Goodeye8

There’s this reminded of a bit by Ari Matti where he goes “you people put sugar on your medicine. You know the rest of the world doesn’t do that?”

Maybe vaccines laced with sugar is the answer America needs.

Yeah, the whole thing stinks to high heavens of the devs fucking around and then trying to shift the blame onto Valve.

I’ve been hooked on ARC raiders since it launched. I’ve done all the quests, I’ve done all upgrade, I’ve done the expedition prep (to the point it can be done), I’ve finished the raider deck. The only things left to do are the trials but even when I’ve more or less cleared the weekly trials I’m still playing the game. It’s just so compelling.

The ARCs demand respect. They’re so dangerous sometimes the best option is to not even fight them. That is especially true for bigger ARCs because you have to prepare to fight them. Whenever one of the bigger ARCs notice me and I’m not prepared to fight them I’m booking it into the first closed space I can get because if you don’t break line of sight you’re going to have a bad day. So my advice is avoid avoid avoid until you’ve come prepared to take one down. Once you get more comfortable with fighting ARC other players become far more dangerous than ARC.

I don’t think Tencent cares that much about Chinese nationalism to push for a China themed AC. It seems to me like Tencent just likes to stick their hand in every pot and make money. At least that’s what I think, I don’t know what they’re doing behind the scenes.

For example “Reciprocity”. Unless it’s something I’ve never seen in gaming I don’t see how that’s a dark pattern. Giving other players stuff is not a dark pattern, the “dark pattern” is when the person feels like they should contribute back. How can a game make a player NOT feel like they should contribute back? There is nothing a game can do to fix this which is why I don’t see how that can be a dark pattern for games.

I misunderstood the other guy. Cred is earned in game, but cred can only be used to unlock stuff in the battlepass. When it comes to the actual in game store you can only use raider tokens and raider tokens (with the exception of the ones in the battle pass) have to be purchased as they can’t be earned in game.

From the discord

The Raider Deck is like a battlepass, where you can spend Cred in order to unlock cosmetic rewards. There are a number of rewards to unlock per page in order to progress to the next page. The number of pages in each Raider Deck may vary. At launch, the Raider Decks will be free, but you can expect a mix of paid and free Raider Decks as new ones are added.

Raider decks are battle passes. The industry standard is that the one that comes with the game (or a paid expansion) is free while all others require money.

And there’s no reason to spend money if you don’t care about cosmetics, but most people do care and the cosmetics are way overpriced.

Is there even a way to get the currency? The battle pass doesn’t count, that probably gives enough currency to buy the next battle pass when it releases.

Absolutely. I wasn’t trying to imply Valve wouldn’t offer VACnet to others. I’m sure they’d be happy to partner up with other devs. My point was more that other devs probably aren’t interesting because of how hard it would be the implement. Like you said Dota and CS have different implementations and I imagine deadlock does too. I imagine most games would end up with either a custom implementation or a custom model, both require a significant work on the developers side. It’s probably easier to add something like EAC than VACnet so devs most likely go that route.

Valve is very vague about their anti-cheat systems. They didn’t say they updated VAC. It could’ve been an update to VACnet, their machine-learning anticheat. I’m not sure if VACnet is available for other devs but I imagine other devs also aren’t particularly interested because ML-based anticheat would be even harder to implement.

The only mention of AC was done by me and I specifically used EAC as an example of devs not caring about Linux. I was not making any generalized statements about ACs on Linux and whether some other ACs would take more effort to get them working on Linux is irrelevant because my point was that if most devs can’t even take 5 minutes to get something working they’re not going to do something take would take even more time.

Easy anticheat runs kernel level on windows. The linux version runs in user space.

Bold of you to assume they know it’s space communism. If the boys is of any indication Star Trek needs to explicitly say “we’re space communism” for there to be a 50/50 chance of Republicans getting it.

It’s not that they can’t manage, it’s that they don’t care.

It’s the same thing with every multiplayer game that uses easy anticheat. Getting the anticheat to work on Linux literally as simple as enabling it in config, adding an extra library and creating a new build with that library. Companies can’t even bother to take 5 minutes, how can you expect them to bother with something that takes more than 5 minutes.

Even F2P games drop off in player count as people come try it out and decide it’s not for them and never play again. CS being free does not explain the yearly upward trend in active player count.

Now you’ve completely pivoted away from your original point of Valve being lazy and not doing anything to whatever the fuck this is.

shrugs this is the self-fulfilling prophecy of this kind of game design, there are WAY more players that would have been interested in that kind of thing but they left a long time ago because they were ignored in favor of the toxic competitive playerbase.

I gave you examples of Valve trying different things from the start of CSGO, before the e-sports and competitive scene had fully cemented themselves as the central piece. These fictional players who supposedly left were never there to begin with or they were such an insignificant amount, compared to the people who enjoyed the competitive playlist, that they died out all on their own. And there’s no self-fulfilling game design that caused this, unless you want to walk back you understanding of keeping the competitive core as is.

It is optimizing for a local maximum, one which is a dead end and only appears to be the only way forward because the parameters have narrowed so far for what the game can be that there is no longer any room to get out of that rut because everybody else who didn’t fit on that local maximum has left and is no longer giving feedback on why they got bored and left.

Yes. Chess is so dead. Smash Bros Melee, a game that is completely abandoned by the devs and hasn’t received an update in 20 years is completely dead (spoiler, the melee competitive scene is very much alive despite the game receiving no updates and Nintendo being hostile towards the scene). What is happening to CS isn’t that it’s narrowing itself into some sort of a dead end, it’s the opposite. It’s found what makes it great and that has become the framework in which the game operates. The game doesn’t have to appease the player, the player will learn how to play the game because the game is fun.

Maybe you don’t know how Steam charts work but CS active player over the course of years is only trending upwards. We’ve gone from an average of 300k players in 2015 to an average of 1mil players in 2025. Real world data literally proves you wrong.

What I am saying that is not nearly enough, it is lazy, you don’t have to change the core game to add more aspects to it, more modes and more content that compliments the competitive core.

I think you have no idea what you’re talking about. They’ve tried that multiple times. They made gun game when CSGO released and nobody cares about gungame. They made some other game mode as well, which I don’t even remember what it was called because nobody cared about that either. They made a 2 man competitive mode called wingman and that at least got some attention because that was competitive, but largely people stuck with the 5v5. They added danger zone, a CS take on battle royales, and nobody cares about that either. They even tried gradually bringing new maps into the competitive map pool by adding them to the casual playlist and nobody played them. Even now the last regular update (which was literally today) added the retakes gamemode back and I doubt the core audience cares.

The reason you don’t see any other kind of content in CS is because the core audience doesn’t care about any other content. For the majority of the playerbase only the gamemode that exists is competitive and everything else is irrelevant. In fact the core audience is so anal about competitive game mode they start bitching when new maps get added. You’re complaining about something that isn’t even true because Valve does try different things, but you only hear about competitive, skins, boxes and other cosmetics because that’s all the core audience cares about.

I’m not sure how that’s relevant. I even considered the possibility of them ordering the list based on revenue instead of units sold but even then it doesn’t make sense that there’s no Silksong in the top 20. One of the most anticipated title of the year in its release month makes less revenue than RDR2? And it doesn’t explain any other anomalies, like Helldivers 2, which has been out for over a year, selling better than Snake Eater, which is considered one the best MGS titles?

I’m not calling them liars but I do think their data is incomplete.

Absolute trash source.

No Silksong in the top 20

Konami said MGS Snake eater sold more than 1 million units on the first day so according to the list Helldivers 2 had to sell more than 1 million units last month because it apparently has sold better than MGS?

Had to check what the fuck is a Kickoff Bundle and it’s apparently NFL 26 and some college football 26. Okay fine, but the list also has NFL 26 brought up separately so NFL gets 2 places in the top 20? Never am I going believe people bought the Kickoff bundle for college football.

And then there are some really sus entries like RDR2 (which is a good game but is it really one of the best selling games of last month?)

But there’s no question about them copying the Horizon series. Whether they’re doing it as an IP infringement is up for the courts to decide. I also disagree with the Nintendo comparison because what Nintendo is doing far worse. Even though Nintendo is doing things in response to Palworld they’re trying to patent a rather generic mechanics, like summonings or calling mounts (in a specific way) which means their actions won’t just affect Palworld but also Cassette Beasts and maybe even Monster Hunter Stories.

Meanwhile Sony want to make sure someone isn’t making a not Horizon game. I can’t even make a realistic comparison to what couldn’t exist if Sony wins because I can’t think of another game that that slots exactly into what Horizon is. Fighting against robots is generic, ARC raiders does that. Tribals vs high tech is also pretty generic, that’s essentially Avatar. Post-apocalyptic worlds are also generic and you’d have to narrow it down to get specifically Horizon style post-apocalyptic which itself is also not unique as that’s essentially the same style The Last of Us uses (just to give the first example that came to mind). It’s only after you take all those individual generic components and mash them together do you get Horizon, and the original reveal of Light of Motiram.

Look at this from the other perspective. Why does Light of Motiram need the same kind of tribal aesthetic like the Horizon games? Why does Light of Motiram need robot enemies that imitate animals like Horizon games down to the same visual style of robots? Why does Light of Motiram need the same post-apocalyptic world like the Horizon games down to the same color palette? Each of those things are rather generic concepts and Light of Motiram could’ve made their own interpretation of each of those concepts. It could’ve been Na’Vi tribals fighting ARC robots in an TLOU world, but instead in those instances it chose to do exactly what Horizon does.