding, and materials to just basically randomly test a whole bunch of chemical compounds, and he just happened to accidentally drag a stick covered in concoction #38 or whatever against a hearth, whereupon it burst into flame?

… Do you think the Wright Brothers, or any other early experiments of developing flying machines… or all those involved in early rocketry… do you think all of those people were 100% sure that each of their designs would work?

When you have a stable business with a guaranteed source of huge amounts of revenue, that all you have to do is basically maintain at a very low cost…

Most other revenue can be thrown at whatever, in a how ever long it takes to do well and properly timeframe.

Actual innovation requires a series of creative ideas that are explored thoroughly, without overwhelming pressure or influence on decision making, or timetables.

Valve’s position allows them to do this.

Lots of those things go no where, but a good number of them work out, and basically revolutionize the industry, more than making up for the projects that do not work out.

As a certain wise old man once said:

“These things, they take time.”

Seems highly unlikely Valve was dedicating valuable dev/engineer time and money to make a toy they had no intention of ever producing…

This actually is basically how Valve works.

They have a pretty small team, and Steam is a fucking money printer.

They are a private company, not public.

That means no shareholders. No need to jam out a product to keep stock prices up, no boards of directors that also sit on 12 other boards that are all scheming to figure out how to push the whole industry toward stupid bullshit like NFT game items or ‘replace all our employees with AI’ or ‘every game is actually just a marketing tool for MTX or battlepasses.’

(The entire idea of loot boxes and in game microtransactions was basically just another ‘i wonder what would happen if, or if it would even be possible to…’ and then the steam marketplace of ingame items was born, and then basically every one else copied them, poorly.)

(Fuck, its basically the same with modern in game achievements as well.)

…

They could do nothing other than maintain their existing products and basically just coast on that forever, remaining profitable.

Because they have essentially no hard deadlines to put out some new product… this enables them to have a very loose, very voluntary, workplace culture which emphasizes quality over quantity, creativity over ‘its the same game in a new setting’, as well as not rushing anything.

A whole lot of their projects in the last decade are just people saying ‘I’m gonna do this’ and then if anyone else thinks its cool or neat, they work on it too.

People are allowed and encouraged to contribute to any project, at any time, as opposed to basically all other corporate software studios that have very rigid and defined roles.