22
votes
MSI's new monitor uses built-in AI to flag enemy positions for you in LoL
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- MSI's AI-Powered Gaming Monitor Helps You Cheat at League of Legends, Looks Great Doing It
- Authors
- Avram Piltch
- Published
- Jan 9 2024
Remembering early E-sports (as in before 2005), buying gear for competitive advantage was part of the game.
IMO, so long as they're not modifying the executable itself via DLL injection, anything goes.
They'll be at a huge disadvantage these days if they leverage this stuff and try to compete in a big IRL tourney anyhow. They almost never let you bring your own monitor or PC.
Edit: Important clarifications added from questions in replies.
Got an example? I know people swear by mouse DPI, red switches, higher refresh rates, and so on, but to my understanding there's little actual proof that actually improves your skill in any statistically significant way, and is mostly marketing.
On the other hand i'm well aware of plenty of cheating scandals where someone had hardware that would run macros, programs, and other such issues. Hell the FGC community has gone through it's own uproars a few times on things like turbo or more recently leverless.
Lol yes I typed my own reply, but you've hit on it. Quake, UT, Counter-Strike.
Yea do not miss playing games with a ball mouse. Kids these days will never know the pain of losing because you picked up a loose hair while playing. Optical mice were a generational leap like no other.
Here children, the pinnacle of 1995 mouse technology. It was more or less the same as the ones from the 80's.
Back then, in the 90s and early 00's, the difference between a high-end rig from 6 months ago and a high-end rig from last week was huge. Admittedly, I'm also talking FPS games and not MOBAs.
Here's a glance at some Quake III benchmark results from the era. Notice how few period-correct builds are over 60fps.
Back in the CRT days, the lower end for gaming was 640x480, up to 1600x1200. You could trade precision with higher resolution at the expense of lower refresh rates. At 1024x768 you could get refresh rates up to 120hz. If you've ever played an FPS at 800x600 vs 1024x768, you'll know the precision difference is huge. FPS has a significant impact on game play, if only visually, especially the difference between < 30fps and 60fps. After that, there are diminishing returns, especially after 120hz or so.
I have a mouse with adjustable DPI. Its important because when you've turned off mouse acceleration so that you can train muscle memory, the DPI adjusts how far the mouse moves per inch. With my DPI on lowest setting, my mousepad maps perfectly onto my screen. On the highest setting, I can move my mouse across the screen in < 1 inch. So, if you have a high-DPI mouse, with good muscle memory and practice, you can move much quicker than with a standard mouse, courtesy of only needing to move your arm 1-3 inches instead of 3-6.
Early FPS also let you set your FOV, and some insane people set it to 150 and learned to play like that, because it gave you way more periphrial vision. Rinse/repeat with using ultrawide monitors.
Personally, I think macros are fair game, though I know I'm in a small minority there. So long as it's not literally modifying game memory, it's the computer equivalent to buying better shoes.
Back when LCDs were starting to take over, they tended to have awful input lag and gray to gray response times. I used to bring my highend Sony Trinitron to LANs to complete and it was honestly unfair how much easier it made hitting fast motion railgun shots. I hated to let those things go, but at one point I had 200lb of monitors on my desk and the heat it produced was suffocating.
With a little elbow grease you can still relive the glory days.
Well, the "glory" part of it involved the technical capabilities of the CRT itself, so this wouldn't have much appeal. The size and weight were purely downsides. Also, only a monster would do that to one of those Trinitrons. I hope it was broken before they gutted it.
Ahh duh yeah. I grew up on ball mice/crt's/etc but wasn't really into the FPS scene, but makes sense.
That's hardly a consolation for the vast majority of players given that they're only playing on the competitive ladder, yeah? Participation in LAN tourneys only make up a very small portion of the playerbase, who are then denied a level playing field in the only context where they play.
They would still be a level playing field, courtesy of matchmaking.
You'll still win/lose 50% ish. And you'll have 0 way of knowing whether or not your opponent was using this monitor, or just knowing what signs to look for.
The people whom are at the top of the ladder aren't going to need this. It won't help the people at the bottom. It'll just be in the gigantic muddy middle where it provides some benefit.
This isn't gonna bring gold players to platinum.
That's a different way of thinking about it. When I say level playing field, I'm thinking of players starting off with access to the same information and same resources, not that they end up performing at the same level to the competitors. Yeah, there already is some disparity because of factors like ping, but stuff like aim assist in other games is banned for a reason.
Don't know much about the e-sports, or in particular League, gaming scene. Why would this put them at a disadvantage in tournaments, assuming they train and incorporate the assistance into their strategy?
I'm assuming it's because they won't get to use this in any tournament.
You can practice all you want using this assistance, but tournament gear is provided for you and will probably not feature these things.
Ah yeah that makes complete sense then. I guess I assumed they could use their own gear, but that would make cheating way easier.
AFAIK they can bring their own mouse and keyboard, but the PC, monitor and (sometimes) headset cannot be changed. I would also assume any BYOD is carefully vetted by the organizers before the event starts.
There's still issues with BYOD sometimes - https://www.vice.com/en/article/3k49z9/dota-2-player-who-used-programmable-mouse-disqualified-his-team-from-dollar15-million-tournament is one I remember since I used to play Dota, which was in fact pre-dated by a talk about the exact concept at DEFCON: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRWjd6o4LO4
This feels gimmicky, sort of like the lcd panels on keyboards that were going around for a while. Honestly I could possibly see the lighting as useful to indicate something, but honestly at a competitive level you know what you are hit with and how much damage it will do before it hits you. At least at the pro level. I guess at the casual level that can be nice but I think in this case it's a real gimmick feature.
I think what maybe could be better is if they could have rear bias lighting on the monitor based on color average of the screen sort of like the Hue sync might do with your bulbs.