Earbuds have come a long way and are very convenient, but IMO there’s no match for proper over-ear open-back headphones. My first pair of “nice” headphones was the Sennheiser HD555, and I made sure all my rips were at least 320kbps. Had the same experience, suddenly I was hearing sounds in songs that I never knew were there!

Nice headphones. Life is too short to be using shit headphones.

You’ll be hoping for a while. This ain’t 2005 anymore.

It’s an arms race, the arms just keep moving deeper into the stack system. Used to happen entirely in usermode, one process poking in and reading/writing memory of the game, so anti-cheat started keeping an eye out for malicious processes. Then at some point someone patched their kernel to cheat in a way the game couldn’t possibly detect from usermode, so someone made an anti-cheat that ran at the kernel level too.

Modern KLA is basically a fully fledged rootkit, living in your system from boot, doing absolutely anything they can to try and make sure nothing has been tampered with. Validating signatures on bins, hooking memory mappings, watching for anything that might try to read/write the kernel or game’s memory space unexpectedly.

Casuals stop playing games when cheaters prevent them having fun, and it’s the casuals they need to keep happy to keep their game alive.

IMO the answer is to internally maintain a “fun to play with” metric. It would be specific to the game, but each player’s actions and interactions with other players would be evaluated to determine how “fun” they are to play with (might need to be multidimensional, since different players like having different types of interactions). It doesn’t matter if they’re cheating, or if they’re just really good, or if they use cheesy strategies, etc, if the person isn’t fun to play with, then match them with other people who are similarly unfun to play with.

This would cover your point that, if there’s a cheater in the lobby, and their behavior somehow makes everyone have more fun, then who cares?

We have memory security, virtualization and antitampering features

As someone who games entirely on Linux and wants multiplayer to work out, the features you’re referring to are for keeping the application contained by the kernel, not the other way around. On a system where the user has full autonomy, no application should be able to know what is going on outside of its user space, and I don’t want it to.

It’d be nice if it was a solved problem, but it’s not. From consoles to phones to windows, currently the industry relies on you not having autonomy over your device for anti-cheat to work. Every other solution is either expensive (obfuscation arms race), or untenable (real time, high resolution server side validation of every property of every player).

If it just looks like a stream of TLS packets, so the content is encrypted, what would DPI be able to see? I feel like if it could detect it as a VPN, that’s just a bug that needs fixing, not an inherent weakness in the protocols involved.

Steam hardware has so far been pretty niche, though. If the user experience is smooth enough, a SM could replace many people’s xbox/playstation.

We’re like 5y into the PS5/XBSX, new games are jumping up to $70-100 each, and hardly any are platform exclusives. Msft have all but canceled the next Xbox, and if Sony tries to push the PS6 in a few years, I think there’s a world where a good chunk of people say nah.

And with the amount of attention Linux is getting from the win10 eol, we could be at the beginning of an historic inflection point in gaming.

Yes, and the best jokes are famously the ones you need to explain. Sometimes the audience is wrong and they need to be set straight.

Then Minecraft is what you’re looking for.

Differentiation comes from role play, which is the least interesting part of the game for me.

Can you explain why you would play a TTRPG if you’re not interested in role play? Seems like a battle sim like warhammer, or just a video game might be the thing you’re looking for.

As a DM, the cooperative story telling IS the interesting part. D&D has never been an airtight game system, it’s a bunch if hand waving to give just enough illusion of structure and randomness so you don’t feel like you’re just arbitrarily deciding everything yourselves. But at the end of the day, you are. The characters and story you’re left with is the only thing of value.

But on closed source drivers, right?

There are space games with procedural large scale galaxies to the point that the entire playerbase can only ever hope to see ~15% of the systems, but that’s why I put the >50% qualifier in there. That’s TOO big. Anyone can generate an effectively infinite procedural world, I want a large world.

When I had originally conceived of this, it was in the context of a pokemon MMO. You would have your home town, and as a trainer, or researcher, or rocket member, etc, you’d travel at a real-time pace akin to the show.

Alternative IP that it could work with are dragonball (imagine the playerbase on a months long search to find/fight over the dragonballs so they could awaken the dragon and make a wish to the devs), or Avatar (each player would have a chance to spawn in as a random bender. One player at any given time is the Avatar. Events happen to strengthen some benders and weaken others. Players make war and peace at will).

There would obviously be challenges in running these types of experiences, but currently it feels like the cost of standing up an MMO is so much that no one ever does anything interesting. Instead they just copy WoW.

I don’t consider NMS to be an MMO. If everyone went to the same location, at best, you’d most likely only see a handful of players you’re instanced with (up to 32 from what a cursory search gives me). That’s kinda the sad state of what passes for an MMO these days, but I don’t accept it. That’s not even a full raid group in WoW.

But yeah, you could squint and say that that otherwise effectively produces the experience I’m asking for. I am looking forward to LNF for sure.

I don’t think that means it didn’t work, I think that just means it’s not for everyone. I’m a firm believer that, “given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game”. Small indie games take firm stances on their gameplay all the time, not every game is for everyone, and that’s ok, that’s how you get unique and interesting gameplay experiences. But that’s easy for and indie game to do because making an indie game is cheap.

MMOs have the unfortunate reality that they’re architecturally complex, and expensive to operate, and thus need to appeal to as wide of an audience as possible to justify their existence to investors. They don’t have the luxury of making the experience they want, which is why they all end up just copying WoW’s enshittified gameplay, but with less polish.

My hope is that this indie revolution we’re in expands to “large scale” multiplayer games. Not so massive that it’s prohibitively expensive to run, but not so small that it’s a ghost town. I think that’s when we’ll start to see interesting MMO experiences again.

by sharing that you use it

aka “promoting”. They were specifically talking about using and not promoting.

WoW is objectively huge, but they made it feel tiny by putting fast travel options everywhere. I would guess that any two points in the world are no more than 5m from each other if routed perfectly.

I want there to exist one MMO where you “live” in a city, and traveling to another city is actually so inconvenient that you only do it if you have to. Not because I want to make the trek, but because I want there to be a world just large enough that any one person has usually seen only ~1%, but the playerbase in entirety has seen >50%. I don’t know if any such game exists.

Hah, I had thought, well it’s not quite reincarnation, because you don’t come back as something new, you come back as yourself with the same memories. But I’m just noticing that it does seem like “the Big Problem” is very similar to what [my rudimentary understanding of] the Buddhist quest for transcendence is.

Rainworld

…but when you start the game, you are merely trying to survive and explore a living ecology full of hostile creatures. The game doesn’t care if you understand any of the lore, it doesn’t care if you “finish” the game, it’s just there to be experienced.

Cool, I didn’t know it was smart enough to undo the copy, that’s good to know/hear.