This happened to me for a different reason, but it was the same level of frustrating.
After months of playing MW and Black Ops, one day I queue up with friends and after waiting 5+ minutes no server would be found. We try over and over finally we realize its me.
Googling around shows that I am "Shadow Banned" and everyone is like "go away cheater" online.
I've been playing online games with an in game name that contains the word "Erotica" for a while now (4+ years) and have had zero issues.
Turns out the word "Erotica" is BANNED by Activision, and they synced their identity management with Blizzard it got flagged.
I found ONE random thread on Reddit where a guy ran into the same problem and gave a link to directly log into their system.
Once logged in I got "Your username contains adult content and must be changed".
After changing it, and waiting 3 days, it 'synced' and my account was unbanned.
The whole thing was absolutely stupid, I had paid $60 and could not play any of their games.
It pretty much ruined the game for me, I haven't given them a dollar since.
It usually doesn't take a lot of work for engineers to do some brainstorming around who will be affected and send a direct email letting users know what's up. That would have saved you days of fumbling around and frustration.
I have a growing enthusiasm for companies that consistently care for users, and conversely a callous distain for companies that don't.
That is insane. Had similar issues but not really banned... just "error-less" issues coming up that would lead you to believe the problem is something else entirely.
Sounds very annoying. Conversely, many of activision’s users are minors. In the games you mentioned it’s some what rare to encounter adults, especially as a new player. Perhaps not the best place to advertise ones love of erotica. Personally it bothers me when I walk past my 10 year old nephew and the other players in his squad have names that are sexual, racist or inflammatory; so I report them. If the people that I report have to work hard to realize that they are disrupting a community and making people uncomfortable I am ok with that too. +1 for activision in my books.
Unfortunately we gave up our right to own software when we let companies own the servers. Back in the day you could get banned from a server and go find somewhere else to play. Now you'll get banned for life, and in some cases, even banned from the single player mode. Sorry, no refunds!
There's a reason pirate crews are hailed as heroes...and it's not the free software. Games legitimately work better when they are cracked almost 100% of the time.
Having community hosted servers with their own moderation was just so much better. Sure, the moderation level would vary from server to server, sometimes with immature admins giving out bans for no reasons, but you would ultimately find your way to servers that match you the best. And often, people would become regulars, finding the same players on the same servers, that was the best aspect of online gaming, finding a community.
Games stopping to provide self-hosted servers is also what made LAN parties increasingly difficult. Having to rent game servers, provide decent bandwidth and not being able to run third party tools (for recording scores or set modifiers) made it impossible to use modern games in a 50 people LAN party with a low budget.
I really can't blame them entirely. Perhaps you could blame companies for not using a hybrid model where players can host privately plus maintaining their public servers.
Why? Because in a similar vein to how social media needs to be moderated to prevent the bad apples from spoiling the bunch, games now need to be moderated to maintain reputation among the community. If a player hearing about CSGO for the first time has no idea what they're getting into finds only a public server running 24/7 CS_OFFICE with Warcraft Mods they might get a bad impression of what the game is. Having consistency in user experience is highly important, and public servers being maintained and moderated by the developer is probably the most important part of that. What about all those servers that have massive latency issues? That's a bad look on the game because most players won't recognize community run servers are the reason the game behaves buggy.
Do I dislike it? Yes. I think it has created irreparable harm to the ability for gaming communities to build organically but so long as central hubs like Reddit or Discord continue to pop up I figure they've just offloaded the community aspect to external sources. Is that better? I'm not sure. Partially yes. Losing contact with a friend because they stopped logging into your preferred server isn't really a thing if you're Discord friends or Steam friends.
> Unfortunately we gave up our right to own software when we let companies own the servers.
Some games managed to balance this quite well despite no self-hosted servers, for example BF4 which allows community managed "rented" servers.
But one thing to note though is that nearly all of them will very quickly adopt global blacklists with cheaters. So for a community BF server you'd hook your server to a global anti cheat database, and any bans from the server would end up on the global cheater blacklist. While the choice of using a global blacklist was of course up to the administrators, it wouldn't be very easy to find a server that didn't use this type of system if you happened to be blacklisted.
So the community will invent exactly the same kind global bans that the game studio has. I never saw a problem with that (likely because I wasn't a false positive).
Generally speaking, if you are a suspected cheater, I can see why you would be barred from online-play.
There's always going to be false-positives though. How often that happens and what means of recourse one has (or should have) is IMO another discussion. And in this particular case, it seems Activision is doing pretty much all the wrong things(tm) though.
> even banned from the single player mode.
The fact that an account (and a server) is required to play a game you've bought in single-player mode is on another level outragious.
That itself should be illegal.
> Sorry, no refunds!
Again. Clearly this needs to be illegal.
If you take away a product you've allowed someone to "buy", then you've broken your end of the bargain.
Lol we were lucky we had the ability to host our own servers back in the day. The IP owners have always had to full right and power to do whatever they want to extract as much profit as possible. We have never had any power over what they do.
This is one of the main reasons Minecraft is still one of the most popular games to this day, after over a decade. Open-source third-party servers and their development contribute to development of new fun plugins, which allows more and more independent server creators to build cool unique servers.
And best of all: you can only get yourself banned from individual servers.
These bans also block the single player mode?! That is absolutely absurd. False bans for multiplayer aren't anything new (unfortunately), but also blocking the singleplayer mode, making the purchased product 100% unusable seems criminal.
I started the wiki linked in the article (codconsumer.org). Long time HN lurker and was pleasantly surprised to see this here!
I was only banned for a week, but I'm absolutely certain that there was nothing sketchy happening on my side. It's pretty annoying when they're charging money for time-limited events like Battle Passes, then you lose some of that time. Of course, it's a much bigger problem for the many who have been permabanned and don't know why. And it's still happening to others.
I would really like for this to end quietly with some better policies on account reviews, and more transparency on the findings of those reviews. I don't think that's too much to ask after being locked out of a $70 purchase. So far they have been completely silent on the matter. So the wiki stays up and we hope to someday get a word out of them.
This is a consumer rights issue across our industry. Algorithmic customer support “decisions” should always be appealable to a human audience.
My Google account was banned years ago, “computer says no” - all of my attempts to appeal failed. I at no point broke their terms. Nobody cares, I lost all of my data.
I hope that a class action prevails against Activision. And I hope that across our industry consumers receive more robust rights. Not being able to reach a human at your company quickly escalates from a being cost optimization, to outright fraud.
Yeah.. you can do a chargeback or take them to small claims court, but then you'll be blacklisted as a customer for life. There needs to be a better process
In this case, it really looks like Activision's Anti-Cheat is broken and banning people unfairly (if we can trust OP, which I have no reason not to).
A related problem though is that game developers have a really hard time trusting anyone who says they've been banned unfairly. Almost everyone who gets banned for valid reasons will claim they did nothing wrong, etc. This is especially true for delayed bans, as the person doesn't even realize that their account got flagged to be banned weeks before the actual ban took place.
Given that problem, when a developer gets reports of users being banned unfairly, it's very easy to ignore them as salty cheaters. Ideally there is a way for them to know exactly what tripped the anti-cheat, but sometimes it's hard as the client has to covertly tell the server to ban itself.
This has been going on since the release of MW2019. I myself was banned after trying to launch and play the single player campaign on Linux through Wine/Proton. I was unable to even launch the game to play the campaign again on Windows after that, and I no longer use Windows at all.
I emailed Activision support back and forth more than a dozen times explaining the issue, finally resulting in them saying they were escalating to another team. I sent them another four emails over three months, asking if there was any update, before asking if there was even anybody left alive at the company that my emails were reaching, with no response.
I really enjoyed the MW2019 campaign, but I won't be buying another game from Activision.
Good timing, I was just today considering playing Diablo III on my Steam Deck (or trying to)... based on your experience, I guess that might be a bad idea to even try.
I really enjoy Call of Duty. Got extremely good at it in high school, along with my group of friends. Since then, I've had to move away and CoD has kept us connected multiple times per week. It's been a very enjoyable game for well over a decade.
In the past few years, it's become extremely clear to me that something is seriously wrong with CoD - and perhaps Activision as a whole. I'm willing to explain much of it away as "it's hard to run a big game at scale", but some the bugs are just inexcusable. Activision offers little to no insight or recourse when things break.
I have 700 hours in MW2/WZ1. I can't even stand to play the new game. It's just too broken.
IMO, the release of Warzone 1, Call of Duty’s Battle Royale mode that released a few months after Modern Warfare 2019, has completely changed the priorities and incentives for the company. The goal is to sell in game cosmetics more so than the game itself, as many other games are turning to as well.
The yearly release cycle, which may be ending soon, leads to bugs that re-emerge each year and features that appear and disappear. Sure, the different studios which produce the games need some room to innovate, but the inconsistent base set of features is incredibly frustrating. CoD games are one of the games I play the most, with the other being a game which is the complete opposite, Old School RuneScape, that has been built on for ~20 years.
I play the current game MWII with friends a few hours a day most days of the week. Multiple times per session my game crashes at random, something I can’t remember with any other major games with a top of the line PC. Like many other pieces of software, chasing other revenue sources seems to have made the quality of the product take a nose dive, with consequences yet to be seen. This is disappointing to me as someone who enjoys playing the game with friends, who has competed in open-bracket events at major tournaments over a span of a few years, and worked directly with the professional league and teams (CDL and CWL) for analytics and software.
If you can convince your crew to try something new, there are some great FPS games nowadays. I've enjoyed those, though I haven't been able to put in anywhere near your number of hours.
Its not just the bugs though. Its the glaringly obvious "move fast" mentality as a dev. There is no way anyone looked at the warzone 2 ping system and thought "thats good enough, ship it". In all of the dev-run cycles, or the playtesting, or the beta testing you are telling me it wasnt _glaringly_ obvious that the system was broken?
Nit: mw2 is the new game, you meant mw1 (2019) presumably.
Similarly for me cod has kept me connected with friends and family across the world as we travelled and went our own ways. But all of us have actually moved onto mw2 by now and are enjoying it a great deal. (We don’t play Warzone and only play s&d or prison rescue). There are bugs here and there but not too bad overall. We are a mix of PC and Xbox players.
I would still recommend giving the game a try in a few “seasons” as it will likely stabilize further.
> And moderators of popular forums like r/ModernWarfareII refuse to allow posts that try to increase awareness of the issue, again, likely assuming we’re all a bunch of whining cheaters. I don’t think they’re aware of the disservice they’re doing to their community by actively suppressing these reports (or conspiratorially, they’re influenced by Activision itself).
I don't think this is very conspiratorially. It's very clear that the mods are coordinating with Activision on releases and information. I've had several posts taken down over the years because they don't tow-the-line.
Game community subs, especially for FPS games, often ban posts about cheaters, bugs or things like the submission. Not because they're conspiring with the maker, nefariously hiding negative info, but because if they don't the sub turns into a grievance filled "help forum".
People who had never visited the forum before, and likely never will again, drop in because they're mad and want a complaint venue where they can gripe. When a game has hundreds of thousands or millions of players, that sort of thing starts to swamp the sub and soon there is no community or sustained conversation and instead it's all 360 no scope drive by complaint drops.
I absolutely commiserate with the OP, and it 100% legitimately sounds like they got caught up in a flawed anti-cheat (maybe exacerbated by a storage system issue on their end, making it think they were trying to modify the system files). But on the other hand, and they recognize this, all the actual cheaters also do the I didn't do nothing routine. When a game is rife with cheaters (PubG, MW, Squad, etc), pretty soon you have a really skeptical approach to those appeals.
This is a feature! You and the other cheaters, whether you're actually baby or bathwater, will simply have to buy it again!!
IMO the only winning move is not to play. I loved calladoody back in university, but you've got to move with the times, yeah? OTOH, I'm not the one who really changed; I'm still all about dedicated servers, but they haven't been seen since Modern Warfare 1.
The winning move for the anticheat dev is shortly going to be not to play, either. It's one thing to implement increasingly invasive rootkits to find out who's watching your game's memory, but I've heard tell of devices that sit between the PC and monitor, using specialized ML to click M1 and fire when an enemy is detected in one's crosshairs. How can you check for something like that?
I've heard of work around using machine learning to analyze players and compare them to the actions of cheaters. It's not flawless but it can give some kind of probability of cheating so you can match make cheaters with other suspected cheaters.
This essentially doesn’t work now either, unfortunately.
A lot of the latest AAA games will only allow you to play multiplayer if your account ALSO has a verified phone number attached, and they only let you attach each number to a single account, plus they filter out phones which are not postpaid (so no using services like Twilio).
I purchased the game and was met with casmera-rhino before even playing a match or seeing a screen to chose what to play I payed $70+ for the game Ive been playing cod for years and years and my stats arent crazy im a casual player and not even a second look at my account after I appealed my ban on activisions website my fate was sealed permanently banned account with over $300+ worth of microtransactions and games and im unable to appeal and Im not sure what to do Im researching class action lawyers and getting advice and how to get my account or my money back from the company if anyone has any advice or is currently talking to a lawyer or some type of representative id really appreciate some info, thank you.
For roughly 25 years now - as long as modern DRM methods exist - there's constantly been reports of false positives, bugs, crashes, performance issues and security holes caused by DRM.
How anyone can believe that their DRM is infallible and not be prepared to deal with the issues it will inevitably cause, is beyond me.
Anyone with two brain cells to rub together should be aware, that they need to have a way to accept reports of false positives and investigate those. Even if "screw the customers" is company policy - you still need those reports to analyze and fix the flaws in your software.
Not doing that is basically like making it impossible to report bugs and suppress any talk about bugs anywhere - and then claiming your software is bug free, because there haven't been any bug reports. Highly dysfunctional.
On the topic of unfair bans, Roblox bans kid accounts for having malicious scripts hidden in models in Roblox Studio. They can detect it in the kid’s game, but allow it in their toolbox. Accounts with premium membership are not refunded for the remaining time left.
This kind of absurdity could happen to anybody. I was a Destiny player since Destiny 1, had absolutely no problem campaign or multiplayer. Around the time of Destiny 2 Forsaken DLC, I got bored of it and stopped playing for about a year. One day, I decided to pick it up and replay the Forsaken single player campaign "Last Call". 10 minutes in, while I was enjoying it, suddenly the game froze, and I was kicked back to the menu screen. When tried to login, it told me my account is perma banned. Shocked, my first instinct was that this is some kind of mistake on Bungie side. However, after going through the fruitless appealing process, which Bungie denied without disclosing any specificity, I believe I'm one of those falsely banned.
This is the only time I got perma banned in any game in my life. The only possible reason I can think of is that I always use some AutoHotkey scripts I wrote myself as shortcuts for Windows control, and has nothing to do with Destiny. I don't really care much about not able to play Destiny again, but because Destiny 2 had moved to Steam, even today there is still a VAC ban record in my Steam profile, which I do care about.
This seems like it could result in actual lawsuits. While the license for the game exists, a court wouldn't look too kindly on this situation. Courts have the power to void contracts if they're against "public policy", so that should be something everyone should keep in mind.
Ban frequently comes with ban reason "Caserma rhino" which looks like that they must know what happened given this weird specific string as you can see on picture below.
I as a player can say that game frequently crashes, shares a lot of bugs with previous version of call of duty and overall is just a copy od mw1 with worse UI and technical state.
250+ comments already so I fear my rant will disappear to the void, but I experienced this exact same thing with Apex Legends. I was fortunate to get my account back eventually, but the experience is the same.
I don't really care that much about my crappy in-game cosmetics, but to have access to the game ripped away from you with no actual explanation to what you did is a pretty big gut punch. The result I took from the experience is that EA/Respawn are untrustworthy and will never receive another penny of my money. Their steadfast "you cheated, no appeals, now shut up" attitude seems like poor long term planning if regular players are going to be randomly harmed by whatever happened.
I've pondered over the issue too, and ultimately I think the entire circus could be avoided if they were willing to discuss the specifics of banning. The notion that they don't need to tell you how you were detected as though it is some sort of protection for their anti-cheat methods is a disservice in customer relations. For me, I tried appealing a case against something I had no evidence for, so to ask a question about how I can make things right in an appeal (what logs do you need? what proof can I provide that this was a bug) ended up just flagging my account so I could no longer open tickets. I had found other users on Reddit who received the same ban (and consequentially, received unban at teh same time too, so it was a system bug). We were all treated the same. How to fix this? Have confidence in your anti-cheat to the point where you can say "we caught you doing X" so I can provide evidence to the contrary.
I suspect it is because they'd need to hire more staff to work customer service. They'd also need to give those staff the necessary tools to respond to customers which I can tell they do not have at the basic CSR level.
In the end, they lose a customer permanently. They also gain a vocal proponent against their services as I write similar rants every time I see a topic of it discussed. They don't really care much about me though. That's important to remember. They are willing to bulldoze the individual in hopes the larger reputation they maintain about being hard on cheaters doesn't backfire.
Good luck bro... I cheated at games especially MMO's from 2000 to 2005. Since then, with all new emails and account ID's I've seen more false positive bans than I saw positive bans in that previous period. I once left wire shark open and got battle eye and VAC banned. I was not attaching either to active network traffic or processes at the time. Just last week I got banned for having Charles proxy running by accident on my 5th DayZ account. I guess I should segregate my dev and play boxes... the problem is I make games.
[+] [-] bearjaws|3 years ago|reply
After months of playing MW and Black Ops, one day I queue up with friends and after waiting 5+ minutes no server would be found. We try over and over finally we realize its me.
Googling around shows that I am "Shadow Banned" and everyone is like "go away cheater" online.
I've been playing online games with an in game name that contains the word "Erotica" for a while now (4+ years) and have had zero issues.
Turns out the word "Erotica" is BANNED by Activision, and they synced their identity management with Blizzard it got flagged.
I found ONE random thread on Reddit where a guy ran into the same problem and gave a link to directly log into their system.
Once logged in I got "Your username contains adult content and must be changed".
After changing it, and waiting 3 days, it 'synced' and my account was unbanned.
The whole thing was absolutely stupid, I had paid $60 and could not play any of their games.
It pretty much ruined the game for me, I haven't given them a dollar since.
[+] [-] nomilk|3 years ago|reply
I have a growing enthusiasm for companies that consistently care for users, and conversely a callous distain for companies that don't.
[+] [-] robswc|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryndshn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duckqlz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] newZWhoDis|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] blue039|3 years ago|reply
There's a reason pirate crews are hailed as heroes...and it's not the free software. Games legitimately work better when they are cracked almost 100% of the time.
[+] [-] keraf|3 years ago|reply
Games stopping to provide self-hosted servers is also what made LAN parties increasingly difficult. Having to rent game servers, provide decent bandwidth and not being able to run third party tools (for recording scores or set modifiers) made it impossible to use modern games in a 50 people LAN party with a low budget.
[+] [-] TheCapn|3 years ago|reply
I really can't blame them entirely. Perhaps you could blame companies for not using a hybrid model where players can host privately plus maintaining their public servers.
Why? Because in a similar vein to how social media needs to be moderated to prevent the bad apples from spoiling the bunch, games now need to be moderated to maintain reputation among the community. If a player hearing about CSGO for the first time has no idea what they're getting into finds only a public server running 24/7 CS_OFFICE with Warcraft Mods they might get a bad impression of what the game is. Having consistency in user experience is highly important, and public servers being maintained and moderated by the developer is probably the most important part of that. What about all those servers that have massive latency issues? That's a bad look on the game because most players won't recognize community run servers are the reason the game behaves buggy.
Do I dislike it? Yes. I think it has created irreparable harm to the ability for gaming communities to build organically but so long as central hubs like Reddit or Discord continue to pop up I figure they've just offloaded the community aspect to external sources. Is that better? I'm not sure. Partially yes. Losing contact with a friend because they stopped logging into your preferred server isn't really a thing if you're Discord friends or Steam friends.
[+] [-] Agent766|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alkonaut|3 years ago|reply
Some games managed to balance this quite well despite no self-hosted servers, for example BF4 which allows community managed "rented" servers.
But one thing to note though is that nearly all of them will very quickly adopt global blacklists with cheaters. So for a community BF server you'd hook your server to a global anti cheat database, and any bans from the server would end up on the global cheater blacklist. While the choice of using a global blacklist was of course up to the administrators, it wouldn't be very easy to find a server that didn't use this type of system if you happened to be blacklisted. So the community will invent exactly the same kind global bans that the game studio has. I never saw a problem with that (likely because I wasn't a false positive).
[+] [-] josteink|3 years ago|reply
Generally speaking, if you are a suspected cheater, I can see why you would be barred from online-play.
There's always going to be false-positives though. How often that happens and what means of recourse one has (or should have) is IMO another discussion. And in this particular case, it seems Activision is doing pretty much all the wrong things(tm) though.
> even banned from the single player mode.
The fact that an account (and a server) is required to play a game you've bought in single-player mode is on another level outragious.
That itself should be illegal.
> Sorry, no refunds!
Again. Clearly this needs to be illegal.
If you take away a product you've allowed someone to "buy", then you've broken your end of the bargain.
[+] [-] makotech221|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fastball|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seanw444|3 years ago|reply
And best of all: you can only get yourself banned from individual servers.
[+] [-] eikenberry|3 years ago|reply
People gave up on software ownership when they stopped demanding the source code. The source code is the software, not the binary.
[+] [-] counttheforks|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nperez|3 years ago|reply
I was only banned for a week, but I'm absolutely certain that there was nothing sketchy happening on my side. It's pretty annoying when they're charging money for time-limited events like Battle Passes, then you lose some of that time. Of course, it's a much bigger problem for the many who have been permabanned and don't know why. And it's still happening to others.
I would really like for this to end quietly with some better policies on account reviews, and more transparency on the findings of those reviews. I don't think that's too much to ask after being locked out of a $70 purchase. So far they have been completely silent on the matter. So the wiki stays up and we hope to someday get a word out of them.
[+] [-] dylan604|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buildbuildbuild|3 years ago|reply
My Google account was banned years ago, “computer says no” - all of my attempts to appeal failed. I at no point broke their terms. Nobody cares, I lost all of my data.
I hope that a class action prevails against Activision. And I hope that across our industry consumers receive more robust rights. Not being able to reach a human at your company quickly escalates from a being cost optimization, to outright fraud.
[+] [-] Firmwarrior|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] charcircuit|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Matheus28|3 years ago|reply
A related problem though is that game developers have a really hard time trusting anyone who says they've been banned unfairly. Almost everyone who gets banned for valid reasons will claim they did nothing wrong, etc. This is especially true for delayed bans, as the person doesn't even realize that their account got flagged to be banned weeks before the actual ban took place.
Given that problem, when a developer gets reports of users being banned unfairly, it's very easy to ignore them as salty cheaters. Ideally there is a way for them to know exactly what tripped the anti-cheat, but sometimes it's hard as the client has to covertly tell the server to ban itself.
[+] [-] snoopy_telex|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jakogut|3 years ago|reply
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/nfeupc/modern...
I emailed Activision support back and forth more than a dozen times explaining the issue, finally resulting in them saying they were escalating to another team. I sent them another four emails over three months, asking if there was any update, before asking if there was even anybody left alive at the company that my emails were reaching, with no response.
I really enjoyed the MW2019 campaign, but I won't be buying another game from Activision.
[+] [-] noasaservice|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amatecha|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SkyPuncher|3 years ago|reply
I really enjoy Call of Duty. Got extremely good at it in high school, along with my group of friends. Since then, I've had to move away and CoD has kept us connected multiple times per week. It's been a very enjoyable game for well over a decade.
In the past few years, it's become extremely clear to me that something is seriously wrong with CoD - and perhaps Activision as a whole. I'm willing to explain much of it away as "it's hard to run a big game at scale", but some the bugs are just inexcusable. Activision offers little to no insight or recourse when things break.
I have 700 hours in MW2/WZ1. I can't even stand to play the new game. It's just too broken.
[+] [-] 0x202020|3 years ago|reply
The yearly release cycle, which may be ending soon, leads to bugs that re-emerge each year and features that appear and disappear. Sure, the different studios which produce the games need some room to innovate, but the inconsistent base set of features is incredibly frustrating. CoD games are one of the games I play the most, with the other being a game which is the complete opposite, Old School RuneScape, that has been built on for ~20 years.
I play the current game MWII with friends a few hours a day most days of the week. Multiple times per session my game crashes at random, something I can’t remember with any other major games with a top of the line PC. Like many other pieces of software, chasing other revenue sources seems to have made the quality of the product take a nose dive, with consequences yet to be seen. This is disappointing to me as someone who enjoys playing the game with friends, who has competed in open-bracket events at major tournaments over a span of a few years, and worked directly with the professional league and teams (CDL and CWL) for analytics and software.
[+] [-] ahmedalsudani|3 years ago|reply
- Squad
- Escape from Tarkov
- Rising Storm 2: Vietnam
[+] [-] duxup|3 years ago|reply
It was a neat idea where the clan was the focus and less so the game.
[+] [-] JamesSwift|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Insanity|3 years ago|reply
Similarly for me cod has kept me connected with friends and family across the world as we travelled and went our own ways. But all of us have actually moved onto mw2 by now and are enjoying it a great deal. (We don’t play Warzone and only play s&d or prison rescue). There are bugs here and there but not too bad overall. We are a mix of PC and Xbox players.
I would still recommend giving the game a try in a few “seasons” as it will likely stabilize further.
[+] [-] SkyPuncher|3 years ago|reply
I don't think this is very conspiratorially. It's very clear that the mods are coordinating with Activision on releases and information. I've had several posts taken down over the years because they don't tow-the-line.
[+] [-] bfgoodrich|3 years ago|reply
People who had never visited the forum before, and likely never will again, drop in because they're mad and want a complaint venue where they can gripe. When a game has hundreds of thousands or millions of players, that sort of thing starts to swamp the sub and soon there is no community or sustained conversation and instead it's all 360 no scope drive by complaint drops.
I absolutely commiserate with the OP, and it 100% legitimately sounds like they got caught up in a flawed anti-cheat (maybe exacerbated by a storage system issue on their end, making it think they were trying to modify the system files). But on the other hand, and they recognize this, all the actual cheaters also do the I didn't do nothing routine. When a game is rife with cheaters (PubG, MW, Squad, etc), pretty soon you have a really skeptical approach to those appeals.
[+] [-] revolvingocelot|3 years ago|reply
IMO the only winning move is not to play. I loved calladoody back in university, but you've got to move with the times, yeah? OTOH, I'm not the one who really changed; I'm still all about dedicated servers, but they haven't been seen since Modern Warfare 1.
The winning move for the anticheat dev is shortly going to be not to play, either. It's one thing to implement increasingly invasive rootkits to find out who's watching your game's memory, but I've heard tell of devices that sit between the PC and monitor, using specialized ML to click M1 and fire when an enemy is detected in one's crosshairs. How can you check for something like that?
[+] [-] Gigachad|3 years ago|reply
I've heard of work around using machine learning to analyze players and compare them to the actions of cheaters. It's not flawless but it can give some kind of probability of cheating so you can match make cheaters with other suspected cheaters.
[+] [-] WirelessGigabit|3 years ago|reply
This allows me to
* issue a chargeback without worries
* sell the account when I'm done with the game
Just the same with Google devices. NEVER buy a Google Pixel on your own account, as issuing a chargeback will cause them to block your whole account.
[+] [-] nixgeek|3 years ago|reply
A lot of the latest AAA games will only allow you to play multiplayer if your account ALSO has a verified phone number attached, and they only let you attach each number to a single account, plus they filter out phones which are not postpaid (so no using services like Twilio).
[+] [-] Thaxll|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ungelled|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdswanson|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hooby|3 years ago|reply
How anyone can believe that their DRM is infallible and not be prepared to deal with the issues it will inevitably cause, is beyond me.
Anyone with two brain cells to rub together should be aware, that they need to have a way to accept reports of false positives and investigate those. Even if "screw the customers" is company policy - you still need those reports to analyze and fix the flaws in your software.
Not doing that is basically like making it impossible to report bugs and suppress any talk about bugs anywhere - and then claiming your software is bug free, because there haven't been any bug reports. Highly dysfunctional.
[+] [-] robloxbanned|3 years ago|reply
https://www.reddit.com/r/ROBLOXBans/comments/vqw1sj/my_6_yea...
I created a Tell HN thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33861309
[+] [-] CrendKing|3 years ago|reply
This is the only time I got perma banned in any game in my life. The only possible reason I can think of is that I always use some AutoHotkey scripts I wrote myself as shortcuts for Windows control, and has nothing to do with Destiny. I don't really care much about not able to play Destiny again, but because Destiny 2 had moved to Steam, even today there is still a VAC ban record in my Steam profile, which I do care about.
[+] [-] EMIRELADERO|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hsuduebc2|3 years ago|reply
https://imageup.me/i96
I as a player can say that game frequently crashes, shares a lot of bugs with previous version of call of duty and overall is just a copy od mw1 with worse UI and technical state.
[+] [-] TheCapn|3 years ago|reply
I don't really care that much about my crappy in-game cosmetics, but to have access to the game ripped away from you with no actual explanation to what you did is a pretty big gut punch. The result I took from the experience is that EA/Respawn are untrustworthy and will never receive another penny of my money. Their steadfast "you cheated, no appeals, now shut up" attitude seems like poor long term planning if regular players are going to be randomly harmed by whatever happened.
I've pondered over the issue too, and ultimately I think the entire circus could be avoided if they were willing to discuss the specifics of banning. The notion that they don't need to tell you how you were detected as though it is some sort of protection for their anti-cheat methods is a disservice in customer relations. For me, I tried appealing a case against something I had no evidence for, so to ask a question about how I can make things right in an appeal (what logs do you need? what proof can I provide that this was a bug) ended up just flagging my account so I could no longer open tickets. I had found other users on Reddit who received the same ban (and consequentially, received unban at teh same time too, so it was a system bug). We were all treated the same. How to fix this? Have confidence in your anti-cheat to the point where you can say "we caught you doing X" so I can provide evidence to the contrary.
I suspect it is because they'd need to hire more staff to work customer service. They'd also need to give those staff the necessary tools to respond to customers which I can tell they do not have at the basic CSR level.
In the end, they lose a customer permanently. They also gain a vocal proponent against their services as I write similar rants every time I see a topic of it discussed. They don't really care much about me though. That's important to remember. They are willing to bulldoze the individual in hopes the larger reputation they maintain about being hard on cheaters doesn't backfire.
[+] [-] AustinDev|3 years ago|reply