Not entirely a nothing burger, I think. If there’s any truth to the anti-cheat outrage, there’s a large population of average joes handing out ring 0 access to a growing number of third or fourth party companies for the purpose of kernel level anti-cheat in video games.

Still a supply chain attack or a vulnerability in one of the A/C programs, but not as impossible as we would like it to be.

Yeah, I can see more of this happening as demand for quality products increases.

Things that don’t need replaced don’t bring in more money year over year, which means they have to keep coming up with other excuses for you to buy a new one just to stay above water.

Any time purchases reach critical mass and mostly everyone has bought the “last gizmo you’ll ever need”, they’ll have to release the last-last gizmo you’ll ever need.

One-time purchase forever mouse would just mean once sales drop they need to release the forever-ever mouse, now with an extra button, then when that one peaks, the forever-and-ever mouse, with one more button than that.

Or they’ll hit a ceiling and go the way of Instant Pot.

It feels like a choice between rental(this) or rental with extra e-waste(any time you replace a cheaply made or planned obsolescence product) and it sucks.

Some would think this is horrible, but to me, it would be wholly dependent on the title/what was bought and sold.

Nothing in this world is free. Development, servers, character licensing, it all costs money and if those costs aren’t passed down, you’ll never afford to continue. So for a game, especially one with online content or continuing content, to be free to play, money has to come from somewhere.

Where the road splits is what is being sold. Things that give an edge in the game, pay-to-win? Uninstalled. Time limited FOMO triggers? Disgusting. Random loot boxes? Begone foul spirit.

On the other end, if all that is for sale is shiny baubles and trinkets, things no one needs but can have as a reward for “supporting development”? I’m cool with that. If I feel no requirement to pay up, it’s being handled right, and if I like they game, sure, I can part with a fiver to look like I’m dipped in gold or whatever the supporter pack adds to help them keep the lights on(at least until I get bored of it in a week or two and switch back :P).

I’d be curious what the divide is between the two kinds of purchases are. I’m sure I’ll be disappointed to find it was mostly P2W scum, though.

My understanding is that this is a rage-baitey misunderstanding.

Yes, they are renaming the base game (to improve search results, it is speculated) but otherwise this is more of a soft-reboot, a free DLC(for owners of current DLC) with some core mechanic overhauls.

It’s not even going to stop being an MMORPG, the marketing team was just allergic to the acronym for some reason.

In fact, it was confirmed that for base game players without DLC, this is all just a big nothing. We’ll still keep our progress and data, just not get any new DLC content(obviously), though the rebalancing will still trickle down.

New World isn’t shutting down, it’s getting a new DLC and a less generic name, the marketing guys just tried to oversell it like a new game. Guess they earned their bonus because everyone is talking about it now…

Genuine curiosity…what are some proposed solutions we think Valve can implement to solve this crisis?

I ask because the line about VAC being a joke gave me a thought…VAC is such a joke because it is so simple and un-invasive. Do we really want VAC “upgraded” to the level of more effective Anti-cheats, where it cuts down the bots but is now a monitoring kernel service? Just a few weeks ago people were in an uproar about the new Vanguard anti-cheat…do we want that for Valve? Or do we think they can do it a better way?

As an aside, honestly in my mind community servers with a cooperative ban list plugin might be the most effective solution of all…it would still be a game of whack a mole since they can always churn out new accounts, but that’s what gives me pause about other solutions because the only real solutions to slow cheaters start to sound like charging for the game(to make account creation costly) or implementing a bulletproof system of hardware bans, which means invasive solutions that can be certain they aren’t virtual machines or such.

It’s very likely something like this will only exist in the Bedrock version, so there’s that. And even if they also put it in Java, there’ll be a mod to remove it very, very quickly.