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God do I ever hate corporate speak.
“Yeah we figured we could increase our market share but that controversy would harm profits even more. Nevermind thihi >.<”
“Rest assured we’ll keep trying other ways until we find one that you don’t really care about or don’t realize it’s screwing you over. Thank you for your continued support!”
Yeah, but Sony cant say “Fuck, calm down we wont do it if you cunts are gonna carry on like this.”
Yeah, they’re not…
Uhh, would maybe Mark Cuban or Richard Branson have those stones? Know there’s somebody out there…
Elon would but Elon does lots of dumb shit.
Democracy? No, free market capitalism, yes. They would not give a shit about negative reviews on steam if it were not affecting their bottom line.
Definitely. Hitting them where it matters most, their pockets. They probably have a long term plan with this game and being hit this early with that many reviews would hurt their pockets. I guess most of us have very little hope that Sony would reverse their decision hence the refunds etc but here we are with this announcement. Anyways, what do we know. We are just kids playing games.
Its a reference to the game
Major order complete. The Automaton… Er, Sony Menace has been driven back can the south quadrant of the map just be sony executives and we have to go fight them off periodically
Reminds me of this Steam review I saw posted a couple days ago:
That would actually be fucking hilarious. It is only available to PC players.
So let’s see if I’ve got the situation surrounded here:
Helldivers 2 = popular game built by a mid-sized studio under parent company Sony Fuckwits International. Well liked game, lots of people playing and enjoying it having purchased it on Steam for PC.
Sony Fuckwits International decides after loads of copies have been sold on Steam that a Playstation account is now required, including for copies of the game sold in regions where Playstation accounts aren’t allowed.
Helldivers 2 sees a catastrophic drop in reviews, Valve starts issuing refunds outside their normal refund range, and Sony Fuckwits International spends an entire week getting cornholed by the gaming press. The CEO of the smaller studio makes some press releases sounding just as upset as the gamers, almost saying “Things were going so great until ultimate retardation descended from on high.”
The backlash was apparently going to effect investor returns this quarter so they have reversed the decision. This is what it takes to keep companies like Sony in check.
This is the sort of thing that should make everyone everywhere really think twice about ordering that shiny new PS6 when it comes out in what? 1 or 2 years?
I’ve been seeing a lot of this stuff in the gaming news lately. Helldivers 2 has been a big one, I think Kerbal Space Program 2 has outright died, like the parent company fired the team who were making it? And I’m a little nervous about Coffee Stain Studios, the latest update video from Satisfactory’s community manager Snutt contained some noise about parent companies and restructuring that had that distinct smell of yacht polish and trafficked children that always follows upper management bullshittery.
The only thing I would say isn’t 100% correct here is that the decision to require a Playstation account was made 6 months before the game launched, not after. Technical issues prevented the game from launching with the requirement actually implemented though, and from the abruptness of the original announcement, I would guess that the developers are the ones who actually had their “grace period” from Sony to get it implemented expire.
Still puts me in a place of wanting to avoid large companies in gaming as much as possible. Studios with large parent companies to this shit. I don’t understand why anyone is willing to buy games from big companies anymore.
Worth noting that 6 months may not sound like a short timespan, but the game was in development for ~7 years. They were down to the “get this polished” stages, when Sony handed down the PSN requirement. Doing it properly would require a lot of redone work and code. So of course, it didn’t work properly on launch.
if that were so, why go through the trouble of translating the game to Russian / Chinese? no psn there. Incompetant greed, thru n thru.
Lots of people have primary languages that don’t align with where they live, actually
I could appreciate your point if they didn’t region lock the localizations. Try downloading the japanese I’ll wait.
Japanese is region locked because of something to do with licensing around the VAs I believe, like they’d have had to pay a lot more to distribute it internationally
Also, Russian and Chinese aren’t region locked, so their point is still completely valid
yeehaw preach it brother
Brilliant roundup.
Would you hate me if I mentioned the “until ultimate […] descended” bit might ruffle feathers? But please never stop ruffling Sony feathers :)
Hate? no. Scoff at? yep!
“Retard” rolled off the same euphemism treadmill that “idiot” and “moron” did, but if I had said “until ultimate idiocy descended from on high” you wouldn’t have felt the need to say anything. I was reaching for a derogatory term for the actions of a stupid person, and I found one. And it ain’t gonna ruffle any feathers that aren’t already permanently ruffled.
I don’t wanna be offended on others’ behalf but in trying to find justifications for and against I came across the Special Olympics - can you guess where they fall on the issue :D
Have a question that’s not a gotcha or nuthin’:
Say captain_aggravated became BFF w/a disabled person who thought innocent usage of “retarded” was harmful even on a FOSS gaming forum. Would you have a thoughtful response there or shrug it off or one of a million other possibilities I’m not guessing here? :)
(Super honest debate here that I doubt anybody else will see, just like to try to rationalize stuff and being The Word Police isn’t my thanggg but I’m still struggling with this - and you’re a cool dude I’d have a beer with so figure you’re good to ask)
Say captain_aggravated became BFF w/a
You’ve already departed reality right here.
Username wasn’t autogenerated then eh :)
No but my avatar was.
That’s great, glad you mentioned it. No avatar support with Voyager iOS apparently.
AHAH is this really the user I counseled regarding
inclusive languagerelatively kinder possible language?!(Strikethrough phrase felt too uptight even for me)
Don’t be so hard on yourself, I bet you’ve got plenty of friends!
My text message history shows that the last person who texted me that wasn’t a family member, a doctors office/auto shop confirming an appointment or an unsolicited advertisement/political lie/scam dates to before the pandemic. I live alone with one cat and even she’s too much.
I guess seeing your game rating go to nearly 50% negative over the course of 3 days after being overwhelmingly positive for weeks made some execs scratch their heads.
I saw it as low as 14% positive review in the last 30 days before they reverted the decision.
I was looking across all reviews rather than the most recent.
Most recent ones would highly likely have been absolutely garbage.
…future plans.
Like what twisted new bullshit scam will be next?
They are working on their ingame overlay for Ghost of Tsushima right now. Which also requires a PSN account for the coop mode.
Probably followed by a PSN launcher for PC and then paid online multiplayer.
I don’t think paid online is gonna happen. The only way I could see them doing it would be if they left steam so valve couldn’t refund the game, made an absolutely killer multiplayer game, idk if Helldiver’s would even be good enough, and bait and switch everyone after the game got really popular. Even then most of the players would probably just go to another game.
EA did that with Origin. Sucked absolute dick and they eventually gave up on most of it except for some backend stuff. Technically, you can still buy games through New Origin, but they cross publish it all on Steam now.
EA took their games off steam, but only to recover retail fees, they supported refunds well before steam due to the BF4 fiasco.
What was the BF4 fiasco? Bad launch?
Probably the worst game launch in my memory, like the Arkham game that was pulled from steam but it wasn’t just broken on AMD cards. Game would crash every 5 - 10 minutes, servers would rarely make it through a match without crashing so your progression wouldn’t be saved, performance issues, etc. It took them over a year to get it stable, but after they fixed it it was a great game.
Wow, that is a terrible launch…
Probably not for Helldivers but they sure as hell gonna pull the GFWL on us if they release a big multiplayer game on PC at some point.
cries in potential Tsushima Player
I have been waiting for that damn game for YEARS now. Don’t fuck it up, please! 😭
Great job PC Helldivers. Can the community do something about the Kernel-level rootkit?
It runs in userspace on Linux
Eee. But, big scary terminals and penguins! /s
Noob question: has anyone confirmed that it’s really running in userspace on linux or win gaming tech forums yet? Doesn’t effective anti-cheat require root privileges?
This is a pretty important thing to validate, in my opinion.
Unless it actually behaves like malware and attempts multiple workarounds to obtain root privileges that I should know about, it does run in userspace for me.
Perhaps later today I’ll spin up the game and check
lsmod, but if I’m wrong that’s a massive black flag that has absolutely no chance of being legal no matter how many eula roofies they spiked my drinks with.
Done, no weird kernel module was loaded: unless nProtect is pulling a sneaky, it’s running in user mode.
This is a subject I’ve been meaning to start researching and poking around with a bit. Due to work/time requirements, I haven’t been able to run a profiler on anti-cheat services on either of my Windows or my Kubuntu boxes. Any information that you’re willing to share is much appreciated. Thank you, in advance!
I’m not using a VM, I don’t think it would work with Windows + the kernel level anticheat; I also haven’t tried poking around with the AC, I guess it does prevent simple memory manipulation with things like
scanmembut I’m not willing to risk 40€ just for science.I’ll try doing the
lsmodthing and edit the comment you replied to, in a bit
Thank you for your service
Without people like you we’d all be relying on hearsay… I mean like even moreso than relying on a stranger’s comment :)
It is impossible to run in kernel without being explicitly given that permission.
Client anitcheat is never perfect, it is slightly better in kernel but that just caused more issues for legitimate customers.
None of this even makes sense as HD2 isn’t a PvP game.
I suppose that a legitimate argument for anti-cheat could be griefing, but then the host could just boot the player based on a basic voting system. In general I was curious to see “what’s under the hood” of a kernel-level and a userspace-level anti-cheat service and what are the implicit security risks for an average user.
In general I was curious to see “what’s under the hood” of a kernel-level service and a userspace-level anti-cheat and what are the implicit security risks for an average user.
This answer isn’t very satisfying, but the risk is complete and total. A kernel module can do anything and can hide what its doing.
A userspace anti-cheat has a wider range of risk. For example on Linux you can sandbox it so its quite safe in that case.
On Windows the most common issues user report are things like kernel crashes, corruption, etc. Things that should never happen in kernel space and potentially break an installation. These are honestly amateur projects that don’t belong there.
I think the most compelling for me was something like in MW2 back in the day hacked lobbies fucking up a your stats. Something similar in hd2 could ruin it for some.
In Helldivers 2’s case, say a cheater forces everyone in that mission to max out samples/medals/super credits, it entirely kills the progression and takes away a reason to keep playing unless it’s reverted safely, which then means that mission was pointless because someone else used cheats.
The solution to that is to rework how rewards are calculated, maybe do some sanity checks with the server, not seize super admin control of personal hardware.
For me, since I use the flatpak version of steam, at no point have I ever provided the admin password in order to install steam or any game. It, like all of my desktop software, runs in it’s own little sandbox that has limited access to the rest of the computer. It would take a somewhat sophisticated attack for an anticheat to actually run in kernalspace on the host os.
But that’s also why companies like riot have their anticheat block Linux from running the game at all.
If Linux becomes a populate enough platform, I’m sure cheaters will start using it to get around anticheat and something else will have to be done. Until then, I’m happy knowing this is a problem that I can mostly avoid.
what is this feeling, this trembling and energetic feeling, deep within me…?
is it …
… joy?
Nah, you burned that bridge, Sony. I’m not coming back.
This is the wrong way. This is what collective action does. But then we all have to have the grace to let people and Companies change course.
No, what? They’re supposed to just return once Sony reverses, trusting they won’t try anything again later?
Permanently losing a customer teaches them a better lesson. Distrusting them unless they actually spend the time and effort to earn it back teaches them a better lesson.
Anything else is the same as the slap-on-the-wrist mild fines we all hate to see when businesses are finally caught committing massive fraud.
At the end of the day, you have control over your own actions. You will be the one missing out in HD2, and if you’re ok with that, then so be it.
The funny thing about this is that this community has proven it will not take any bullshit, so you’re doing yourself a disservice by not allowing yourself to be a part of it anymore.
If you enjoy the game, allow yourself to play it again, and if Sony gets up to fuckery, believe in your fellow Divers to drop the bomb on them again.
Yes, that’s the tradeoff, you accept some amount of bad behavior in exchange for a game you enjoy. I don’t think a principled stance like theirs is fun. I think long term consequences are the only way to prevent them from trying to creep things like this in over and over until it finally works.
“The community will not put up with any bullshit, we’re safe now.”
Installs a rootkit.
What’s the bad behaviour we’re accepting right now though?
The game was review bombed to hell and back and people stopped playing because of the behaviour. No one accepted it. Sony now doesn’t have the account linking they wanted, and people not coming back to the game now punishes the Devs because it’s their livelihood too.
You 100% don’t have to play the game again, and it’s a 100% understandable choice, fuck the corpos. But like… You get to have fun, and you support the Devs that work hard to make the content, without feeding your account data to Sony. My perspective shows little to no downside, even considering what benefits Sony.
There’s the bad behaviour we’re not accepting right now, like the awful rootkit. This game is basically perfect for me, and for once my friends play it too, but I’m not touching it so long as rootkit crap exists, especially on a cooperative game.
Tbf the community has already long accepted the anticheat
I mean, I guess I understand where you’re coming from. I heard a really smart guy say once, “I reserve the right to get smarter.”
If Sony didn’t do anything people would complain that they stuck because they didn’t listen to their fan base.
Helldivers is a fun little game. I’ll be dropping in tonight. See you on Hellmire.
If they reverse course and everyone still refused to play out of principle, the only thing Sony learns is that they should just double down. The situation becomes a calculated move between the shareholder value linked PSN accounts create vs whatever they permanently lose in playerbase numbers, instead of a give and pull between a corporation and the community for one of its games. Not playing after they give in just tells them that there was no point in walking it back, and they might just reinstate the policy because at least they’ll get that tasty user data out of whoever they didn’t burn the bridge with.
I mean it’s your choice, but I’m just extrapolating what your stance entails if everyone were to take it.
I think both of these positions are important for coercing Sony. If everyone who was upset left permanently and kept their bad reviews, Sony would have no incentive to backtrack their next boneheaded decision. But it’s also true that if everyone jumps back in as if nothing happens, they have no incentive to avoid excessive greed in the future.
Most of the players will come back, and so Sony will be rewarded for compliance. But some players will be permanently alienated, and those permanently lost profits will be a reminder of what happens when you try to screw your players over.
Hey! You’re entitled to that opinion. I think each person has their level of bullshit tolerance. I think many people will review positively since the game was overall very good for 2 months and the change that would have made it awful was reversed, and willing to give it one or more chances. Others will keep the negative and request a refund, which will hopefully remind Sony not to do it again.
At this point they might not grant more late refunds.
The Sony way:
Shitstorm = Feedback
Noted
Holy crap what a weekend
Time to change back them negative reviews and then time to GET SOME!
Great news.
A huge collective effort to have players voices heard. I think some credit might need to go to the devs as well, as I’m sure they have been pushing back against this bullshit that Sony were trying to pull…
The devs must be pleased, they made a cape for Helldivers to wear that looks like the review graph.
Finally ! I hope we can go back to
bitchingtalking constructively about balance patches now.Helldiver fans – we’ve heard your feedback…
Pretty sure – and I use them all the time to add bonus thoughts – that’s not how you use an em dash.
You call that an em dash? THIS is an emdash! —
