Quoting: g000hDon't think your point holds weight *because* cheating is easy on Windows. Almost all the cheating tools are built to work on Windows. It would be harder for me as a Linux gamer to find cheats to use on Linux. Sure, someone could make Linux better for cheating, but the status is that it isn't a great cheating platform unless you build the cheats yourself rather than take advantage of all the cheats already built for Windows.

You are confusing cause and effect.
That you can find more cheats and tools for Windows is exclusively down to the fact that 99% of gamers are on Windows. Writing some tools to edit hex values while a game is in RAM isn't easier on Windows, it's the same on pretty much any platform.
Same with editing game-specific dynamic libraries, inspecting/inserting network packages, and all the other ways to cheat.

It just wouldn't make sense to write some cheating tool for Linux as it wouldn't really be used by anyone. There already aren't too many gamers on Linux, and (potential) cheaters are an even smaller subset of that.

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: g000hI get quite irritated by the fact that the likes of Garry Newman and Tim Sweeney and other game developers suggest that the approx 1% Linux gaming market-share would in any way influence the amount of cheaters on their games.

Statistically speaking, if 10% of Linux users were cheating, then that is 10% of the 1% population, i.e. 0.1% of gamers. Comparatively, if you have 10% Windows users cheating, then that is 10% of the 99% population, i.e. 9.9% of the gamers. Even if every Linux gamer was cheating (*ridiculous*) then that would only amount to a max of 1% of the population.

If I as a Windows user would want to cheat, and it were hard on Windows and easy on Linux, I might just dual boot. I guess that's what they're fearing, not the 0.whatever%.

That's also how I understand it.
They don't think Linux users are cheaters, but are afraid easy cheating might lure cheaters to use Linux for their goals.

With which they do have a point.

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Quoting: tuubidoes restricting chat abuse make the game experience significantly worse for anyone? Does it make the game less approachable for their target market? If not, I don't see why Valve should care. If this "spicy banter" isn't what makes the game enjoyable for the general player base and attracts new players, this move is a good one.

The problem is that censorship generally starts out as something "innocent" and well-meaning. But never stays that way.
At the beginning, people might only want to censor some generally accepted racist (accepted as in, yes, everyone agrees this is racist) terms.
But then, slowly, or faster (who knows), more and more censorship will seep in as soon as anyone gets their precious feefees hurt by whatever "evil word" offends them for whatever reasons on any given day.
Fast forward, and you'll get words banned that are in no way offensive to any majority of the userbase and soon the only words being allowed in chat are "flower" and "love", but only if you kindly ask everyone's permission beforehand. At this point, why even have a chat?
A tiny minority, which isn't even playing the game, just raising a stink on Twitter etc., ends up dictating a majority of the actual playerbase what they can or cannot say. Doesn't sound very reasonable or logical to me.

Just look at the recent nonsense happening with Github renaming "master" to whatever, because apparently the word master itself cannot be said anymore, no matter the context (bad news for anyone who has a master's degree like my GF, their degree is now racist, or who accomplished mastery of some skill)...
Or that desaster in Visual Studio Code when the Santa symbol was removed from an innocent celebration of Christmas time, because a single user found it offensive for the most absurd reasons with which barely anyone agreed.
Again, a tiny minority dictating the majority what is or isn't acceptable.

In this climate, I wouldn't trust anyone, least of all people in the PR or media business, to make any reasonable decision in the matter. Because currently, the name of the game is bend to knee to whoever is crying the loudest about being offended on social media - except for the actual userbase.
Better to not even let them gain a single foot in the door whenever it can be avoided. Even if that means having to defend stupid insults.
I rather have stupid insults than a thought and word police.

Quoting: tuubiYou don't need to play this game if you just want to trade insults. The Internet is full of venues for that sort of thing.

Banter is part of the game, believe it or not.
If someone doesn't want it, they can disable the chat, just like what you can do with voice chats.

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Quoting: PatolaWhat other "reverse horror" games (where you are the villain) do you guys like? I particularly love Attack of the Earthlings [External Link] and the Overlord [External Link] series.

Overlord was awesome. The seal clubbing alone was hilariously over-the-top. Took some getting over myself to get that sweet XP.

There's also Stubbs The Zombie, which was awesome, but unfortunately not successful at all.

Another, actually very dark game, would be Manhunt.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyIt's believed by many investigators that the massacres in Rwanda were to a fair extent enabled by media like talk radio routinely calling the other ethnic group various stuff like cockroaches and whatnot, dehumanizing them and making it psychologically "OK" to kill them. Not that there wasn't other stuff going on, but that had a big impact.

Are you aware the topic is some random insults in heated moments in online game chats, not real hate-speech, systemic persecution or actual calls to violence, etc.?
The latter things have always been forbidden and people who did that have always been quickly banned, at least as far back as I remember (back when Counter-Strike was new).
And the former has never lead to the latter ones, as it is always some infantile venting while the latter ones require an actual motivation and ideology behind them.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyI was bullied in school. A lot. I was chased around and beaten up routinely by groups of 4 to 6, although not that thoroughly 'cause it wasn't that tough a school (and often they failed to catch me 'cause I ran fast). And I was insulted constantly and socially ostracized. I gave as good as I got there. So as someone with extensive experience of the physical and the verbal side . . . if you could have somehow subtracted one entirely, just leaving the other, well, I won't say it's an easy or slam-dunk choice but I'd probably get rid of the verbal rather than the physical. So I don't find people convincing when they say words are nothing and should just be ignored. Or that verbal abuse is fun.

Well, kids and teens can be cruel, that's not exactly news.
But what does bullying at school, which is always very focused on a few unlucky individuals which happen to have the wrong face/color/name/body/accent/whatever, have to do with forbidding people to vent and sling some insults in an online chat?
If someone would be followed around by the same group of people online, with them constantly harassing that person, that would be a comparable case. But given the nature of matchmaking in these games, that isn't something that could even happen.

Sucks for you that your experience makes you unable to deal with even the slightest forms of verbal abuse in the form of "kaka-language", but this isn't true for most people who actually play these games and there is therefore no need to censor anything or restrict anyone playing these games.
If some real racists, etc. turn up in these games and start letting their nonsensical views loose, they are generally identified and dealt with quickly, but some frustrated venting or spicy banter has nothing to do with that.

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Quoting: GuestThe demo worked on a potato and is fun to play.

My traveling laptop is more of a lemon, do you think it will work on that as well?

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: TheSHEEEPThe problem is that nowadays everything can be called "hate-speech" and get the perpetually offended raging, calling for mommy (aka whoever runs the game) to restrict others so they can have their completely opposition-and-adversity-free safe space.

I've noticed that the people who love their gratuitous kaka-language insults get tremendously offended and thin-skinned whenever they're confronted with someone who considers it juvenile stupidity. Buncha snowflakes.

They sure do.
Just a month ago or so, I was playing some Mordhau and chat was especially active with beautifully infantile insults.
My "What's going on here? School's out early?" was met with just the right amount of upset kiddies and ROFLing adults.

Wouldn't want to have it any other way.

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Quoting: x_wing

Quoting: PatolaOk, your avatar, your representation in a virtual world is shred to pieces in a graphical manner and with sophisticated animations, 3D graphics and sounds, but still words which are as virtual as any graphics are worse? So the words unambiguously affect the person, they could not be "protected" by these nasty words like, you know, not giving a f* about them instead of asking for censorship?

It's a game were you will finds teens playing. But even if it wasn't the case, most communities have norms against hate-speech so this is not censorship, these are just measures in order to make this rules work.

The problem is that nowadays everything can be called "hate-speech" and get the perpetually offended raging, calling for mommy (aka whoever runs the game) to restrict others so they can have their completely opposition-and-adversity-free safe space.
Even terribly uncreative insults. Like, really, whoever programmed these bots had a gold mine that could have been used for Monkey Island-style insult banter, but instead they went with lame stuff. Meh.

"Hate-speech" really has lost most of its meaning, it's just a "whatever I don't like"-term used by people who are unable to deal with words of opposition and some lame insults. Meanwhile, real hate-speech is still rampant on Twitter, Facebook, etc. and rarely penalized.
Some people should really learn to internalize the "sticks and stones" and grow some skin.
Or disable the chat, especially voice chat (not because of insults, but I just find babbling people annoying as hell when I play). Which they now can in TF2. Hooray!
Besides, what happened to the good old ******ing of words?

Being German, I used to get lots of "nazi!" comments in online games when I still played them (and had a more obvious accent than I do nowadays), but I was only amused by the lack of creativeness of my opponents. Also, it was generally a sign that I was playing well to get anyone feel the need to vent bollocks.
But - and that's the important part - I'd never, ever, have called for anyone to silence them (except if they just spammed and made chat unusable with it).
If they need to vent, let them vent. Also makes it easy to identify sore losers.
Then again, I'm just not one of the people who want to silence all opposition because I don't like their words, nor do I feel so insecure about myself that I'd need a "safe chat" free of people calling me names...

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Stadia really, badly, needs a built-in resolution picker as I've seen games do this repeatedly with no other way than the external Stadia Plus plugin to help. Their own performance picker doesn't force a resolution, only set the limits of what it will do overall.

Stadia, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Spotify, ...
None of the streaming services actually offer good services. They are all completely barren when it comes to features that would both just make sense and be easy to implement.

I have no clue what's behind that lack of quality software, but it is very noticeably tied to streaming services.

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Someone made an effort to write a bot slinging insults in chat?
What's the point of that? You aren't even around to witness the meltdowns... :tongue:

Anyway, lots of games could use a better player reporting feature. I have played quite a few games that didn't have any built-in method of reporting players.
You'd instead have to make videos or screenshots yourself, go to some obscure website, follow multiple support-ticket-steps, ...

Sure, if it is very easy to report someone, you'll get lots of false reports for various reasons, but that's just something you'll have to sift through. If the game is big/successful enough, there shouldn't be a problem in hiring people for that.

Most devs really don't want to deal with problems in their playerbase.

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