Quoting: TurkeysteaksGenuinely asking here, what is the path forwards for this situation? I do not see how it can be solved.

The only way you can prevent cheating is by controlling (restricting) people’s actions. The only way you can catch cheaters in the act is by scrutinizing every action they take. This applies to everything outside simply video games. Sports competitions have blood tests to detect drug use. Exams have invigilators to spot concealed cheat sheets and other tricks. Card games have people watching for a literal card up your sleeve. Casinos only trust their own dice. Some methods are more invasive than others, but in each example they have the considerable advantage of holding the competition in person to visually keep everyone in check.

Online play lacks that last lever and is built on eminently fallible platforms with multiple points of vulnerability. User input must be sanitized to account for what’s humanly possible, but in real-time 3D games with freedom of movement, that’s a boggling amount of parameters to account for and since latency kills those games, you have very little time to make a decision when it comes to proactive processing (after-the-fact analysis and sanctions are another story of course). I imagine it’s a lot easier to validate a player’s actions in a turn-based game with a small set of well-defined possible moves.

So you have to restrict the player’s actions, and watch them closely in a way that you can trust what you are seeing. That’ll never happen if you don’t control the machine they use to interface with the game. And even if you do, there’s always things like having accomplices watch a competitor to gain illegitimate strategic knowledge in near-real-time. Remote competitions are a flawed concept altogether, as far as I see it. Rootkits are both necessary and still insufficient: you can’t spy on the player without them, but they still won’t catch everything either. So make your choice: accept that there will be cheaters and take reactive action to punish and disincentivize them, or don’t compete via the Internet. And since cheaters have no trouble evading bans in free-to-play games, the former is also a lost cause as long as you’re not playing in person.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Bogomipsif I follow your example, if 2 cheaters disturb a game I would say the game is ruined for all the players involve in that round so maybe 10 times (I have no idea of the player count in a round) then, it disturbs 20 people at a time not everyone that's why you always see the same type of comments imho.

Your interpretation of "disturb" seems overly generous. First, even if only one match out of ten puts me up against a cheater, my experience of the game overall will be hampered as that might mean getting paired with cheaters multiple times a week. Second, those games typically have ranking systems and rewards for player performance. If cheaters can easily occupy the top of every leaderboard without skill, it does disrupt the game’s competitive scene for the whole player base and devalues the competition itself.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I wonder why they made the schedule such a tiny, illegible image that you can't even right-click to see in its original size. If anyone else is having trouble with it:

Vertical:
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/607436da860d0a6278bc81e7/ebb604c3-f497-4669-b939-5340ff6c70f8/SS24_Schedule_Vertical_2K.png
Horizontal:
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/607436da860d0a6278bc81e7/b826ce82-2bcf-4a4e-8884-83cadabe6f6c/SS24_Schedule_Horizontal_2K.png

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I got the newsletter this morning announcing that KEYGEN CHURCH (aka MASTER BOOT RECORD) is doing 10 remixes from the original Castlevania OST on this. There’s going to be some bangers there.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

A good point someone mentioned in a previous article is also that Valve are still unable to keep up with the verification process and provide consistent, reliable results on many games. Adding a second hardware target to test against is going to basically double the work needed when it comes to performance and drivers (though not UI/UX aspects like font size and keyboard entry, I reckon).

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I always felt like "Minetest" sounded like a debugging tool for Minecraft servers or something, so I’d say good change as far as that goes. I don’t see how that will help "throw off the 'Minecraft clone' comments" though, since that’s exactly what it is regardless of the name.

Quoting: hm11I get the french and code mixture, maybe is because i don't know french

What French?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Ooooh I had played this with a friend taking turns using Remote Play Together but the input lag made it unfair at times. Sharing levels at the same time ought to be even more fun!

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I don't usually go for Survival games because I’m afraid of the time sink and prefer stories to sandboxes, but I sunk 50 hours in the demo so this was a day-one purchase for me with the native Linux build. I just really like the atmosphere and getting lost in Realistic mode, where you don’t see your current position on the map.

Quoteyou need to survive the wilderness with nothing but your bare hands to start with.

For the record, that is hyperbole. You do start off with a few steel tools, a compass and enough food to last you a few days while you get to grips with the game systems and set up camp.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

A bunch of new TBRPG demos? There goes my free time for the next week!

Quoting: GamingTFMThese are some pretty good deals. Is it worth buying the basic version of XCOM 2 or should I get the version with all DLCs?

I’ve been sticking to the base game because I’ve heard the expansions make it more buggy and I feel like the extras would make it overwhelming (there’s already a lot going on in my opinion), but if you want to use Workshop content, a lot of the most popular mods require War of the Chosen. I think it would be a sound strategy to buy just the base game for your first playthrough(s), and wait for another sale if you want to add on to it later.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I think when they say "'departing' from the Season Pass model with everyone getting access at the same time", they mean that season passes will no longer include early access? Which may be entirely to avoid too many players saying that the game sucks before everyone else can buy it blindly.

Quoting: KlaasIteresting… “our goal is not to push any specific agenda”… “focusing on (…) GaaS-native experiences”.
Focusing on GaaS is an agenda, right?

Considering the wording, this sounds to me like a vague allusion to gender politics. Trying to convince far-right nutjobs that they haven’t "gone woke"? I’m not sure. I don’t know what the "polarized comments around Ubisoft lately" are other than whether or not Star Wars Outlaws was any good.

View this comment - View article - View full comments