this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2024
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[–] [email protected] 182 points 8 months ago (5 children)

Seems like a major case of Redditors being able to dish it out but not take anything in return.

[–] [email protected] 79 points 8 months ago (7 children)

I was watching Mo1st play Helldivers the other night and he mentioned someone's comment about it having the kernel anti-cheat, and one of his buddies immediately said "that guy's a redditor."

I had never felt more attacked yet agreed with something so much.

[–] [email protected] 140 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (5 children)

If people knew what devs said (justifiably) about players when nobody is looking, the internet would implode.

Like, I'm not trying to be an asshole, but holy fuck gamers are the worst about actually knowing how games are made or the consequences of various decisions they want made.

I don't know why 80% of gamers think playing games means they know how to make games, but it infuriates many of us to no end. We get that it's just misguided desire to see the games improve but jfc it makes life incredibly difficult (especially for the CMs)

EDIT: Imagine someone told an architect "You should just remove that load bearing wall. This other building doesn't have one in that position and it's great. Why is it so hard for you?"

[–] [email protected] 40 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Oh they definitely say that, and some are dumb enough to shop around for engineers they can bully. Just look at the Millennium Tower in San Fran. Idiot investors found engineers they could bully, built an inadequate foundation, and are now trying to save the building. A huge building they just built.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Yeah, and anyone with an ounce of common sense will point at that and be like "See? This is what happens." But an outrageous chunk of gamers seem incapable of applying the same logic to game development 🤷

Edit: btw this is why knowing how to give good feedback is a really good skill to learn

Bad feedback: "You should remove this button, it sucks and I don't want it"

Good feedback: "It disrupts my experience when I go to press button A but accidentally press button B because it's so close."

[–] [email protected] 39 points 8 months ago

"If people knew what devs said (justifiably) about players when nobody is looking, the internet would implode."

I feel that applies to every profession. Im a mechanic and sure we get a bad wrap on the internet for all the dodgy work and ripping off we do.

But when we're dealing with customers and their cars are filthy gross and full f rubbish and they're in for the dumbest of shit you just wish you could come back at them with facts and keep your job.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago

I totally believe it. Just based on complaints in gaming subs and communities I've seen over the years, I can confidently say there isn't enough money in the world to convince me to make a game and have to deal with all the grief from certain types of gamers lol.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

I've attempted to do public-facing technical support for a game and dear Christ you're spot on. I love people for wanting to engage with something I've spent a substantial part of my life putting together and trying to make it run okay, and am sympathetic to people feeling frustrated when technical issues prevent them from fully enjoying an early access game. Early on when the community was small I had a great time shitposting with the players, but once we hit release the environment turned toxic pretty much overnight as the community suddenly grew.

But like, none of them know how hard we crunched to get even a playable version of the game out, nevermind one that's playable on the lowest of netbook specs. None of em know how complicated the system is that's breaking preventing them from logging in, that that's not actually my area of expertise and that I'm just feeding them information from the matchmaking team who are all freaking the fuck out because this is the first time we've tested this shit at scale. None of them know that we were getting squeezed by our publisher, who wanted us to do a progression wipe that we didn't want ourselves, but like they control if the game gets shipped at all so... not really a choice there. And we can't admit any of this because accusations of incompetence come out pretty early, tend to stick around, and leave devs very little room to make bad decisions (which happens a lot!)

And like, being trans now on top of that? Hell no, I'm never touching a public server again if I can help it. Slurs and mistrust were already flying before, I can't throw myself in front of that bus again. I'm gonna miss it because I cared a lot about connecting with people playing the game and for a while found a lot of joy in responding to bugs and fixing individual system issues and integrating into the community. And there were some amazing people who were great to talk to that I really missed when I left. But the inherent abuse that comes with that gets so overwhelming and it drained my desire to even work on games at all for quite a while.

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[–] [email protected] 91 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I don't know if this makes me "a redditor" somehow or what, but....

As a dev, I am deeply troubled by the gaming industry so calmly walking into kernel anti cheats. It's insane and being tossed around like it's nothing.

Helldivers especially, since they picked one of the sketchiest ones and it's a game that entirely doesn't need it.

I have no idea if Reddit has suddenly picked up on this, but I've been pissed since at least Valorants release, but have seen more YT videos talking about it recently.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 8 months ago (3 children)

I really do not understand how server anti cheat is not way easier. I feel like devs are caught up on realtime anti cheat and not willing to do anything asynchronous. Or they really like paying licensing fees for client-side anticheat. I just don't understand how any competent software engineer or systems admin or architect trusts the client so fervently.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 8 months ago

Game servers are incredibly expensive, and server side anticheat is more costs.

Whether or not the studios can afford it (they can.) is irrelevant, it's simply cheaper to go for flawed client side because the client will do most of the processing.

Any software developer worth their salt simply does not trust the client, but management is gonna manage and the engineers have to come up with a solution to "we must have anticheat because we said so, and you must keep server costs per user below x". It's easy to forget that most implementation choices in video games aren't made by developers who like games, they're made by middle managers who view games as a money-generaring industry.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago

I really do not understand how server anti cheat is not way easier.

In a clean slate, it is. It's also way more effective (except for things like wall hacks, aim bots, recoil suppressors, etc, but most of those things are only really important and popular in competitive FPS). It's also much simpler to understand and to leave no "holes" behind. It also lives in the developers domain so it can't be "compromised" or circumvented.

The thing is that client side "anti cheat" can be commoditized. Every game with server authority/anti cheat needs specific server software to run their game logic. Client anti cheat is basically "look at everything else running on the system and see if any of it seems suspicious". As such, there's not really anything "game specific" to these - they basically are just a watch dog looking for bad actors - so as such, one company can come along, make one, and sell it to other devs.

This being "off the shelf" and not something the dev team has to think about besides a price tag means that management is just going to buy a third party solution and check off the "anti cheat" box on their task list.

I feel like devs are caught up on realtime anti cheat and not willing to do anything asynchronous.

First, this is a management problem and not the devs. Any dev worth their salt knows this isn't really a good solution.

But I'd say the more relevant and prominent thing here is that game companies just don't want to have to run servers anymore. It's a cost, requires dev time, and requires maintenance, and they don't want to do that. If these games had servers running the game world like games used to, they'd inherently have their own "anti cheat" built in for free that wouldn't necessarily catch everything but would do a better job than some of these. And it could be enhanced to cover more bases.

But studios don't want to do this anymore. It's easier to make the game p2p and slap an off the shelf anti cheat and call it a day.

Some games still require matchmaking servers etc, but the overhead there is way lower.

Or they really like paying licensing fees for client-side anticheat.

Not that I agree with the decision, but it is definitely cheaper and faster than the alternative. But picking something like nprotect totally fucking baffles me. There are better options.

I just don't understand how any competent software engineer or systems admin or architect trusts the client so fervently.

In some ways, same. Every project I've been on that has gotten anywhere near client side trust I've fought adamantly about avoiding it. I've won most arguments on it, but there are some places where they just utterly refuse.

But then there are things like New World.... I don't know how the fuck that shit released like it did. The number of things trusted to the client were absolutely baffling. I expected Amazon's first foray into gaming to be a fucking joke, but I was totally appalled at how bad it turned out. They even touted hiring ex blizzard talent to get my hopes up first.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago

It was something I was aware of and against when I was on Reddit ever since I first heard of them.

And they don't even make cheating impossible. Cheats don't need to be running on the OS that is running the game. It could be running in a VM. I believe many VM implementations will let the guest OS know that they are running on a VM, but that isn't mandatory. Other hardware in the system can have full access to the memory space and do reads/writes without the OS knowing (though caches complicate this). Some cheats just act as a display and mouse, processing the display as it passes through the device to the monitor, and modifying the mouse input to correct aim based on what it sees. If it spoofs a monitor and mouse, nothing in the kernel will necessarily see any difference.

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[–] kryllic 9 points 8 months ago

What else is new lol

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

Right? I just assumed the developer said the N word or something.

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[–] [email protected] 69 points 8 months ago

"I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?"

[–] [email protected] 68 points 8 months ago (2 children)

"Given the opportunity players will optimize the fun out of a game"

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago

Pretty much true.

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[–] [email protected] 53 points 8 months ago (1 children)

" A moderator on the game's Discord server, for instance, said "watching u all cry, amuses me so much," while another said on Reddit that complaints about weapon nerfs were perhaps in reality a question of "skill issue." "

Are you kidding? That's fucking hilarious. Learn to use a different weapon than the railgun you absolute chuffs.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I was expecting hate speech or something… but this sounds almost like friendly banter

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago

The crying comment comes off as more of a dick thing to say, but the skill issue bit is pretty funny.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

Honestly, I don't think it's a big deal. But it's just stupid as a developer to act like this.

I often ask about risk vs reward in these situations. What were they going to gain by acting like this and what were they going to risk by acting like this?

[–] [email protected] 31 points 8 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 50 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Eh. I went and looked at the comments. Sometimes people get a little lippy and it's whatever? Shit happens. But basically telling the customer 'i get off on you crying about this' is definitely going to cause some issues for the company.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Yeah, that's a line you don't cross in PR ever. "Cry more, I like it" is just not the message you want to send.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

/Kleenex has entered the chat

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago

Goddammit, enjoy your upvote 😆

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Could just as well have gone the other way though. Sassy CM telling some loud, annoying, entitled brat to git gud or cry more? Instant cool-dev meme. But if a lot of people feel similarly you get outrage and controversy. Just depends on the local culture on that particular day in that particular place.

It's cool to be rude as long as you also feel that it's warranted. It's cool to offend people you don't like or deride ideas you think are stupid. ~~Everyone is~~Most people are always just one wrong audience away from being a horrible person.

Of course CM or PR staff have different expectations, but I can understand why they might make a gamble sometimes trying to be cool and causual.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago

Will, first and foremost, these were devs not CMs. Shouldn't have been posting in the first place for exactly this reason.

But in my experience in the industry, it's never worth the risk to try to look cool. You lose more often than you win, even when you think it's the right time. Because even if people agree with the sentiment, there will always be people who object to the tone itself and that tips the scales against you

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

Sure? But actions have consequences.

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[–] [email protected] 44 points 8 months ago (2 children)

The dev comments are hilarious, and they were obviously trolling

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Agreed, Agreed and they still shouldnt have done it. Sometimes I say shit I know I shouldnt to customers because they are being assholes. They complain, the boss tells me off, I say "Fair enough" and I dont do it again for a while. But I know when I say the thing I shouldnt that "I'm gonna get a talking to for this" fortunately I'm government employed and I'm union so I know that a little backtalk isnt going to result in outright dismissal.

Ultimately the company could have turned around and sacked them all because I'm sure the company has a social media policy that basically says "if you do anything we dont like, we can fire you" and they would have had to fight it. They took a risk and I'm glad they didnt get fired (yet) but with all the layoffs in this space at the moment I wouldnt have.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 8 months ago (8 children)

It was the patch that got me to stop playing. Why you would nerf weapons in a non-competitive game rather than make poor preforming weapons viable is beyond me.

It's akin to Steve Jobs telling everyone they're holding their phone wrong.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 8 months ago (4 children)

It's to keep design space open and to minimize developer work.

Let's say we decide to keep an overperforming gun. It does all the things. It has all the ammo, all the damage, all fire rate, all the reload speed. Now, all future weapons have to be made with that as a consideration. Why would players choose this new weapon, when there's the old overperformer? The design space is being controlled and minimized by the overperformer. Players will complain if new weapons aren't on the level of the overperformer.

Now, let's say we have ten weapons with one clear overperformer. Now, we can either nerf a single weapon to bring it in line with the others, or buff nine weapons to attempt to bring them up to the level of the overperformer. Assuming the balance adjustments of each weapon are the same amount of work, that's 9x the effort. However, if we assume we do this extra work to satisfy players, now we have ten overperforming guns and players find the game too easy, so now we also have to buff enemies to match. However, the game isn't designed to handle these increase in difficulty. Players complain if we just add more health to enemies, so we have to do other things like increase enemy count, but adding more enemies increases performance issues. It's a cascading problem.

I consider nerfs a necessary evil. It's absurd to ask developers to always buff weapons and give them so much work when they could be developing actual additions to the game. Sometimes, a weapon really does need a nerf.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Thank you so fucking much.

If you want the game to have long term viability, you have to have nerfs. Otherwise in 3 years everyone who has been playing since day 1 has a mech with a gattling cannon that fires nukes and is fighting gods.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

Average anime protagonist progression.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Also, I'm not sure how much this applies to helldivers specifically, but from what I've seen, teams didn't really teamwork. Because they didn't have to.

This can be very bad because if it follows these steps:

  1. game is easy, no teamwork required, players learn to play the game without teamwork
  2. game gets harder, but some people can still manage solo, complain about "newbs" and tell them to "git gud"
  3. game gets even harder, now it's impossible to play "quasi solo" but the environment is no longer fit to learn teamwork in the context of this game. "How" to work together effectively.

Then people will complain, justly, that they don't have the tools and methods to beat the challenge. Which is correct. They don't. But you can't just tell people to "go play easy mode and learn the game", when they are "max level" and put 40-100 hours into the game.

Of course the synergy tools still have to exist and I'm not knowledgeable about helldivers whether they do.

There is no good choice to "encourage" teamplay, except via creating "natural" funnels that people will "end up at" "organically", and putting a challenge in front of them that they can only work with teamwork. But that means the challenge has to beat them, until they get it. And that may never happen.


One game I have found exceptional as a case study for what is "overpowered" and what isn't, and why, is magic the gathering. All the "code" is public. The complaints are public. The bans are public, and explained. So if anyone here wants to nerd out about balance and doesn't know mtg yet, there is a rabbit hole for you.

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[–] GTG3000 7 points 8 months ago

Preach.

The game does have a bit of a balance problem, but as usual the players are not the best at designing the solution.

  • Railgun was overpowered, since it did literally everything without any risk. The funny thing is - you can still do things it did before, you just need to actually use the unsafe mode.
  • The armoured bugs are a bit overtuned, the devs have announced they will be looking at them, but just giving you an OP gun is not a way to fix that.
  • Shield was probably alright as it was, but the current iteration of armour doesn't really make up for the lack of it.
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[–] [email protected] 26 points 8 months ago

Making all the weapons overpowered to match ruins the intended difficulty.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 8 months ago (13 children)

This is a dumb take.

If there was a gun that 1 tapped every enemy in the game and had infinite ammo and maybe even auto aimed for you, that would suck a lot of the fun out of the game wouldn't it?

Would you not want that gun to be nerfed or would you want every gun in the game to become a 1 tap super weapon?

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I dont know what everyone is so upset about, the shotgun feels fine, the recoil doesnt feel bad, and the mag size isnt a huge problem for me.

Plus the flamethrower buff and laser cannon buff are super nice. Im usually in favor of the whole "buff everything else, no debuff" but this honestly feels fine.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago

This game has like ten difficulty modes.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Did you ever played Payday 2, where powercreep made us go from guns with all the best attachments could maybe kill the toughest enemy in the game in half a mag, or about 15 shots, to the devs needing to implement 3 (technically 4) more difficulty levels with new enemies that were just old enemies with more resistances or 10 times the health as their stock launch counterparts, and those things dying in 2 hits from all the meta build weapons. All because they kept introducing more powerful weapons, more attachments that made launch guns more and more obsolete, and general more power creep through skill tree expansions and entirely new jobs for perks. The player counts for that game dove off a cliff after players realized each DLC was just pay 2 win garbage and even using stuff you could get only from the base game and free updates left every weapon feeling samey with the same tactics being used and things not in the meta utterly ignored by anyone playing end game content. Because instead of reigning in the things that overperformed and broke the balance curve, they just kept powercreeping new items into the game.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago

I’ve been playing since launch. I played a lot last night. I do not see the problems. I play on hard difficulty. I have a good time whether winning or losing.

There are players that take the game far more seriously than I and honestly they make the game more tense than it needs to be. They make it feel competitive, in that if I’m not doing what they think a “good” player should then I’m unwelcome.

I think the vast majority of complaints stem from these players. I lament that another Call of Duty is not coming out sooner so that the community can diminish into relative obscurity, hopefully populated with like minds that view this as a game and not an e-Sport.

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