I always feel a little doubtful of anti-cheat claims. Like "Look, we deployed our latest anti-cheat software and our stats show there's no cheaters anymore" makes me think "right, because if you...
I always feel a little doubtful of anti-cheat claims.
Like "Look, we deployed our latest anti-cheat software and our stats show there's no cheaters anymore" makes me think "right, because if you knew they were cheaters you would ban them, but that doesn't prove there aren't cheaters you can't detect".
Or on the flip side, "we've no false positives, as determined by how many bans we've overturned" makes me think "right, because your customer support's first response is to confidently assert your correctness and say all bans are final".
I do agree with you for the most part. Though, in this case, I also believe there's some truth to what they're saying due to the circumstances. They implemented the new anti-cheat software fairly...
I do agree with you for the most part. Though, in this case, I also believe there's some truth to what they're saying due to the circumstances.
They implemented the new anti-cheat software fairly recently, which likely requires any previously used cheats to need to be completely rewritten in order to sneak past it. So it's likely more effective at the moment, simply due to the cheaters trying to catch up. But it's likely only a matter of time until they figure out how to get past it and reach the levels of cheaters that were seen previously.
The number of cheaters seems to have significantly been reduced in the recent months due to their new anti-cheat. If that's the case, the number of false positives (and false positives that are not overturned) has likely also been reduced. Overall, probably a win.
Finally, they probably do use in game reports to some extent for their statistics. I would hope that those numbers are also down. Though, they don't mention reports at all, so it's hard to say if any of this is true. Especially since it can be difficult for people to differentiate from an extremely skilled player and a cheater. And I guess there's also the possibility that their anti-cheat boasting has a placebo effect causing less reports as well...
Yeah, I'm probably more cynical than most since I experienced EA stealing a copy of Red Alert 3 from me via their anti-cheat. I played a few private matches online around when I got it with some...
Yeah, I'm probably more cynical than most since I experienced EA stealing a copy of Red Alert 3 from me via their anti-cheat. I played a few private matches online around when I got it with some friends, left the game for a year, and came back unable to log in to the online because my CD key was banned for cheating, despite never cheated or done anything I can think of to make anti-cheat uneasy.
Nowadays I do do things that could make anti-cheat unhappy, like... run Linux, or have debuggers installed because I'm a programmer now, or run discord which has an overlay that hooks into games to show who's talking.
I've never had a problem with Discord or my debugging tools. Though I imagine I might run into trouble if I tried playing a game with something like Ghidra running.
I've never had a problem with Discord or my debugging tools. Though I imagine I might run into trouble if I tried playing a game with something like Ghidra running.
I'd heard that vanguard banned everyone with a vulnerable driver installed (in valorant) that was known to be exploited, which could means false positives. In the article they simply mention...
I'd heard that vanguard banned everyone with a vulnerable driver installed (in valorant) that was known to be exploited, which could means false positives. In the article they simply mention blocking systems with vulnerable drivers which seems tamer. Otherwise, I haven't heard much about players getting false positive-ed by vanguard, but I've personally experienced a false positive with blizzard's opaque system when playing Overwatch 2. I suffered through 8 denied appeals (strongly worded and gaslighting responses) over the course of a month before It was finally overturned with a canned it "was an error" message. I agree that any stats offered about an anti-cheat's effectiveness ring hollow, and my own experience makes wonder how many people gave up appealing and just became a stat in a blizzard pr post.
I'm still salty they killed off LoL on Linux entirely. I understood the reasoning and disagreed with the decision (still do - besides the kernel anticheat concerns, cheaters were never such a big...
I'm still salty they killed off LoL on Linux entirely. I understood the reasoning and disagreed with the decision (still do - besides the kernel anticheat concerns, cheaters were never such a big problem in my experience, but maybe I was just lucky).
I'm immensely curious about embedded Vanguard though - I'm sure they'll keep most of it under wraps, but I wonder how much of it relies on macOS native stuff, and how much would be easily ported to Linux.
I'm still coping for a Steam Deck release some day. :(
It sounds like it relies a lot on macOS native stuff if they can run it from the same unprivileged process as the game client.
The unique security of the macOS environment allows us to be a little less stringent on defending its kernel, so as the name implies, this won’t require any extra installs—the security is “embedded” right into the game client. Further still, we’re actually already using mVG to great effect on VALORANT console and on Wild Rift.
It sounds like it relies a lot on macOS native stuff if they can run it from the same unprivileged process as the game client.
From what I understand, macOS has been using Secure Boot for quite some time, and has gotten quite good at leveraging it to validate the integrity of the operating environment, from boot all the...
From what I understand, macOS has been using Secure Boot for quite some time, and has gotten quite good at leveraging it to validate the integrity of the operating environment, from boot all the way to protecting vital system utilities inside /bin and such.
I'm not sure you'll ever see anything similar on Linux. For a long time, TPM/Secure Boot has been synonymous with DRM. Today, even though there is a shim, I don't think most distros derive any meaningful security benefit from Secure Boot, and given the propensity for Linux users to want to fool around with their kernel, as well as the lack of a stable driver interface, I feel like Linux users will be left more and more in the cold when it comes to competitive online games with anti-cheat.
It always baffles me how a game company can think they're important enough to exist on someone's PC in such an invasive way. It's just a game. Especially this sentence rubs me the wrong way: "We...
It always baffles me how a game company can think they're important enough to exist on someone's PC in such an invasive way. It's just a game.
Especially this sentence rubs me the wrong way:
we still need to know nothing had a chance to compromise Windows since boot.
"We need to protect you from yourself" is an awful stance and it will always feel like sentencing innocent people to catch a very small contingent of (very low level, low stakes) baddies.
The worst part of anti cheat is that it never actually accomplishes a cheat free environment. What works, and it's clear in these charts, is rapidly changing detection methods. I understand Vanguard gives them that ability but I don't think the kernel level requirement is necessary for that per se.
Now I'm hesitant to install, but not entirely opposed to installing, kernel level anti cheat. I place a small level of trust in these companies simply because them fucking this up will cost them more than they are willing to pay, which means I inherently put more trust in them than they do with me.
Still, I'd rather not because I can guarantee all you'll get from me is false positives at best. You don't give ankle monitors to innocent people and you shouldn't have to.
Their anti-cheat, which essentially amounts to a rootkit, is only one small bug away from causing a ransomware catastrophe on all systems that have it, and I absolutely do NOT trust the competence...
Their anti-cheat, which essentially amounts to a rootkit, is only one small bug away from causing a ransomware catastrophe on all systems that have it, and I absolutely do NOT trust the competence of developers at riot.
Which is entirely understandable and I don't fault anyone for doing so. Trust is a strong word and I hesitated writing it in the first place. I'd say it's more of an understanding that they're...
Which is entirely understandable and I don't fault anyone for doing so.
Trust is a strong word and I hesitated writing it in the first place. I'd say it's more of an understanding that they're holding my computer at gunpoint, but squeezing the trigger will cost them so much I understand it will likely not happen.
Let me be clear though, I don't have League or Valorant installed, and Vanguard made me less likely to do so. I did make the conscious choice to go through with it for Helldivers 2.
Very interesting read with statistics and information about the state of the art in anti-cheat software. Previous discussion when Vanguard was introduced to LoL:...
Very interesting read with statistics and information about the state of the art in anti-cheat software.
I've actually noticed the quality of my Ranked, Draft Pick and Quickplay games get dramatically worse since the Vanguard update, and I dropped from Bronze 1 to Iron 4 since the end of last season....
I've actually noticed the quality of my Ranked, Draft Pick and Quickplay games get dramatically worse since the Vanguard update, and I dropped from Bronze 1 to Iron 4 since the end of last season. The final straw that made me uninstall and bin the game outright was a 7 day chat restriction just for typing "gg shit team" in chat. It sucks when Riot pander to the fragile and punish anything & everything as abusive chat when you can run it down like an Olympic sprinter with absolute fucking impunity.
Wanna get rid of toxicity? Punish the people who int. People who run it down and die every 1.5 minutes, supports who place zero wards, and junglers who can't even be bothered to do full clears, gank or contest objectives shouldn't be tolerated in Ranked games.
As the only real incentive to bot at my MMR is to try and power level accounts to low Iron for resale, my guess is that there has been a significant brain drain from the community since a lot of people are incredibly apprehensive about installing one of the most invasive kernel level anticheats to currently exist. Of course, this isn't such a factor for the Valorant crowd because people are used to playing Counter Strike on external third party servers (i e. FaceIt and ESEA) with similar solutions. In fact CS2 has such a massive cheating problem due to how badly VAC sucks that playing on FaceIt is practically mandatory.
If you still think there's no problem... MiHoYo's anticheat had a significant vulnerability exploited on it, and there was the issue of the Apex Legends finals being hacked by an outsider live on stream.
To be honest the state of League right now is dismal (every biweekly patch has been a massive meta shakeup with huge balance changes that break the game), and if they don't do something drastic within the next few months like fire Phreak, fire Phroxzon and hire people who are actually competent at game design and balance, Tencent is gonna be Riot's bank balance...
I've recently given FFXIV a second go and I'm just astounded at how enjoyable an online server community can become when the company aggressively bans and flushes out assholes who think they're...
I've recently given FFXIV a second go and I'm just astounded at how enjoyable an online server community can become when the company aggressively bans and flushes out assholes who think they're doing a community service by being toxic & denigrating, as if anyone should be required to tolerate them while they're trying to enjoy a leisure activity.
It's also kinda weird cuz finding and banning toxic chat is so easy compared to differentiating if someone's just playing badly in low elo vs actually inting. There's obviously extreme cases that...
It's also kinda weird cuz finding and banning toxic chat is so easy compared to differentiating if someone's just playing badly in low elo vs actually inting. There's obviously extreme cases that everyone points to where people go like 0/20/0 but I feel like the "soft inting" thing is just so dumb. Some people just aren't great at the game.
Seconded. It's funny because toxic players often stick themselves in a loop. They think they're better than their allies, and often, mechanically, they are. The reason they're playing with "shit...
Seconded.
It's funny because toxic players often stick themselves in a loop.
They think they're better than their allies, and often, mechanically, they are. The reason they're playing with "shit players" is because they're a shit teammate. The more toxic you are, the more likely you are to help your team lose the game. I've know quite a few dota players who saw major gains in their rank because they just stopped flaming their allies at every opportunity, and it turns out that not having someone give up at minute 10 because they're sick of your bullshit really helps you turn things around.
Even if this was only a "end of game" vent only, it's still basically just throwing a tantrum, and I see no reason to need to protect it. Games over, move on.
This is a really interesting opinion to me. Considering how low elo you were (and for the record I wasn't great either), do you really feel like you have the game knowledge to make these kinds of...
To be honest the state of League right now is dismal (every biweekly patch has been a massive meta shakeup with huge balance changes that break the game), and if they don't do something drastic within the next few months like fire Phreak, fire Phroxzon and hire people who are actually competent at game design and balance, Tencent is gonna be Riot's bank balance...
This is a really interesting opinion to me. Considering how low elo you were (and for the record I wasn't great either), do you really feel like you have the game knowledge to make these kinds of statements? Can you really, confidently say that you understand league of legends to the point where you can assess the impact of a balance change across the entire game?
There's a reason most people aren't high elo and it's not "because of x y z", it's mistakes that they don't even realize they're making.
I promise you, hand on my heart, that if you let someone a few tiers above you review your solo queue games they'll be back with a shopping list of mistakes, and the higher their tier the more mistakes they'll spot. Hell, I bet if you critically reviewed your VODs, you'd notice some of them, too.
I'm not saying that you have to be a perfect player to criticize the game or disagree with a balance change, but... Look. We're bad at the game. If we weren't, we just wouldn't be this low. I can't criticize a high elo chess player's game when I'm sitting on 500 and don't understand why I keep losing, blaming my opponents for using "cheese" that I could easily practice against and get better (yes this was an actual point in my life).
I decided it wasn't worth it when I started reviewing my games and realized just how many times I fuck up per game and how much work I'd have to put in to get better. Ever since then I've rarely played and have little to no desire to play ranked. If you can't or do not want to put in the effort, just accept your rank and move on. Blaming anything else is an easy way to trick yourself into thinking you're already good enough, when you really, statistically, aren't, and to keep playing game after game after game. That's what elo hell really is, a prison of your own design.
I'd say that the vast majority of the game should be balanced around the average player. I know that's not always the case, but for the sake of argument, a competitive multiplayer game should be...
Can you really, confidently say that you understand league of legends to the point where you can assess the impact of a balance change across the entire game?
I'd say that the vast majority of the game should be balanced around the average player. I know that's not always the case, but for the sake of argument, a competitive multiplayer game should be balanced around the average. Meaning that yes, they should see the balance changes impact their game the most.
Now whether or not that's true is another topic. Many games balance around their loudest, richest, or most successful rather than their general player base. I know Riot has done a lot of that in the past but I wouldn't know at this point.
Note that I agree with your post by the by, it's just that that part specifically gave me some food for thought.
I might be extending your line of thinking a bit past what you intend, but the average player sucks. Balancing around them is a really quick way to get a low skill ceiling. Riot does a decent...
I might be extending your line of thinking a bit past what you intend, but the average player sucks. Balancing around them is a really quick way to get a low skill ceiling. Riot does a decent amount to look at lower skill levels and ask what's a mathematical or meta shortcut to quickly win in the guidelines of basic game knowledge, and they tend to tweak character numbers when they're too easy to exploit in low level play. But similarly, take Garen or Trynd - they're never really intended to be balanced at high level, and they're going to continue to pubstomp for eternity. That's because they're countered by knowledge, not by being "outplayed".
Garen and Trynd should exist, and pubstomp, and not / barely exist in high level play, because it should be an easy signpost for people to come to a realization themselves that they need to modify their playstyle in either a macro fashion or higher to a pick/ban level. The average player shouldn't dictate whether they're "too powerful"; if they can't consistently understand how to beat them, it's a measure of their skill that they're not ready to jump that hurdle.
MTG has a good analogue in draft, where there are "traps" that seem good but don't actually perform well in a limited format. As that article also mentions, the whole Enchantment - Aura subtype exists to lay out basics of card advantage and putting too much investment in a resource. They feel good when they go off, but once Timmy's 15/15 dinosaur blows up to a single kill spell enough times they'll start to get they're not as cracked as they looked. It's a teaching tool, and that moment sometimes makes a game click as much as a good Trynd splitpush. I had this in Deadlock when I started looking at farming numbers and the souls involved for a wave of minions or denies vs a kill; the strategy suddenly clicked in my head. I put more stock in being conservative during the laning phase, and now... Well, the MMR is borked right now and people sometimes still shoot orbs faster than I can. Sometimes. (A lot.) But it's one more thing I fuck up less!
Games should be fun for the average player and balanced around the highest. The average player is likely to get stuck in habits or poor analysis, and a game shouldn't cater to that. I always go to competitive Smash, especially Melee, as an example. Low, enjoyable, approachable skill floor, very high and rewarding ceiling with steps along the way; easy recipe, and really difficult to tweak right. But it's the way to go for a truly lasting game.
I think this is the sentiment I trip over and what I tried to highlight. I don't think you should balance for the highest tier, what ends up happening is that the vast majority of your player base...
Games should be fun for the average player and balanced around the highest.
I think this is the sentiment I trip over and what I tried to highlight. I don't think you should balance for the highest tier, what ends up happening is that the vast majority of your player base doesn't get a fun experience.
It seems counter intuitive to me that you would balance for the 1% or even 0,1% of your player base. And it's what happens quite often! You can see changes based on pro play that significantly affect the average game because an imbalance disproportionately works better at lower levels than it does at the higher levels.
You also have to consider the 50/50 matchmaking here and balance becomes stupidly difficult to implement properly if you look at only 1% of your player base.
I'd even posit the opposite: Games should be fun for the pro player and balanced around the regular folks.
Spectacle brings in viewers, while a fair competitive playing field keeps players playing; the latter ultimately being your customers.
Now there's nothing holding you back from balancing on either side of the fence, overbearing imbalances should be patched out regardless of player level, but I'd take a more general approach to balance were it up to me.
Heartily disagree. I'll point to Melee again; Fox is technically TAS-perfect and if you're a robot you can play him perfectly. At the highest of high echelons, that drives people towards an arms...
I don't think you should balance for the highest tier, what ends up happening is that the vast majority of your player base doesn't get a fun experience.
Heartily disagree. I'll point to Melee again; Fox is technically TAS-perfect and if you're a robot you can play him perfectly. At the highest of high echelons, that drives people towards an arms race of skill, and a meta around Fox. But Fox is also wildly difficult even with that mathematical edge; at lower competitive play, a decent player of any character would still wreck. At the most casual of play that most people engage with the game at - who cares? One bad Bob-omb spawn sends us all off the stage. There were probably more eight year-olds losing friendships over Ganondorf neutral B than Fox. But it's because the game has the space for its upward climb that people keep playing it - because there's somewhere to go. That's longevity.
What you're arguing over from a League perspective, ultimately, can be tiny little numbers over things like sustain; number of times a champion might back in lane; the specific amount of HP someone will come out of the jungle with; the specific AS number that multiplies out of a particular build, and whether that pushes someone towards Shiv, PD, etc. The game HAS to be balanced around these things. Otherwise a perfect player or team mathematically solves it. At lower play, these numbers get negated by misclicks, picking one bad teamfight, picking a champ into a bad lane, getting tilted by a bad lane early game... It's up to a player to figure out how to deal with that.
Or, addressing this from your original post:
Meaning that yes, they should see the balance changes impact their game the most.
I think you put way too much faith in the average player to see it, at all, even if there was a giant pop-up saying "balance changes!" when you start the game. (Is there? lol) The game is still engaging to them. They won't put the time in to care or notice, they'll continue to press Q on Yi and watch some HP bars drop. I played a few months ago and realized my jungle paths were awful due to meta changes, but that didn't stop me from winning a few games anyway.
It's an extremely wide game with thousands of micro and macro decisions happening every second. I think Riot (, or Sakurai for Smash, or Icefrog for DotA, or presumably Icefrog pretending to be a guy called Yoshi for Deadlock,) have created good games simply because they can be engaged on these lower levels, BY just making an engaging loop regardless of the dozens of variables behind it, and tuning this all for higher and higher players.
You also have to consider the 50/50 matchmaking here and balance becomes stupidly difficult to implement properly if you look at only 1% of your player base.
Why? Not sure what you're getting at - the 50/50 matchmaking sorts out the people to how much they do or don't understand the game, no? And it's not like everyone from Diamond II-downwards suddenly quits every patch.
I reached Archon within three weeks of getting into DOTA 2 and I got into Master League in SC2, so don't give me this spiel about "not being good at games." And I quit DOTA because it's not fun to...
I reached Archon within three weeks of getting into DOTA 2 and I got into Master League in SC2, so don't give me this spiel about "not being good at games."
And I quit DOTA because it's not fun to have people mass report you for "inting" and scream obscenities at you in other languages via VC, then you get a low priority queue penalty because Valve's report system is an even bigger crock of shit than Riot's. DOTA is the reason I know a lot of curse words in other languages.
Only games I got LPQ for were Turbo Mode ones which are about as fair and balanced as Fox News. The kind where your lane opponent can kill you once in lane then make you go 0/12 whilst farming you under tower because turret damage is non-existent in that mode.
If a game's community is so toxic that it makes you go back to League to cleanse your palate or their bullshit, it's a sign that Valve should divest some of their esports prize pool into giving their community mandatory anger management classes.
I said nothing about your skill in other games, just league. All of my points still stand. If you reviewed your VODs you'd find out exactly why and how you're stuck where you are, and if you...
I said nothing about your skill in other games, just league. All of my points still stand. If you reviewed your VODs you'd find out exactly why and how you're stuck where you are, and if you improved you'd climb. The fact that you intuitively understand other games might make you think that it will or should transfer to league, but that's not how skill works. For most people, being intuitively good on guitar does not make you necessarily good on bass.
Also, this statement is kind of funny...
And I quit DOTA because it's not fun to have people mass report you for "inting" and scream obscenities at you in other languages via VC
...considering you previously said this in the last post:
Wanna get rid of toxicity? Punish the people who int. People who run it down and die every 1.5 minutes, supports who place zero wards, and junglers who can't even be bothered to do full clears, gank or contest objectives shouldn't be tolerated in Ranked games.
In your OP, you are justifying the exact behaviour that you're describing now. The people who are yelling at you think you're a worse player than them so they tell themselves it's okay to harass you. You think the people in your ranked games are worse players than you so you think riot should "punish" them, whatever that means. This is such a double standard that it makes me question if your 7 day chat restriction was really just from saying "gg shit team".
Edit: also, I looked it up because I had no idea, and Archon seems to be... Pretty average? Maybe above average? I don't know if I'd expect to get the same result in league, nor is it good justification for literally anything in your post. Your StarCraft tier is very impressive but it's not even the same genre as league. With this in mind, you addressed literally none of my points and just tried to pull rank in different games as a reply. You can keep bringing up all of these things to blame for getting angry about these games but it only reinforces the thought that you need to step back and assess your relationship with them.
I miss the days where people would post in the r/leagueoflegends subreddit complaining about getting banned for innocuous reasons before a Rioter came in and said nahhh you were way more toxic...
This is such a double standard that it makes me question if your 7 day chat restriction was really just from saying "gg shit team".
I miss the days where people would post in the r/leagueoflegends subreddit complaining about getting banned for innocuous reasons before a Rioter came in and said nahhh you were way more toxic than this.
Okay, I'll bite. I can't stand DotA because of the types of things their player base says or types to you, which would be deemed zero-tolerance and grounds for an immediate perma ban from LoL....
Okay, I'll bite.
I can't stand DotA because of the types of things their player base says or types to you, which would be deemed zero-tolerance and grounds for an immediate perma ban from LoL. DotA players are the kind that will wish cancer upon you and your family, throw racist slurs around and tell you to hang yourself if you screw up even once. Most of the crap I got in that game would immediately get you automatically system muted by the game's zero-tolerance language filter for the rest of the match if you tried to type any of in League.
DotA has the opposite problem to League where the system punishes you and docks your Behavior Score just for having a bad game, but the community is allowed to be toxic with the same level of impunity that Riot allow people to int in League. I'm not gonna pretend that I'm a well-mannered and respectful player who can handle losing situations but even I have standards. In terms of toxicity comparing League to DotA is like comparing a pint of Stella Artois to a beaker full of Strychnine.
Back to my point about soft-inting as you put it. Support is a role that is intended to be low-income by design. A support's primary job is to place wards, and the World Atlas you are directed to buy at the very start evolves into an item that can place wards. Vision wins games. Many deaths can be outright prevented just by placing a stealth ward in the brush near your river, and a control ward deeper in your side of the map.
The metric that can easily determine if a support is competent or dead weight is vision score. You gain 1 for each minute a ward is up, or for destroying enemy wards.
There is nothing more frustrating than being placed with a support who ends a 30+ min match with a single digit vision score. A semi-competent player should be approaching triple digits. It's actually baffling that there isn't an automated check to warn and punish support players for low vision scores, because refusing to place wards in that role is more akin to running it down.
I have no idea what you're talking about with regards to dota. I literally never mentioned dota in my original reply. I have never played dota. It is irrelevant to the conversation in my opinion...
I have no idea what you're talking about with regards to dota. I literally never mentioned dota in my original reply. I have never played dota. It is irrelevant to the conversation in my opinion and really doesn't change much about what I'm saying. I was addressing the hypocrisy in your statement regarding what you said in the last post, and you're just explaining to me why dota is more toxic than league as if I was arguing otherwise. I have no opinion because I have not played dota.
What makes you special? How do other people climb out of Iron, pure chance? (this in particular would be quite the claim, one that really should have some proof beyond anecdotal experiences). "Inters" like those bad supports should statistically show up in other people's games just as often as yours, meaning that even if it was the case that every game is a coin flip that's still 50/50. That leaves your individual skill as what bends the needle towards a positive or negative winrate. If you can play well enough to win 1% more games, you'll have a positive winrate and eventually climb. This is my point, but you're explaining vision score to me? Can't help but feel it's a tad condescending.
I'm sorry but it doesn't really feel like you're taking anything I say seriously. I didn't engage in order to call you bad or make fun of you, I did it because I was in the exact same situation with video games a few years ago and know exactly how frustrating it is to keep losing no matter what I do. The simple explanation is usually the right one: is the league of legends matchmaking system rigged against you and the balance team should be fired to specifically cater to what you think is correct or fun, or are you just not as good as you think you are?
Be that as it may I don't think you're interested in any advice I have to offer, so I don't really see much point in continuing to talk. Have a good one.
It's funny you've mentioned the quality of your games changing for the worse, because I've had the exact opposite experience. I was in silver 1 for months, but I've climbed to gold 2 since the...
It's funny you've mentioned the quality of your games changing for the worse, because I've had the exact opposite experience. I was in silver 1 for months, but I've climbed to gold 2 since the update.
I don't think I'm playing much better, but my rank has definitely improved a lot.
Remember that episode of South Park where the boys are playing little league baseball and everyone is deliberately throwing because they don't want to spend the whole summer playing? Iron MMR is...
Remember that episode of South Park where the boys are playing little league baseball and everyone is deliberately throwing because they don't want to spend the whole summer playing?
I always feel a little doubtful of anti-cheat claims.
Like "Look, we deployed our latest anti-cheat software and our stats show there's no cheaters anymore" makes me think "right, because if you knew they were cheaters you would ban them, but that doesn't prove there aren't cheaters you can't detect".
Or on the flip side, "we've no false positives, as determined by how many bans we've overturned" makes me think "right, because your customer support's first response is to confidently assert your correctness and say all bans are final".
I do agree with you for the most part. Though, in this case, I also believe there's some truth to what they're saying due to the circumstances.
They implemented the new anti-cheat software fairly recently, which likely requires any previously used cheats to need to be completely rewritten in order to sneak past it. So it's likely more effective at the moment, simply due to the cheaters trying to catch up. But it's likely only a matter of time until they figure out how to get past it and reach the levels of cheaters that were seen previously.
The number of cheaters seems to have significantly been reduced in the recent months due to their new anti-cheat. If that's the case, the number of false positives (and false positives that are not overturned) has likely also been reduced. Overall, probably a win.
Finally, they probably do use in game reports to some extent for their statistics. I would hope that those numbers are also down. Though, they don't mention reports at all, so it's hard to say if any of this is true. Especially since it can be difficult for people to differentiate from an extremely skilled player and a cheater. And I guess there's also the possibility that their anti-cheat boasting has a placebo effect causing less reports as well...
Yeah, I'm probably more cynical than most since I experienced EA stealing a copy of Red Alert 3 from me via their anti-cheat. I played a few private matches online around when I got it with some friends, left the game for a year, and came back unable to log in to the online because my CD key was banned for cheating, despite never cheated or done anything I can think of to make anti-cheat uneasy.
Nowadays I do do things that could make anti-cheat unhappy, like... run Linux, or have debuggers installed because I'm a programmer now, or run discord which has an overlay that hooks into games to show who's talking.
I've never had a problem with Discord or my debugging tools. Though I imagine I might run into trouble if I tried playing a game with something like Ghidra running.
I'd heard that vanguard banned everyone with a vulnerable driver installed (in valorant) that was known to be exploited, which could means false positives. In the article they simply mention blocking systems with vulnerable drivers which seems tamer. Otherwise, I haven't heard much about players getting false positive-ed by vanguard, but I've personally experienced a false positive with blizzard's opaque system when playing Overwatch 2. I suffered through 8 denied appeals (strongly worded and gaslighting responses) over the course of a month before It was finally overturned with a canned it "was an error" message. I agree that any stats offered about an anti-cheat's effectiveness ring hollow, and my own experience makes wonder how many people gave up appealing and just became a stat in a blizzard pr post.
Yeah, though to be fair these two pitfalls are far from unique to anti-cheat. False negatives especially are hard to root out in general.
I think a portion of that less steep decline in the tail end of the graph is the development of workarounds lol
It would have been interesting to compare numbers with a non-kernel-level anti-cheat solution. Just to see the relative effectiveness of both.
I'm still salty they killed off LoL on Linux entirely. I understood the reasoning and disagreed with the decision (still do - besides the kernel anticheat concerns, cheaters were never such a big problem in my experience, but maybe I was just lucky).
I'm immensely curious about embedded Vanguard though - I'm sure they'll keep most of it under wraps, but I wonder how much of it relies on macOS native stuff, and how much would be easily ported to Linux.
I'm still coping for a Steam Deck release some day. :(
It sounds like it relies a lot on macOS native stuff if they can run it from the same unprivileged process as the game client.
From what I understand, macOS has been using Secure Boot for quite some time, and has gotten quite good at leveraging it to validate the integrity of the operating environment, from boot all the way to protecting vital system utilities inside
/binand such.I'm not sure you'll ever see anything similar on Linux. For a long time, TPM/Secure Boot has been synonymous with DRM. Today, even though there is a shim, I don't think most distros derive any meaningful security benefit from Secure Boot, and given the propensity for Linux users to want to fool around with their kernel, as well as the lack of a stable driver interface, I feel like Linux users will be left more and more in the cold when it comes to competitive online games with anti-cheat.
It always baffles me how a game company can think they're important enough to exist on someone's PC in such an invasive way. It's just a game.
Especially this sentence rubs me the wrong way:
"We need to protect you from yourself" is an awful stance and it will always feel like sentencing innocent people to catch a very small contingent of (very low level, low stakes) baddies.
The worst part of anti cheat is that it never actually accomplishes a cheat free environment. What works, and it's clear in these charts, is rapidly changing detection methods. I understand Vanguard gives them that ability but I don't think the kernel level requirement is necessary for that per se.
Now I'm hesitant to install, but not entirely opposed to installing, kernel level anti cheat. I place a small level of trust in these companies simply because them fucking this up will cost them more than they are willing to pay, which means I inherently put more trust in them than they do with me.
Still, I'd rather not because I can guarantee all you'll get from me is false positives at best. You don't give ankle monitors to innocent people and you shouldn't have to.
Their anti-cheat, which essentially amounts to a rootkit, is only one small bug away from causing a ransomware catastrophe on all systems that have it, and I absolutely do NOT trust the competence of developers at riot.
Which is entirely understandable and I don't fault anyone for doing so.
Trust is a strong word and I hesitated writing it in the first place. I'd say it's more of an understanding that they're holding my computer at gunpoint, but squeezing the trigger will cost them so much I understand it will likely not happen.
Let me be clear though, I don't have League or Valorant installed, and Vanguard made me less likely to do so. I did make the conscious choice to go through with it for Helldivers 2.
Very interesting read with statistics and information about the state of the art in anti-cheat software.
Previous discussion when Vanguard was introduced to LoL: https://tildes.net/~games/1fkf/riots_vanguard_comes_to_league
I've actually noticed the quality of my Ranked, Draft Pick and Quickplay games get dramatically worse since the Vanguard update, and I dropped from Bronze 1 to Iron 4 since the end of last season. The final straw that made me uninstall and bin the game outright was a 7 day chat restriction just for typing "gg shit team" in chat. It sucks when Riot pander to the fragile and punish anything & everything as abusive chat when you can run it down like an Olympic sprinter with absolute fucking impunity.
Wanna get rid of toxicity? Punish the people who int. People who run it down and die every 1.5 minutes, supports who place zero wards, and junglers who can't even be bothered to do full clears, gank or contest objectives shouldn't be tolerated in Ranked games.
As the only real incentive to bot at my MMR is to try and power level accounts to low Iron for resale, my guess is that there has been a significant brain drain from the community since a lot of people are incredibly apprehensive about installing one of the most invasive kernel level anticheats to currently exist. Of course, this isn't such a factor for the Valorant crowd because people are used to playing Counter Strike on external third party servers (i e. FaceIt and ESEA) with similar solutions. In fact CS2 has such a massive cheating problem due to how badly VAC sucks that playing on FaceIt is practically mandatory.
If you still think there's no problem... MiHoYo's anticheat had a significant vulnerability exploited on it, and there was the issue of the Apex Legends finals being hacked by an outsider live on stream.
To be honest the state of League right now is dismal (every biweekly patch has been a massive meta shakeup with huge balance changes that break the game), and if they don't do something drastic within the next few months like fire Phreak, fire Phroxzon and hire people who are actually competent at game design and balance, Tencent is gonna be Riot's bank balance...
Sorry, but I'll keep reporting this any day of the week.
I've recently given FFXIV a second go and I'm just astounded at how enjoyable an online server community can become when the company aggressively bans and flushes out assholes who think they're doing a community service by being toxic & denigrating, as if anyone should be required to tolerate them while they're trying to enjoy a leisure activity.
It's also kinda weird cuz finding and banning toxic chat is so easy compared to differentiating if someone's just playing badly in low elo vs actually inting. There's obviously extreme cases that everyone points to where people go like 0/20/0 but I feel like the "soft inting" thing is just so dumb. Some people just aren't great at the game.
Seconded.
It's funny because toxic players often stick themselves in a loop.
They think they're better than their allies, and often, mechanically, they are. The reason they're playing with "shit players" is because they're a shit teammate. The more toxic you are, the more likely you are to help your team lose the game. I've know quite a few dota players who saw major gains in their rank because they just stopped flaming their allies at every opportunity, and it turns out that not having someone give up at minute 10 because they're sick of your bullshit really helps you turn things around.
Even if this was only a "end of game" vent only, it's still basically just throwing a tantrum, and I see no reason to need to protect it. Games over, move on.
This is a really interesting opinion to me. Considering how low elo you were (and for the record I wasn't great either), do you really feel like you have the game knowledge to make these kinds of statements? Can you really, confidently say that you understand league of legends to the point where you can assess the impact of a balance change across the entire game?
There's a reason most people aren't high elo and it's not "because of x y z", it's mistakes that they don't even realize they're making.
I promise you, hand on my heart, that if you let someone a few tiers above you review your solo queue games they'll be back with a shopping list of mistakes, and the higher their tier the more mistakes they'll spot. Hell, I bet if you critically reviewed your VODs, you'd notice some of them, too.
I'm not saying that you have to be a perfect player to criticize the game or disagree with a balance change, but... Look. We're bad at the game. If we weren't, we just wouldn't be this low. I can't criticize a high elo chess player's game when I'm sitting on 500 and don't understand why I keep losing, blaming my opponents for using "cheese" that I could easily practice against and get better (yes this was an actual point in my life).
I decided it wasn't worth it when I started reviewing my games and realized just how many times I fuck up per game and how much work I'd have to put in to get better. Ever since then I've rarely played and have little to no desire to play ranked. If you can't or do not want to put in the effort, just accept your rank and move on. Blaming anything else is an easy way to trick yourself into thinking you're already good enough, when you really, statistically, aren't, and to keep playing game after game after game. That's what elo hell really is, a prison of your own design.
I'd say that the vast majority of the game should be balanced around the average player. I know that's not always the case, but for the sake of argument, a competitive multiplayer game should be balanced around the average. Meaning that yes, they should see the balance changes impact their game the most.
Now whether or not that's true is another topic. Many games balance around their loudest, richest, or most successful rather than their general player base. I know Riot has done a lot of that in the past but I wouldn't know at this point.
Note that I agree with your post by the by, it's just that that part specifically gave me some food for thought.
I might be extending your line of thinking a bit past what you intend, but the average player sucks. Balancing around them is a really quick way to get a low skill ceiling. Riot does a decent amount to look at lower skill levels and ask what's a mathematical or meta shortcut to quickly win in the guidelines of basic game knowledge, and they tend to tweak character numbers when they're too easy to exploit in low level play. But similarly, take Garen or Trynd - they're never really intended to be balanced at high level, and they're going to continue to pubstomp for eternity. That's because they're countered by knowledge, not by being "outplayed".
Garen and Trynd should exist, and pubstomp, and not / barely exist in high level play, because it should be an easy signpost for people to come to a realization themselves that they need to modify their playstyle in either a macro fashion or higher to a pick/ban level. The average player shouldn't dictate whether they're "too powerful"; if they can't consistently understand how to beat them, it's a measure of their skill that they're not ready to jump that hurdle.
MTG has a good analogue in draft, where there are "traps" that seem good but don't actually perform well in a limited format. As that article also mentions, the whole Enchantment - Aura subtype exists to lay out basics of card advantage and putting too much investment in a resource. They feel good when they go off, but once Timmy's 15/15 dinosaur blows up to a single kill spell enough times they'll start to get they're not as cracked as they looked. It's a teaching tool, and that moment sometimes makes a game click as much as a good Trynd splitpush. I had this in Deadlock when I started looking at farming numbers and the souls involved for a wave of minions or denies vs a kill; the strategy suddenly clicked in my head. I put more stock in being conservative during the laning phase, and now... Well, the MMR is borked right now and people sometimes still shoot orbs faster than I can. Sometimes. (A lot.) But it's one more thing I fuck up less!
Games should be fun for the average player and balanced around the highest. The average player is likely to get stuck in habits or poor analysis, and a game shouldn't cater to that. I always go to competitive Smash, especially Melee, as an example. Low, enjoyable, approachable skill floor, very high and rewarding ceiling with steps along the way; easy recipe, and really difficult to tweak right. But it's the way to go for a truly lasting game.
I think this is the sentiment I trip over and what I tried to highlight. I don't think you should balance for the highest tier, what ends up happening is that the vast majority of your player base doesn't get a fun experience.
It seems counter intuitive to me that you would balance for the 1% or even 0,1% of your player base. And it's what happens quite often! You can see changes based on pro play that significantly affect the average game because an imbalance disproportionately works better at lower levels than it does at the higher levels.
You also have to consider the 50/50 matchmaking here and balance becomes stupidly difficult to implement properly if you look at only 1% of your player base.
I'd even posit the opposite: Games should be fun for the pro player and balanced around the regular folks.
Spectacle brings in viewers, while a fair competitive playing field keeps players playing; the latter ultimately being your customers.
Now there's nothing holding you back from balancing on either side of the fence, overbearing imbalances should be patched out regardless of player level, but I'd take a more general approach to balance were it up to me.
Heartily disagree. I'll point to Melee again; Fox is technically TAS-perfect and if you're a robot you can play him perfectly. At the highest of high echelons, that drives people towards an arms race of skill, and a meta around Fox. But Fox is also wildly difficult even with that mathematical edge; at lower competitive play, a decent player of any character would still wreck. At the most casual of play that most people engage with the game at - who cares? One bad Bob-omb spawn sends us all off the stage. There were probably more eight year-olds losing friendships over Ganondorf neutral B than Fox. But it's because the game has the space for its upward climb that people keep playing it - because there's somewhere to go. That's longevity.
What you're arguing over from a League perspective, ultimately, can be tiny little numbers over things like sustain; number of times a champion might back in lane; the specific amount of HP someone will come out of the jungle with; the specific AS number that multiplies out of a particular build, and whether that pushes someone towards Shiv, PD, etc. The game HAS to be balanced around these things. Otherwise a perfect player or team mathematically solves it. At lower play, these numbers get negated by misclicks, picking one bad teamfight, picking a champ into a bad lane, getting tilted by a bad lane early game... It's up to a player to figure out how to deal with that.
Or, addressing this from your original post:
I think you put way too much faith in the average player to see it, at all, even if there was a giant pop-up saying "balance changes!" when you start the game. (Is there? lol) The game is still engaging to them. They won't put the time in to care or notice, they'll continue to press Q on Yi and watch some HP bars drop. I played a few months ago and realized my jungle paths were awful due to meta changes, but that didn't stop me from winning a few games anyway.
It's an extremely wide game with thousands of micro and macro decisions happening every second. I think Riot (, or Sakurai for Smash, or Icefrog for DotA, or presumably Icefrog pretending to be a guy called Yoshi for Deadlock,) have created good games simply because they can be engaged on these lower levels, BY just making an engaging loop regardless of the dozens of variables behind it, and tuning this all for higher and higher players.
Why? Not sure what you're getting at - the 50/50 matchmaking sorts out the people to how much they do or don't understand the game, no? And it's not like everyone from Diamond II-downwards suddenly quits every patch.
I reached Archon within three weeks of getting into DOTA 2 and I got into Master League in SC2, so don't give me this spiel about "not being good at games."
And I quit DOTA because it's not fun to have people mass report you for "inting" and scream obscenities at you in other languages via VC, then you get a low priority queue penalty because Valve's report system is an even bigger crock of shit than Riot's. DOTA is the reason I know a lot of curse words in other languages.
Only games I got LPQ for were Turbo Mode ones which are about as fair and balanced as Fox News. The kind where your lane opponent can kill you once in lane then make you go 0/12 whilst farming you under tower because turret damage is non-existent in that mode.
If a game's community is so toxic that it makes you go back to League to cleanse your palate or their bullshit, it's a sign that Valve should divest some of their esports prize pool into giving their community mandatory anger management classes.
I said nothing about your skill in other games, just league. All of my points still stand. If you reviewed your VODs you'd find out exactly why and how you're stuck where you are, and if you improved you'd climb. The fact that you intuitively understand other games might make you think that it will or should transfer to league, but that's not how skill works. For most people, being intuitively good on guitar does not make you necessarily good on bass.
Also, this statement is kind of funny...
...considering you previously said this in the last post:
In your OP, you are justifying the exact behaviour that you're describing now. The people who are yelling at you think you're a worse player than them so they tell themselves it's okay to harass you. You think the people in your ranked games are worse players than you so you think riot should "punish" them, whatever that means. This is such a double standard that it makes me question if your 7 day chat restriction was really just from saying "gg shit team".
Edit: also, I looked it up because I had no idea, and Archon seems to be... Pretty average? Maybe above average? I don't know if I'd expect to get the same result in league, nor is it good justification for literally anything in your post. Your StarCraft tier is very impressive but it's not even the same genre as league. With this in mind, you addressed literally none of my points and just tried to pull rank in different games as a reply. You can keep bringing up all of these things to blame for getting angry about these games but it only reinforces the thought that you need to step back and assess your relationship with them.
I miss the days where people would post in the r/leagueoflegends subreddit complaining about getting banned for innocuous reasons before a Rioter came in and said nahhh you were way more toxic than this.
Okay, I'll bite.
I can't stand DotA because of the types of things their player base says or types to you, which would be deemed zero-tolerance and grounds for an immediate perma ban from LoL. DotA players are the kind that will wish cancer upon you and your family, throw racist slurs around and tell you to hang yourself if you screw up even once. Most of the crap I got in that game would immediately get you automatically system muted by the game's zero-tolerance language filter for the rest of the match if you tried to type any of in League.
DotA has the opposite problem to League where the system punishes you and docks your Behavior Score just for having a bad game, but the community is allowed to be toxic with the same level of impunity that Riot allow people to int in League. I'm not gonna pretend that I'm a well-mannered and respectful player who can handle losing situations but even I have standards. In terms of toxicity comparing League to DotA is like comparing a pint of Stella Artois to a beaker full of Strychnine.
Back to my point about soft-inting as you put it. Support is a role that is intended to be low-income by design. A support's primary job is to place wards, and the World Atlas you are directed to buy at the very start evolves into an item that can place wards. Vision wins games. Many deaths can be outright prevented just by placing a stealth ward in the brush near your river, and a control ward deeper in your side of the map.
The metric that can easily determine if a support is competent or dead weight is vision score. You gain 1 for each minute a ward is up, or for destroying enemy wards.
There is nothing more frustrating than being placed with a support who ends a 30+ min match with a single digit vision score. A semi-competent player should be approaching triple digits. It's actually baffling that there isn't an automated check to warn and punish support players for low vision scores, because refusing to place wards in that role is more akin to running it down.
And yeah, I've seen inting montages on YouTube that show how easy it is to sabotage matches without detection. In fact, the only time I've ever seen an inting report of mine actioned was when I was paired with an ADC who dived the enemy, died, blamed me, threw out obscenities en Français and literally ran it down repeatedly, throwing a Ranked match with a 0/27 death streak.
I have no idea what you're talking about with regards to dota. I literally never mentioned dota in my original reply. I have never played dota. It is irrelevant to the conversation in my opinion and really doesn't change much about what I'm saying. I was addressing the hypocrisy in your statement regarding what you said in the last post, and you're just explaining to me why dota is more toxic than league as if I was arguing otherwise. I have no opinion because I have not played dota.
What makes you special? How do other people climb out of Iron, pure chance? (this in particular would be quite the claim, one that really should have some proof beyond anecdotal experiences). "Inters" like those bad supports should statistically show up in other people's games just as often as yours, meaning that even if it was the case that every game is a coin flip that's still 50/50. That leaves your individual skill as what bends the needle towards a positive or negative winrate. If you can play well enough to win 1% more games, you'll have a positive winrate and eventually climb. This is my point, but you're explaining vision score to me? Can't help but feel it's a tad condescending.
I'm sorry but it doesn't really feel like you're taking anything I say seriously. I didn't engage in order to call you bad or make fun of you, I did it because I was in the exact same situation with video games a few years ago and know exactly how frustrating it is to keep losing no matter what I do. The simple explanation is usually the right one: is the league of legends matchmaking system rigged against you and the balance team should be fired to specifically cater to what you think is correct or fun, or are you just not as good as you think you are?
Be that as it may I don't think you're interested in any advice I have to offer, so I don't really see much point in continuing to talk. Have a good one.
It's funny you've mentioned the quality of your games changing for the worse, because I've had the exact opposite experience. I was in silver 1 for months, but I've climbed to gold 2 since the update.
I don't think I'm playing much better, but my rank has definitely improved a lot.
Remember that episode of South Park where the boys are playing little league baseball and everyone is deliberately throwing because they don't want to spend the whole summer playing?
Iron MMR is like that, except I think people are throwing because DongHuaP once made a video revealing that Iron 4 accounts can go for hundreds of dollars.