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Cheating is a tiny issue as in, its still rare. It's more rare than bugs in your typical shoddy post-2000 game. Any competent gamedev can deter it easily. Since they are deterring it, its rare for you to encounter a cheater. Remember, we're primarily concerned about general games here, not specific high ranked matches. Those are the _only_ place that any sort of extra validation would even start to be acceptable.

All that matters for casual games is that the company actively does something to minimize cheating. Identity verification is not a way to do this as it is not an active measure. It just puts one hoop for people to jump through. More useful is to do typical statistical analysis as that will catch 99% of actual impactful cheating (subtle cheating doesn't matter much since the average player won't be able to tell the difference anyway) and rinse and repeat.

Nice job using in-kernel a/c to claim how advanced the problem is. When those came out 20 years ago, it was just a few small patches to bypass them. Even some of them were still only signature based so you could just change the signature of your cheat and bypass it. But I'll stop here since you don't seem to comprehend the concept of cat-and-mouse nor the fact that pursuing it to the end just makes the game unplayable for innocent players.

Yes, I know some games requires phone verification to play at all, and I'm against that. My initial reaction to this thread was "um we are just now caring about this? they're moving onto photo ID now, which creates real life fraud problems". Gee I can't wait until game devs start stealing my ID and the subsequent "fix" of using a trusted third party that's also abusive and blocks me from multiple games because they have monopoly, and has integration bugs causing the game not to work at all if I press the wrong button on their web page embedded into the game.

> 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.

Well congratulations, you prevented 0.01% of "bad things". I've been gaming for 20 years on competitive FPS. Cheating is a tiny issue. 99% of cheating reports are bogus.

Why are you arguing like a lawyer instead of coming up with a valid point for me to rebuke? Obviously I was referring to just the general notion of people saying racist stuff in chat. It's no the end of the world when that happens.

Saying that you find the game less enjoyable when people say racist shit just makes you sound like an annoying person.

The fact that you brought up racism and then used this strawman of "game being disrupted" is actually hilarious and shows what a thin spine you have.

Yeah, the subgame is the PVP. But that's rare and requires players to play for thousands of hours to get to whatever level and probably is like an RPG but with worse mechanics because the devs spend most of their time adding new items and currencies and other things peripheral to the game

But thanks for the downvote, you really got me there.

> that seems like a win for gaming to me

Well, it isn't. What people are saying in chat has no bearing on the quality of the game. I'm not even playing devil's advocate like you are doing in this sub thread either, I literally could not care what people say in game chats. I take more issue to this obnoxious, cancerous, USA opinion that someone saying the N-word is the end of the world and requires me as an innocent bystander to bear the costs (such as having to use phone identification to play a game). You see the problem is not being racist itself, but the "solutions" you people propose.

> Are MMORPGs not games?

Yes. I've never played one, but from what I can tell it's like a forum where you go on with an identity and form clubs with people and chat about stuff, then you play some wonky subgame for 1 minute in that 3 hour session, then you go press a bunch of buttons to gamble for virtual prizes, etc.

> level of access Vanguard has on your computer

I use a separate computer for games. Multiple for different games. Just because they have egregious amount of access to stuff like the hardware profile and the ability to run anything with full privileges doesn't mean I want to also have phone number nonsense on top of that.

COD Warzone required phone verification to install when I tried. There was no way to play at all without getting a code sent to your phone. But yeah this is old news. This cancer started around 2010 when Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and friends out of nowhere required it on all of their services.

> I don’t understand how this is controversial.

First and foremost: Because it's a gimmick on top of being annoying.

Second and very important: Because phone numbers do not actually fix anything. People will pool numbers, people will buy new numbers ($1). But since you already got baited on the hook, you will all happily accept photo ID as the next "fix" as well as whatever comes after that.

Because I've literally watched gamers complain about practically the same shit since the year 2000 and layers of new snake oil were added by the corporations to appease you, and you still complain since these gimmicks predictably amount to nothing aside from making it more annoying to play the game.

Because not everyone has a phone.

Because kids don't have phones (yeah I know this is changing).

Because phone is not the internet.

Because phones suck.

Because phone numbers change.

Because I don't want more stuff tied to my phone (which I don't have) that needs to change when my number changes.

Because it's another way for your game to break. Phone might not work at the time or the message wont be received or your phone is crashing/updating as usual and that adds another 5 minute delay before you can start the game, or you forgot to charge the phone. Which brings up the same point: because phones suck, why the hell do I need to hold a separate physical device to use what is essentially a different email account which is on an entirely different network and both networks have to be up all the time to be able to do anything?

The above point is extremely pertinent. About every 19 in 20 games I have played since the year 2000 have had some obtuse login, onboarding, social, whatever the hell bogus system with all kinds of dangling third parties and if any one of them broke or you clicked the wrong button you'd have to spend possibly an hour just making the game start up. Perhaps with one of the most successful games ever made this may not be an issue, but for the rest of the games, this certainly is.

Because I don't want gamedevs to have my phone number (nor the hassle of setting up a throwaway).

Because of all the reasons I hate email verification (which is utterly pointless aside from helping grannies not lose their account, since this is what captcha is for) as well.

Because the company will fuck up every possible thing imaginable so the phone will have some huge downside I didn't think of yet.

> I hope all multiplayer games start to add in this type of requirement

No. Kindly keep that, far away from anything I use, pretty please. Thank you. I will never add it to my games, either.

Who is we? BR games have one map and reload it every time they start and even loading the menu takes extremely long. Then they go on top make the time between matches solid minutes to wait for people to be pointlessly loading the map. Fortnite for example (haven't played it in years but it was like that in the first 2-3 years). There's literally no excuse. Now that I got myself ranting on BR games I'll note that their quality is an order of magnitude worse (bugs, performance) than games with 5 minute rounds, while they have 30 minute rounds. Meh anyway I guess I'm attacking your random thought too hard.

> A twenty-second delay for recording a forty-second clip is a pretty bad efficiency ratio.

What a weird way of thinking, I wouldn't hire anyone who says something like this. 20 seconds to load up or do just about anything on a computer is bad, regardless of some round about reasoning of ratios. I find these days there is something wrong with most developers' brains. Like we need to start a new parallel software industry and make sure no unreasonable people can be part of it.

> I'm a game developer and game performance is better than ever.

I'm a game developer (and player) and I strongly disagree. What game can even do P95 144FPS on affordable hardware? On lowest graphics, with populated lobbies (there also can't be a that ONE map where this all goes to shit). And are we talking about AAA games or not? Because non-AAA means a minecraft knockoff cannot meet 60FPS.

Weird how they used as an example debugging character encoding bugs instead of solving real problems as the typical thing software engineers do.

Short of swapping in a new image during the vertical blanking interval, you will never have a "flicker" free image. Any "flicker" that can happen from no double buffer can happen because of no vsync. This begs the question why you would ever want to show graphics in the terminal in the first place. I might be wrong, but in my experience most terminal emulators do not look like they can update the full screen 60 times per second. If everyone started doing graphics in the terminal, we will have to find what method can actually output fast enough, or create it and standardize it, and soon we will have a new graphics API that all terminal emulators must conform to or not, and a way for applications to detect whether the terminal supports it.

Yup. MAME still has an "electron beam" since that's how all PC video works, just the software buffers a full frame before letting it scan out to the monitor. Even if emulators didn't buffer, they would have to somewhat exactly match the speed of the instruction execution of whatever they're emulating (do emulators do this? I have no idea), or else for example the amount of girder rendered in each frame would be different than the real system, i.e, they will be longer in that first frame if the ROM runs faster than the real system (I think... assuming the code is just filling the tiles at its own pace and not tightly scheduled by something else).

Incidentally, the paper was a good read and I'm always looking for details of precisely how rendering works on 90s and earlier games.

> Second article

Why does this guy claim that the potential input latency of a debounce implementation negates the latency caused by decreasing the polling rate? This is such a typical non-sequitur I see in computer related topics and doesn't change my mind that mechanical keyboards are yet another gimmick mainly lead by charlatans. Also the fact that you can just set 99% of keyboards, even from 20 years ago to 1000Hz with a tweak.

The chart says there is a total latency on PC of 80ms. It's unplayable. 80ms is actual garbage. Comparing it to console works because consoles typically are garbage these days. FPS/TPS on console sucks. Yes, Geforce Now may be comparable to a console, because you're just running the PC version of the game remotely, and the PC version of games typically probably have less lag due to consoles sucking. Of course, Geforce Now is still back to the 80ms a console might get, that's still terrible.

> Like think about it, if you're comparing 16.6ms to 100+ then the game would be running at like 1fps and is completely useless.

Not how it works, you could have 2000ms of lag and still have a completely smooth game running at 500fps. But why are we talking about smoothness all of a sudden?

That youtube review is clickbait and bikesheds on some stupid detail like tree rendering distance on some certain scene. I don't think it even talked about input lag. He did state that cloud gaming being bad is a misconception because he feels like it's good, though. Also Genshin Impact is a laggy game. I have played it on a PC, and it's framelocked way down to 60FPS, and so it only uses a small fraction of CPU/GPU, and it's still so laggy you can't even aim right with the mouse with an aiming weapon like the longbow. Just moving around is tedious, which indeeds gives me that post 2000s console feel. The game with vsync off plays far worse than a misconfigured system. Even any FPS like UT or Quake with vsync on feel more responsive than Genshin Impact.

It's a bug with most modern LCDs. Ever since HDMI days they started taking ages to turn on or change modes. I have LCDs from 1997 that turn on and change modes in about 100ms, as opposed to the new 3s-10s. I suspect something extremely stupid, like maybe HDCP crap takes a long time to do its thing (regardless of whether its used) and the process gets blocked on that.

Interesting, this was a thing in the VGA days. I didn't know it stills is.

It's useless either way but I thought this was obvious.

Yup, bots say shit.

> my experience is that it's flawless and indistinguishable from native in twitch games like fortnite and counterstrike

This is just your opinion and it's wrong for at least 50% of humans. Nobody with a mouse will find fortnite or cs playable with 40ms added lag. 40ms lag is higher than the mere 16.66ms you get from going from 60 FPS to 60 Hz vsync (that is, running the monitor at 60Hz and enabling vsync. it will be the same framerate but much laggier). In the 60 FPS days, EVERYONE complained about this mere 16.66ms added difference. This included people who just started playing their very first video game one day ago. On Twitch, still everyone notices vsync and turns it off once they figure out that it is the cause of the shitty sluggy mouse feel.

Your next idea

> The "trick" here is that native devices already have some amount of latency, just they are in an acceptable range for most people. However nvidia can optimize PC hardware to reduce the device's latency such that even with the network latency added it's still faster than the average person's native device. Hope that makes sense.

Is also utterly wrong. You don't need "le graphics pipeline" to make input lag noticeable. Just plug in a monitor with 16ms input lag to your computer and you will notice that the mouse is annoyingly difficult to position over anything in the Windows or Linux desktop.

OR another explanation: Make a program to move a small shape around the screen using the mouse position. It waits until the monitor is about to start scanning out a frame from the framebuffer and only then draws the shapes new position in the framebuffer where the mouse is at that time (since it's just a blank image with a small shape it's near instant to do this in the CPU, a few microseconds). If you use a monitor without lag (like a CRT) and it's running at 60Hz, that means there is now a total input lag of up to 16.66ms (accounting for the time between frames), and perhaps 1ms if you run the mouse at 1000Hz like you should be doing, then maybe some small delay from the OS. Now if you make this program render the slow vsync way, i.e, rendering the frame to temporary memory and doing nothing for the next 16.66ms then swapping it to the framebuffer once the monitor is about to scan out the next frame, this adds another 16.66ms of input lag. And it will feel terrible.

Ergo, getting far greater than 16.66ms lag caused by some network streaming service will NOT magically feel less laggy than native hardware. Also the idea that optimizing small isolated components randomly will fix input lag is laughable, it's all about timing. Almost no lag is caused by CPU (or GPU core) bottlenecks, aside from the straight up most basic problem of low framerate.

They aren't. The people who advocate stream gaming are precisely like this guy in the article who bought 400 games and never played any of them.

> near-imperceptible network latency

> I play on a tablet

> Xbox controller

None of these instill any confidence in me that Stadia has tolerable input latency. Geforce Now certainly doesn't. A mouse has a much lower tolerable input latency than a controller. Then again gimped experiences like aiming on a controller are just as bad so you do you.

> 4K HDR

HDR could mean a lot of things. Geforce Now substantially cuts the color depth even when using only a small fraction of the available bandwidth. It's night and day. I'm sure Stadia does the same (otherwise adds more lag).

Reminds me of SmarterChild.

An extra 40ms is absolutely terrible, and apparent to everyone. Anyone who says otherwise is accustomed to ultra bad games.

> GFN on 120hz is better than a 3060 on native in 60hz

False. 60Hz input lag is subtle and if someone can't notice an extra 40ms, they won't notice this.

At risk of responding to a troll post, the idea that cloud gaming somehow brings equality to society, is retarded. As is the idea of games needing more powerful GPUs (it's a bug). Ironically, the reason games need more and more powerful GPUs is because greed: they can't support basic stuff like supporting less powerful systems, because the boss doesn't want to.

Okay hackers gather round let's scoff at how hilariously bad this consumer oriented article is. It's not only content-free, but the guy is such a casual at gaming that he even has 400 games (that he never plays, as any Silicon Valley type would) and still doesn't notice game breaking lag.

I tried Geforce Now on two occasions. Both times, it was completely unplayable for literally anything. Remember how bad vsync feels if you use it at 60Hz? This is like that but multiple times worse. And to top it off you can easily feel the latency increasing and decreasing as you play, so you couldn't even lead your shots consistently. The first time I started it, it shows me a VNC type window where I can login to Steam, a portent of future disappointment.

The second time, I ran two games at 1024x768 and I measured and saw it only uses a small fraction of my bandwidth: 7mbps for mostly still scenes, and 20mbps for spinning the mouse around. And the latency was still unbearable. This was on a machine with very low latency to begin with (so it should be even harder for a game to bring the latency within human perception, than with an average machine): CRT, and mouse and keyboard at 1000Hz.

Further debugging:

Ran the built in network test in the Geforce Now menu, latency 14ms.

Opened the status window in the games (ctrl+alt+f6), it shows ~50ms RTD (is that round trip duration?) at all times. That would explain the lag. I don't know enough networking yet, but I'd say once you're receiving multiple megabits (as opposed to maybe a few kilobits with most games), you no longer get good latencies.

For one more test, in the Geforce Now settings, I lowered max bitrate to 5mbps, kept framerate at 60fps (highest you can get for free), and turned vsync off. This time it showed RTD 30ms. It was less bad this time (could be a coincidence), but still much worse than 60Hz vsync would feel. The graphics were ultra crap at 5mpbs too.

In all of the above tests, it was never smooth either. This is to be expected as I don't think you can just go from 7mbps to 20mbps each time something interesting on screen happens and have a constant amount of latency in those instances. I did notice that whenever I flicked 90 degrees it stuttered.

On all these tests, the games were on lowest graphics settings.

I also noticed the color depth vastly improved after switching back to the realm game on real hardware (on a 90% dead CRT).

To confirm that this is a pure streaming service (no advance stuff like 3D acceleration offloading over the net), I also tested downloading something at max speed while playing the game to confirm the graphics do degrade to sub crap jpg quality and the sound starts skipping.

But what about casual games, you say? Like an RPG? The lag is still so bad that you will likely strain your wrist or arm due to constantly having to readjust your mouse to do basic tasks.

I want games that don't have constant stutters due to their team not caring about a baseline resource usage. Most games will still stutter on a 3080 RTX. Streaming doesn't fix this.

Streaming gaming sucks and will likely to continue to suck for the next decades. I want at least 240Hz if I'm using an LCD for smoothness but mainly because 120Hz is still too blurry, and with 1080p at the very least so it can be on a 24" monitor without too much moire, and with zero input lag on top of what the game itself already has. I feel like if streaming gaming takes off, the chance of games ever running good will never happen. It's already hard to get a baseline 240FPS at a reasonable percentile, and networks are bloated with garbage and streaming gaming will absolutely worsen this problem. Games should engineer to reduce jitter. The reason you see enemy players teleport is because their latency changes (or their network straight up cuts off for a while).

And last but not least, streaming gaming is the next level after Steam where you don't own your games. Steam (and competitors) already sucks ass because it's terrible half-assed software, but it also prevents you from being able to revert whatever version of the game you want.