Seems like a major case of Redditors being able to dish it out but not take anything in return.
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.
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?”
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.
“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.
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.
I don’t think it has kernel anti cheat tho. Runs just fine on Linux without root permissions
Damn, getting downvoted for just stating my experience. It doesn’t require kernel level access on Linux and runs fine—it’s not a stretch to think it doesn’t have kernel level anticheat (it doesn’t on Linux, just on Windows).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
“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?”
The dev comments are hilarious, and they were obviously trolling
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.
