Can you point me to a blog or feature of them that does this? I used to work at R7 up until last year and there was none of this functionality in their products at the time and nothing on the roadmap related to this. It was all static content.
There are a lot more factors that they will be subject to in an IPO that I think they could have avoided through this deal. IPOs/Stock market has not been kind to companies that do not have great margins and the current rumor mill has Wiz spending quite a lot in infrastructure costs to power their platform (a lot of it is built on Neptune and snapshot data transfer/processing is costly).
At the end of the day there were a lot of employees up and down the organizational chart that would have been very happy with this deal. So I wish that we could see the inner workings of what went wrong.
The constant rumor mill around Wiz keeps turning, and one starts to ask if there are nefarious actions at play.
I worked at a company that had an internal website that showed all people, departments, teams, and had a filter you could use for new employees or employees that left. It was sort of a double edged sword: you had enough information to start asking questions about what it meant if a team member or coworker was on the list. What was more interesting is that it almost became ritual for some people to logon first thing in the morning and check the list, every morning.
At the end of the day the number of instances that are publicly available is just clickbait in an article. What really matters is whether or not this is being actively exploited in the wild. I have my own issues with Clickbait and dramatization of vulnerabilities, but I don't think this is necessarily something that we should be concerned about (as-in I think that this vulnerability is pretty damn bad and should be patched, regardless of if there are 2k or 200k instances).
Sure some metrics around "number of instances out in the wild" will determine if threat actors put resources into developing mass-scale exploitation, but if you are patching for a company it doesn't REALLY matter.
If you are a target and are exploitable it doesn't matter how many honeypots are reporting as Confluence -- you will be breached if your Confluence server is vulnerable and exposed.
The best argument against honeypots would be that if we had some active group that was working with all affected users to patch and verify patches, if that was the case then the honeypots are a detractor. News outlets should do their best to get the best information, but this is the least-worst thing around vulnerability reporting IMO.
Breaking records does not mean profitable, having first hand knowledge of the situation esports (for Riot) is still very unprofitable -- the way that they try to measure esports profitability is by player increases/purchases after the events occur and leading up to the events and sponsorships of course.
esports does not bring in new players, it mostly brings back churned players or excites current players. The financial model for existing players versus new players is very different.
Another thing -- if you are ever need Sudafed (the real stuff) and they are out ask for one of the allergy medicines, the -d version. Claritin-D, Zertec-D all have the primary active ingredient as Sudafed bundled with the Allergy medicine.
I think that this is a response to the rising usage of the Cronus and/or other controller modification tools that give players advantages (cheats).
For example one of these "Mods" for Cronus state that they are:
a dynamic, fully-automated Anti-Recoil system that transforms your in-game character into a laser-guided juggernaut we've affectionately dubbed as [BEAM]
Battling cheaters in video games is a never-ending chase, but I appreciate that they are attempting something.
I wish that a gaming company could figure out a less invasive way to detect these cheaters.
I don't think this is even going to stop the Cronus. The Cronus already requires an OEM controller plugged into it to authenticate. If it does, a Cronus firmware update will probably figure out a way around it as it has an OEM device to work with.
For what it's worth, I own a Cronus and it's not nearly as much of an advantage as they sell it as. I bought it just to use as a fightstick adapter and it's kind of mediocre at that too.
> For what it's worth, I own a Cronus and it's not nearly as much of an advantage as they sell it as. I bought it just to use as a fightstick adapter and it's kind of mediocre at that too.
It can be pretty scummy in games that have strong aim-assist, however to achieve true scumbaggery you need to download custom anti-recoil scripts designed for specific games/guns. They can work really well in certain games.
Meh I'm a 40 year old man with the reflexes of a 60 year old man. I didn't buy it to cheat at online games, I don't play them.
I bought it so I could use my PS3 fightsticks in Soul Calibur 6. The Brook adapter works(worked, past tense soon?) way better and is way more cost effective.
The Cronus might make you a little better at a game if you're already really good. If you're bad at the game like me, you're still going to be bad at it.
You say you don't play online games and bought the controller for a fighting game so how can you tell how much of a cheat it is? The parent comment said it has anti-recoil which is a huge advantage in FPS games.
Every cheater will buy a cheating peripheral, and then go around saying how it isn’t all that much of an advantage, and how they don’t even need it, and have some story how they got it for some other reason entirely and certainly not for the reasons stated on the box. And then continue using it.
The poster claims to somehow know how much of an advantage it is. Wonder how that knowledge was acquired?
I am sure that too was perfectly innocent and just “that one time”. Then why all the hand-wringing about these cheats getting blocked?
> Every cheater will buy a cheating peripheral, and then go around saying how it isn’t all that much of an advantage, and how they don’t even need it, and have some story how they got it for some other reason entirely and certainly not for the reasons stated on the box.
I don't think that's true at all!
> The poster claims to somehow know how much of an advantage it is. Wonder how that knowledge was acquired? I am sure that too was perfectly innocent and just “that one time”.
They didn't even say they tested it online.
And you're making a claim that's impossible to disprove. Oh if they say they cheat regularly, they cheat regularly, and if they say they tried it out of curiosity, they're lying and they cheat regularly.
> Then why all the hand-wringing about these cheats getting blocked?
Because it's going to get blocked in all situations. Single player? Blocked. Fighting games? Blocked. Games with friends? Blocked.
They're not blocking cheats, they're blocking the controller itself. (If the block works on this model.)
They've gone into every xbox owner's house and destroyed their property with prejudice. 3rd party controllers, all of them, including all never used to cheat become non-functional and worthless.
At that point I don't give a flying fig what excuse they are using. Neither should the law when it comes to wanton destruction of property. Property rights are a thing!
If you don't have power over the software running on the hardware, it ain't your hardware. Force the consoles to be open and give power back to the users.
It’s always fun to see that viewpoint run face-first into real life, as it inevitably and immediately devolves into a cesspool of cheating that either drives everyone off the platform or loops back around to being forced to run anti-cheat software you don’t have power over.
These vapid comments about freedom
And abstract notions of ownership always strike me as naively and comically libertarian
"Won't someone please think of the children^W cheaters?" This argument is preposterous. If you want to solve multiplayer game cheating, there's no solution other than to make your game fully server-based and stream a video feed to the client. Meanwhile, these draconian anti-multiplayer-cheating methods obliterate single-player-game freedoms by removing all potential for modding, which is the only good thing about the medium of gaming these days.
These vapid comments about convenience over freedom and short-sighted notions of corporate control over our devices always strike me as naively and comically authoritarian.
> If you want to solve multiplayer game cheating, there's no solution other than to make your game fully server-based and stream a video feed to the client
Yep, but that would result in no games being commercially viable, and so no games existing.
So there needs to be a compromise in order for those games to exist.
It you want to play a mod friendly game, then… go play one? Lots exist.
Or invent a way to allow anyone to modify and run their game clients in any way they want to preserve abstract notions of freedom whilst also preventing them from modifying and running their game clients in a way that hurts the experience of others.
> "Won't someone please think of the children^W cheaters?" This argument is preposterous. If you want to solve multiplayer game cheating, there's no solution other than to make your game fully server-based and stream a video feed to the client."
This isn't really enough these days. There's proof-of-concept videos on YouTube of people developing ML-Image Recognition aimbots that move a physical mouse.
The time to do this was at the start of the generation or the next not mid way when people had invested in hardware. I think Sony already did this with the ps5, but from the get go so it’s fine
It’s just poor planning punishing xbox owners creating a ton of e waste
It is not all 3rd party controllers. It is "unauthorized accessory" controllers which excludes devices that are part of the "designed for Xbox” hardware partner program.
So they're willing to "authorize" all 3rd party controllers for no more than the cost of an engineer's time in examining each controller, regardless of who submitted it and paid?
Or can we acknowledge this for what it actually is, please.
or join with the authorities to maintain law and order.
You spin it as "cartel" but why can't it be spun as Law & Order?
Or do you think that cheaters should have unrestricted control and the ability to destroy the economy of any given game? You think people will play on platforms that aren't working to keep things even?
This is the same argument for P2W games where you can just pay to be the best. A few people will argue for that as they drop thousands to get those "rare" loot boxes and the rest will say "it's no fun to play a game against someone who's paying to be better than they really are".
To be fair, I think the vast majority of this is about online. Keeping a clean and hack free experience isn't just about selling proprietary controllers - it's also bout blocking cheating and keeping things sane.
(and single player games have Trophies which is online so... depending on how much you value pixelated trophies? those would be affected by "cheating in single player")
Remember... this is Microsoft. The same company that had YEARS of bad press because bad third party drivers was one of the largest causes of windows crashes.
So even if you never play online (I don't either) and only play single player games (FF and similar games here)? There's nothing worse than a shitty controller to ruin an experience.
It's possible some otherwise perfect controllers might lose their spot if they get "banned" because they aren't "upgraded" with "security chips" (or whatever) and you might be affected but in aggregate its something a company the size of MS has to take into account.
We'll see how it plays out but I'm not surprised (after reading comments about cheating stuff used by others in stuff like controllers).
You’re literally talking about creating a walled garden around what is currently an open ecosystem in which devices already purchased by people - including people with limited financial resources - will no longer work. All under the justification of ‘it solves cheating’. PC games have cheaters since forever, they’ve worked around that problem despite having less operating system and hardware control.
Not to mention the fact that eventually any hardware based controls will be circumvented - this is a device which converts mechanical actions to digital, so there’s nothing to stop physical control modifications.
The whole thing is either lazy, incompetent, or greedy, and won’t solve anything anyway.
"already purchased by people" Better talk to the EU that just forced Apple to negate a decade of iAccessories by forcing a switch to USB-C (which I support)
And even if "eventually controls will be circumvented" is true... making the barrier to entry harder gives them time to make back their investment (yes, the company deserves that). IE: DRM that eventually gets broken but not for a year can be the difference in the copies of a game sold being enough to make it a success or not.
The DRM also gives companies a path to suing companies that break the DRM. IE: Nintendo or Apple suing companies that jailbreak their stuff. Or you can be someone like Sony who has a PS5 that hasn't been jailbroken yet - making their platforms more resistant to cheating and thus more attractive to players who want a level playing field.
"won't solve anything anyways" Depends on your definition of "solve". If it takes 5+ years to fully jailbreak a PS5? Then that's successful. So even "broken" jailbreaks can be seen as successful in the long term.
There are negatives to these moves... but it's plain ignorance at best and dishonesty at worse to say there aren't justifiable reasons for companies like MS to take these steps.
> PC games have cheaters since forever, they’ve worked around that problem despite having less operating system and hardware control.
Have they though? Cheaters are rampant in most games, meanwhile consoles have been highly successfully in preventing cheaters from using things like wallhacks and aimbotting.
Once you get into certain skill levels in matchmaking it is very common to run into cheaters, depending on the game. If you think about above average lobbies, the number of cheaters will go up until you get to another MMR threshold just due to the fact that the cheats enable people to move up MMR. The average low MMR players will see less, and the top of MMR will see less, but the middle-upper bracket cheating is very, very bad.
Companies are trying to battle this with anti-cheats, heuristics, shadowbanning, etc but it is still noticeable at above-average MMR.
Regularly when doing anything that touches online. And even stuff that doesn't touch "online", these days, normally involves trophies that you can cheat your way to getting.
I'll agree that if it was ONLY trophies? Sure you might have an argument... but this obviously isn't only about that one thing.
Let me ask this... if trophies are low key "no one cares" (and that's not the case... plenty of people go out of their way to "100%" games and care about those stupid trophies) then what's the solution to allow "bootleg" controllers for only those people? how many people fall into that category? 25%? 15%? 5? 1? That's a low % of people to support a fragmented market - which is what MS would have to do - support a more fragmented market.
I think it's just too simplistic to say "M$ Evil and only wants money and I play online so I'm the only one that matters".
Supporting "grey market" means a more complicated product to support and that complication isn't going to be worth it for such a small subset of players.
PC gaming is loaded with tons of cheaters despite rootkit level anticheat systems. Having locked down hardware ecosystems reduces the rate of cheating, I've had far fewer times of running into cheaters on console games than on PC games.
I'm just speaking to the idea of PC gaming has worked around cheaters, as if its a solved problem. PC gaming has such a massive cheating problem games are resorting to rootkit-like anticheat systems and yet there's still tons of cheaters out there. It is precisely because there's so much freedom out of the box on a PC that cheating flourishes there.
Blocking controllers isn't a rootkit, I agree. But acting like PC gaming has somehow solved cheating without needing restrictions on input devices and the like is disingenuous.
Blocking controllers makes the cost to have a hacked controller higher. It takes more effort to make a useful hacked controller, they have to source already built controllers and tear them apart, etc. Higher costs means it will be less likely to have people using hacked controllers. If you make the ownership of hacked controllers lower, you reduce the rate of cheating on the platform.
Using cheats on a lot of PC games can be free. If there was some magic that made the cost to install a cheat at least $100 do you think the rate of cheating will be lower, higher, or the same?
The goal isn't to eliminate all cheating, that's impossible. The goal is to reduce the rate of cheating.
Microsoft's only motivation for anything is the maximisation of shareholder value.
There are things we in society don't allow corporations to do in their pursuit of profit. We codify those things in law. This thing they want to do is one of them.
"only" is a strong word and obviously not true. Mainly? Sure... but only? a company with thousands of employees "only" wants one thing?
And saying it's illegal is a bit too strong as well. Maybe in the EU but even then? The EU just made a decade of things obsolete when forcing Apple to switch to USB-C so saying "companies can't do that because illegal" obviously isn't true.
And what is illegal in EU is legal in America or vice versa... or brazil... or China... so saying "society doesn't allow" is too simplistic on that level as well.
In America it's illegal to break DRM. Companies like Apple and Nintendo do stuff so that you can't run custom code or use unauthorized attachments/parts/etc. if you break the DRM you can get sued as a company that provides that service.
And you haven't address the fact that MS, Sony, Nintendo, Apple, etc all have to have stable trustworthy platforms for gaming - that goes beyond "they only want money"- sure, they want money but part of getting that is having platforms people want to use. That they trust. That makes cheating harder and provides a level playing field.
Take a step back and realize that "greedy" companies aren't as simplistic as you want to make them out to be and even if they are "greedy"? They do have valid reasons to do shit like this.
Employees will want many different things and have many differing systems of morals of different strengths including some being totally amoral.
Microsoft is an organisation focused on maximisation of shareholder value. Literally anything they do contrary to that gets them sued for securities fraud. Any employee who morally objects to any action taken by the company can suck it up, resign or commit sabotage for which they will be fired if found out.
Microsoft management have to be ready to defend any and every action as being at the very least not detrimental to shareholder value in court.
They are most definitely doing this to combat cheaters. I tried out Cronus + KBM on my friend's Xbox S and it was comical. I had aim assist, no recoil and a keyboard and mouse. I was running 100:3 K:D on COD:MW2. If you don't think cheating is a big part of the reason you've never played console games competitively.
That's the problem though: pampering to competitive gamers ruins the experience for the vast majority of people, who just want to, you know, enjoy a game. Unfortunately, competitive gamers are the only ones that matter - they're the cash cows of this part of the industry, which now focuses on creating as many such players as they can, and milking them for all they're worth.
Consider how cheating was handled back before AAA games turned into videogame equivalent of Marvel Cinematic Universe movies: if you were found cheating, you were booted off the server, period. There was no matchmaking bullshit, the games weren't nudging or limiting you to play on the ladder, against global ranking. Instead, you had local and international servers, public and private; you had neighbourhood servers, and servers run by groups of friends, and themed servers, etc. - in other words, servers were communities. As diverse and rich as human communities can be. And they handled cheating in ways communities do it.
On smaller / local servers, people wouldn't cheat because the community extended past the game to other on-line places, and/or to meatspace. Everyone was friends with each other, and being a cheating asshole is a fast way to lose your friends. Scaling up, you had all the mechanisms one also saw on discussion boards: some servers had owner or moderators ban anyone they didn't like; others voted. It was nicely self-regulating: servers weren't sticky, so being banned as false positive (or out of spite) didn't hurt. People didn't like power-tripping server operators? They'd switch over to a new server, run by someone saner.
Were there still cheaters? Yes. Assholes and griefers happened. But without a single global ranking to compete for, cheating was mostly self-defeating: there was no reward, no incentive, and you'd be just ruining the fun for yourself.
Yes, cheating is kind of a proxy reason why I don't enjoy multiplayer games. But the real reason is this: modern games feel like suddenly all the little soccer leagues were required to follow all the FIFA rules, were allowed only to play registered games, only to use pitches and equipment and balls and clothes that are certifiably up to spec, regularly audited - all because it might happen that our ad-hoc team of Sunday players would one day be visited by a World Cup team, and it would suck if we had an unfair advantage.
It's just ruining the game for everyone, for the sake of a small group of people running a racket.
Wow you've captured well the feelings I have looking at modern gaming very well. In the 2000s I played on servers and chatted with people for weeks, over time we learnt how each other played and formed cooperative teams and had our own in jokes. Kind of like HN. Your description of "modern gaming" to get up a global ladder highlights the near equivalence of social media firms, facebook etc. with their likes, fllowers and doom scrolling. It makes me slightly sad if kids don't have those communities today.
This reminds me of Wildstar. The MMO was intentionally dedicated to hardcore players, making progression nearly impossible for casuals. They were pretty smug about it as I recall. It eventually died, as there weren't enough players paying micro-transactions to keep the servers online.
It declined remarkably quickly on release, as was completely predictable. Unfortunately, it had multiple problems, so difficulty fetishists could always point to the other problems.
Wildstar was the game that made me realize I was done with MMOs. Not only was I not really looking forward to the attunement flowchart (I love raiding but jeeze) but around level 12 I realized I didn't want to play the game you have to play before you can play the game. I've come to really appreciate round-based lobby games since then.
I think my wife would love to explore the game again, and I think we could maybe tune some dungeons so they're doable by just two players, but we're parents now and some things are just not possible anymore.
I don’t understand the relevance of this. Are you saying that aggressively targeting cheaters is pampering to wannabe pros or that not aggressively targeting them is pampering wannabe pros?
Another thing that has changed in FPS land is game modes making cheaters WAY more frustrating. It used to be that you get into a lobby, see someone cheating, and could leave and find a new lobby right away. Now with the extremely popular battle royale modes, you don’t encounter the cheater until 20 minutes into a match — via dying in a game mode where dying is “expensive.”
I'm saying is that it's a problem companies created themselves, and are subjecting customers to increasingly dystopian measures in a futile attempt to manage it.
Pro gaming and casual gaming don't mix well. Cheating is a self-solving (or at least self-regulating) problem if you let people freely associate and host games. Cheating is only a big problem in competitive gaming, where there are rewards (status, monetary, or both) for moving up the global ranking. It still can be solved in context of pro-gaming, but it requires some invasive means.
The right approach would be to treat casual and pro gaming as separate experiences. Casual players play casually without invasive anti-cheating measures; pro players sign up for the league, which comes with extra restrictions. This is exactly how it used to work in the past, and exactly how any non-computer competition works: casuals and pro players may be playing the same game, but their goals are different, and so the rules and experience is different too.
Unfortunately, as it always happened, the industry decided to do the exact opposite of the right thing, and is now forcing all players to play by the competitive pro-gaming rules. With the game designed around pro gaming, causal players no longer have means to host and moderate their own servers in a social fashion, thus losing the natural, non-invasive method of combating cheaters. The addition of match-making further prevents the kind of grouping casual players prefer. As a result, casual players (which tend to be the majority) become exposed to competitive cheaters, which obviously makes the game extremely frustrating for the former. And to mitigate that, companies are employing invasive anti-cheating methods - methods that make sense when dealing with clubs and official matches, but are plain abusive and dystopian when employed remotely at scale.
Again, the right way to solve cheating is to keep casual gaming and pro gaming entirely separate - the same way playing soccer with your friends is an entirely separate activity from playing it professionally in a local team. Unfortunately, I think companies figured out that pro gamers are where the money is made, so they're willing to screw the majority of the players to streamline costs and hopefully create more wannabe-pros that can be monetized.
Several of the assumptions in your post are flawed, which undermines your whole argument.
> Cheating is only a big problem in competitive gaming, where there are rewards (status, monetary, or both) for moving up the global ranking
This is untrue, cheating was until recently a huge problem for team fortress 2 which hasn't been competitive for years.
See also the huge cheating problems in the CoD games from the Xbox 360 era, which was before they were competitive outside of small, grassroots tournaments.
> The addition of match-making further prevents the kind of grouping casual players prefer
Players overwhelmingly do not prefer server browsing. Games have consolidated on the matchmaking model because any game without it is dead on arrival.
The biggest example of a game with a foot still in both worlds is Counterstrike, where the overwhelming use of custom servers is for external matchmaking services with stricter anti cheat than Valves VAC.
> Unfortunately, I think companies figured out that pro gamers are where the money is made, so they're willing to screw the majority of the players to streamline costs and hopefully create more wannabe-pros that can be monetized.
Again this is just not true - the revenue and profit of casual games dwarfs competitive games. Check out a recent financial report from ActiBlizzard and see how much money they make from competitive games like Overwatch and CoD compared to their mobile sub company, King.
Pro circuits and pro game modes are advertising expenses, not revenue or profit centers. Arguably the biggest pro game in the world, Counterstrike, makes the vast ,majority of it's money selling lootboxes and taking a cut on skin trades.
> Again this is just not true - the revenue and profit of casual games dwarfs competitive games.
This is actually very, very true. Most esports departments are not incredibly profitable (I actually worked for one of the biggest esports gaming companies for a long time and it was a constant source of friction how much money was spent on esports versus the return on it).
At the end of the day, cheating is a dopamine hit: killing the whole lobby in 2-seconds by holding down a button makes people feel good and you can't fight against that without some pretty drastic measures.
So I agree with the overall thrust of your argument here in that I far preferred the world of casual servers you could hop on with your friends, make goofy rules, ban whoever you wanted, etc., and I see how dissolving that into shared servers with automated matchmaking makes certain anti-cheat measures infeasible.
What I’m not sure of is to what degree the new shared servers/auto-matchmaking pattern is due to catering to competitive gamers? Is that really the reason?
(I legitimately have no idea so I’m curious how you’ve come to this conclusion)
The vast majority of players are likely using the stock controllers or controllers they picked up at a normal store stocking pretty much only OEM or approved 3rd party controllers.
The vast majority of players will never know this is a thing.
If they were trying to combat cheaters, they wouldn't have released an official controller that allows generic, 3rd party, unauthenticated inputs: the Xbox Adaptive Controller.
It would be pretty trivial to hook up a Pi Pico through the jacks and USB ports to be able to make a KBM adapter like that. There just hasn't been a point making such a device when the xim/cronus works fine.
"Pretty trivial" but only for the small percentage of people that are tech minded like that and who can be bothered; it's not an issue, not compared to laypeople being able to buy an off the shelf ready to use product.
Yes, and once a company like xim makes one, they can sell it and laypeople will buy it off the shelves. This method doesn't require any internal modifications or anything, that's the whole point of the adaptive controller.
The creators of the xim will want to make a new product to sell if their old one no longer works. It might even be possible with a software update.
Those off the shelf ready to use cheating products will still be there, they are just going to use a modified xbox controller instead of a third-party one because that's what microsoft allows.
The difference is Microsoft will now get more money out of the cheating products than before, not sure that sounds the right incentive but that's what is going to happen.
If this ban affects cheaters at all (after the next firmware update), the next Chronus could very well be a little box with a bunch of colour coded wires that you plug into an Xbox accessibility controller. All the cheater logic ("no recoil", mouse like precision on the analog sticks) would still work perfectly.
How is cheating in video games hurting society?
I would assume it drives people off playing multiplayer games, but I fail to see how this would be bad for society.
Possibly, I think the math on number of people that currently purchase controllers that will be blocked in the future is a very small amount of money compared to the possibility of losing that revenue to other gaming sources if that is the reason.
"Preserving console experience" really feels like corporatespeak to say "cheaters" without saying the devices in question (because then it raises visibility to those devices).
I think the "doing this for money" is the people who are currently not gaming due to rampant cheating in games like R6S, Apex, COD, etc.
That's a convenient metric. Or rather, the lack of it. My common sense tells me there are significantly more people using third party controllers than there are cheaters, though.
I think the metric is blocked controllers, which is a small subset of 3rd party controllers. So far the most common people complaining about this change is cronus and xim users not legit players.
Most 3rd party controllers that are being sold online are still compatible afaict.
I don't think it has affected xim or cronus at all. They use official first party Xbox controllers to handle authentication, and MITM them to inject inputs.
Instead the big one affected has been Brooks, who make very popular boards for custom fighting game controllers.
they obviously care about money and selling periphials is money... but so is selling consoles.
If they can't control the cheaters in some fashion (losing battle and all that) then they will sell less consoles because why would people pay for that? (unless you're a cheater paying for it but that's besides the point).
The problem you have is that you think there's only one answer to this and the answers is the want to stop the cheaters AND they want money because cheaters affect both.
If the goal was really to stop cheater, they'd provide an API in their XDA to let game developers reject unauthorized controllers. That way, ranked matches could take advantage of this to make competitive games more fair. If people want to have more fun with cheats in a single player game using an unapproved third-party controller, they should be able to do so!
I generally agree with the accessibility arguments against doing anything for this, but if you are going to do something, I feel like "give dev's a way to opt into this check, limit to online play" feels like a reasonable system. That would allow fighting games in particular to not opt in.
Sony has something like this setup with screen recording, where some parts of games (cutscenes in some stuff) can't get recorded. It's annoying, but at least it's not the whole game, and the feature exists.
> give dev's a way to opt into this check, limit to online play
In theory, that would have less of a PR risk / impact, too -- if they provide it as a configuration option, they can shift the blame onto third-party devs. who change a value in some XML file somewhere.
(Not that I particularly care about Microsoft's PR, just thought it to be interesting commentary.)
If they were trying to stop cheaters they could just ban "unauthorized" controllers for online play. This would give a much more understandable message "Unauthorized controllers can't be used for online play to ensure that no player gains an unfair advantage."
Heuristics in competitive games will always bring their own sets of issues.
As it's an arms race, controller tweaks will adjust to be at the borderline of what the system detects, and on the other hand the 0.001% of the most dedicated players that actually beat that borderline will get pushined with a mere "no human can be that good" response, which is the worse outcome when the game's whole point _is_ to be that good.
In the speedrunning community there are plenty of players who can fairly reliably perform frame-accurate inputs (i.e. press a button exactly on a specific 1/60th of a second) so it seems to me that you would have a very, very hard time distinguishing the best legitimate players from cheaters.
This has always been my thoughts as well, and it seems like they have the data required, but I always think they are worried about some false positive issues. These companies should have the resources to build deployable models for this.
There are also discussions around CapEX versus OpEx that apply here, and depreciating costs over time. There is a trade-off of agility, cost, and maintenance, but the markup on cloud is quite high.
Hey Melingo, I noticed that you responded to a lot of different threads in this post. It seems like you are a bit dismissive of people's experiences using K8s. I have also run K8s at scale, and it is not easy, it is not out of the box in cloud providers. There are a ton of addons, knobs, and work that has to be doen to build a sustainable and "production ready" version of K8s (for my requirements) in AWS.
K8s is NOT easy, and I do not believe that in it's current form it is the pinnacle of deployment/orchestration technologies. I am waiting for what is next, because the pain that I have personally experienced around K8s that I know others are feeling as well does not make it a perfect solution for everything, and definitely not usable for others.
At the end of the day it's a tool, and it is sometimes difficult to work with.
I know you are sharing your experience, others are as well. Let's not dismiss other's experience just because it doesn't match our own, the truth is most likely somewhere in the middle. Especially when so many people are clamoring saying that they had pain using K8s.
The initial deployment for EKS requires multiple plugins to get to something that is "functional" for most production workloads. K8s fails in spectacular ways (even using Argo, worse using Argo TBH) that require manual intervention. Local disk support for certain types of workloads is severely depressing. Helm is terrible (templating Yaml... 'nuff said). Security groups, IAM roles, and other cloud provider functions require deep knowledge of K8s and the cloud provider. Autoscaling using Karpenter is difficult to debug. Karpenter doesn't gracefully handle spot instance cost.
I could go on, but these are the things you will experience in the first couple days of attempting to use k8s. Overall, if you have deep knowledge of K8s, go for it, but It is not the end-all solution to Infra/container orchestration in my mind.
I fought with a workload for over a day with our K8s experts, it took me an hour to deploy it to an EC2 ASG for a temporary release while moving it back to K8s later. K8s IS difficult, and saying it's not has a lot of people questioning the space.
The way I see it is it starts off easy, and quickly ramps up to extremely complex. This should not be the case.
I worked at a company that had their own deployment infra stack and it was 1000x better than K8s. This is going to be the next step in the K8s space I believe and it may use K8s underneath the covers, but the level of abstraction for K8s is all wrong IMO and it is trying to do too much.
I have noticed a large difference in the past couple of days in my timeline. Every time I load the page there are 4 Elon tweets in the top 100 (with Elon being the top entry every single time). There are also an increasing number of ads in my timeline, every 4-5 tweets has an ad.
I finally had to mute Elon with the terrible memes and too many tweets in the feed. I could have sworn I did this a couple of months ago, so I'm surprised I had to do it again.
His tweet around "absolute block versus percent block" made sense to me, but even so every single time I load twitter his tweets are at the top of my page, it's too much and I wouldn't be surprised if he does have a factor enabled due the changes I have seen recently.
