> nonsense that ignores reality which no one who calls themselves a hacker (old school definition) would agree with is still top upvoted
I played Fortnite for 2 years at the start. Reddit posts with 50000 upvotes were complaining about "the cheaters", while posts about actual problems (weapon switch lag, bug where you edit a wall but it edits the wrong one, etc) were unacknowledged. The company even acknowledged the "cheating problem" (as any bad company would, regardless of if it's real). However, in my thousands of games, I've come across maybe 2 cheaters. What I did notice, is almost every random I play with complained about:
- shooting around corners
- flick aim
- stuff that cheats dont even typically do, like allowing you to bypass a highly specefic cooldown which would only benefit a highly experienced player who would beat said randoms even without cheats
And then we get all those big incompetent hardware review sites who can't even explain how vsync works writing articles about how there are so many cheaters in game 1 2 and 3.
Again, I have played competitive FPS for 20 years. When I'm in a game playing with randoms and it happens to be the 1/300 where a cheater ruins it, I noticed consistently what is unsurprising: my team mates act like this is the end of the world, want to shoot the cheater IRL, etc. This is because the average video game player is a bad sport and is always seeking for something to blame his losses on. Most people do not play video games for sportsmanship, but to consume a product.
Do you see the problem now? No matter what measures are added, you will still complain. I argued with the exact same hordes of entitled bigoted kids each time something like VAC or Punkbuster came out. The before and after situation of perceived cheating was absolutely no different. I do not believe for one second that 50 of you ITT are competent gamers and can discern cheating. Less than 10% of gamers can. If you're "an adult with other things to do", you most certainly can't. So why do you really want phone identification, after knowing all of this? Answer that and stay fashionable.
But cheating is just one aspect of the problem. Another very common thing to do is Smurf, where you get an alt account and end up playing in low-level matches again and easily win. Shouldn’t it be possible to prevent these players from coming back?
Or how about that person who wants to shoot their opponent IRL just because they’re a bad sport? Shouldn’t it be possible to report them and get them banned permanently?
When a game is free to play like OW2, all of these things which are already huge problems for the OW1 player base become even worse because there’s no cost barrier to entry.
SMS seems like the least intrusive way to identify the same person across different accounts.
> Shouldn’t it be possible to prevent these players from coming back?
Just make a mechanism to slow down account generation. CD keys were good for this. It doesn't matter that it's not fool proof, it still works since you have less chance of running into a freshly made smurf or cheater account in the lowest rank. Phone does the same thing, however phone is intrusive and a bad solution. Smurf is even less of a problem than a cheater btw.
> Or how about that person who wants to shoot their opponent IRL just because they’re a bad sport? Shouldn’t it be possible to report them and get them banned permanently?
Umm, wtf? This was just an example and no they shouldn't be banned at all for that. That's also a good 50%-90% of any game's userbase.
> When a game is free to play like OW2, all of these things which are already huge problems for the OW1 player base become even worse because there’s no cost barrier to entry.
Free 2 play games are literally a scam. I don't want a game that has skins and nonsense. In fact, I take more issue to having to learn what cosmetic skins mean what (for instance in a class based game, you have to memorize each skin of a class, and for team based, some skins are the wrong color, like in Splitgate), than the perceived problems of this thread. I don't care what Overwatch does, I care about the fact that whatever nonsense they do will be normalized in the rest of the industry to the point where devs can't even argue with it.
I played Fortnite for 2 years at the start. Reddit posts with 50000 upvotes were complaining about "the cheaters", while posts about actual problems (weapon switch lag, bug where you edit a wall but it edits the wrong one, etc) were unacknowledged. The company even acknowledged the "cheating problem" (as any bad company would, regardless of if it's real). However, in my thousands of games, I've come across maybe 2 cheaters. What I did notice, is almost every random I play with complained about:
- shooting around corners
- flick aim
- stuff that cheats dont even typically do, like allowing you to bypass a highly specefic cooldown which would only benefit a highly experienced player who would beat said randoms even without cheats
And then we get all those big incompetent hardware review sites who can't even explain how vsync works writing articles about how there are so many cheaters in game 1 2 and 3.
Again, I have played competitive FPS for 20 years. When I'm in a game playing with randoms and it happens to be the 1/300 where a cheater ruins it, I noticed consistently what is unsurprising: my team mates act like this is the end of the world, want to shoot the cheater IRL, etc. This is because the average video game player is a bad sport and is always seeking for something to blame his losses on. Most people do not play video games for sportsmanship, but to consume a product.
Do you see the problem now? No matter what measures are added, you will still complain. I argued with the exact same hordes of entitled bigoted kids each time something like VAC or Punkbuster came out. The before and after situation of perceived cheating was absolutely no different. I do not believe for one second that 50 of you ITT are competent gamers and can discern cheating. Less than 10% of gamers can. If you're "an adult with other things to do", you most certainly can't. So why do you really want phone identification, after knowing all of this? Answer that and stay fashionable.