Skyrim immediately comes to mind. That game was made so much better by the community driven mods, even a lot of the base game itself. Towns were made better, bugs were fixed that still existed in the vanilla game, new missions that made the world more populous. Fallout as well. But I understand that's more of the exception than the rule. My issues with consoles were all about lack of choice. The choice to build a better system and get true HD quality at 60+fps. Choice to play more than licensed IP. Choice to use more than the dual sticks for input. Modded games. Better deals from multiple vendors than you could receive in the second hand disc market. Attempting to build my own games. Haven't bought a console in a long, long time.
For me personally, it was primarily Rocket League or other mostly casual non-competitive games with a multiplayer aspect like Don't Starve, Terraria, Dead Island, Borderlands, etc. Even a game like Civ, where timeliness isn't crucial like some other RTS's, play surprisingly well with the Steam controller and when I still had a PC in the living room it worked just fine from the couch. Built my man cave a couple years back and most of my equipment went out with it and that's when I started considering the Link. If they had some kind of USB bus back to the main rig it would've been great.
Biggest issue for the Link was not being able to port over voice channels. I was gonna buy one, then realized after research that I couldn't access discord (kinda expected but disappointing) or any other voice channel through Steam itself. Combined with the Steam controller, I could have seen playing several games from the couch, but would have effectively been cut off from playing any of these games with friends.
I know you can access Discord from the phone as well, but then you get into further logistics issues. I don't have a bluetooth headset. For those that do, you'd need a single ear deal because you couldn't connect both your phone and the link at the same time, rather than say, the xbox headset I already had. Etc. Etc. Was bad planning on their part.
It seems a lot of folks here are missing the incentive piece. The loot crates they added have created the incentive to cheat, much like the gold farmers from WoW days. When you unlock a crate, you get an accessory item that can be sold or traded after 7 days. With a super popular market right now, I've seen some of the more rare items go for over $100. The winner of each match gets the bulk of the 'Battle Point' reward, as well as bonuses for each kill. You then in turn use those BP to buy crates. It still costs a small amount of real world currency to unlock each crate once you've bought it with the in game currency, but with the marketplace being a seller's market at the moment, it's generally a winning proposition to take.
The only way to combat it will be to remove the incentive, or to find a way to significantly dampen it without knock on negative effects for the community. Even most MMOs struggle to fix this. WoW recently threw in the towel and started selling the gold themselves, I guess deciding that since it couldn't beat them, it may as well profit from it. The 1.0 patch in PUBG has helped a good bit, adding in a kill cam and a means to report a player via recording. They've also tried to tighten up BattleEye, the anti cheat mechanism. Honestly it's just going to be a matter of enforcement. If they can discover and ban a hacker on average before the account has a chance to become profitable (reasonable profit - (game cost + crate cost)) then we'll start to see it decrease. Otherwise bans won't be effective. Most cheaters aren't here to have fun any more than the Chinese gold farmers were playing WoW for leisure. This is what happens when you open a vector for indirect profitability and they shouldn't have been surprised, but loot crates tend to be easy money for a developer. I personally think making them openly available for direct sale was dumb to the highest order without significant cheat protection and let's be real, this is the Unreal engine we're talking about.
Region locking would be somewhat successful due to this. Obviously the occasional cheater will find you because there will always be curious shithead little 13 year olds, but the amount of people doing this simply to turn a profit, the professional farmer types, will almost instantly drop from our (US) servers. There just isn't enough profitability to support a large market of cheaters in first world countries, and bans are fairly effective against non-professional cheaters. That may not be exactly PC according to Mr. PlayerUnknown, but it's kinda hard to deny.
Selling his 513 bitcoins? Isn't that like 8.4 million in dollars? Shouldn't they hold onto the 7.6 million instead? I mean, what happens if that 9.3 million in bitcoin is liquidated and the man is innocent? They'll have a hard time paying back that 6.7 million.
Had everyone who pushed the boundaries of progress before us decided that every "difficult to explain" data point was merely the work of Intelligent Design, we wouldn't be having this conversation right now... On the internet... Using electricity.. On a keyboard most likely derived from oil polymers. History shows time and again that "higher power" excuses are the crutch of the intellectually lazy or the ignorant.
Slashdot Mirror
Skyrim immediately comes to mind. That game was made so much better by the community driven mods, even a lot of the base game itself. Towns were made better, bugs were fixed that still existed in the vanilla game, new missions that made the world more populous. Fallout as well. But I understand that's more of the exception than the rule. My issues with consoles were all about lack of choice. The choice to build a better system and get true HD quality at 60+fps. Choice to play more than licensed IP. Choice to use more than the dual sticks for input. Modded games. Better deals from multiple vendors than you could receive in the second hand disc market. Attempting to build my own games. Haven't bought a console in a long, long time.
For me personally, it was primarily Rocket League or other mostly casual non-competitive games with a multiplayer aspect like Don't Starve, Terraria, Dead Island, Borderlands, etc. Even a game like Civ, where timeliness isn't crucial like some other RTS's, play surprisingly well with the Steam controller and when I still had a PC in the living room it worked just fine from the couch. Built my man cave a couple years back and most of my equipment went out with it and that's when I started considering the Link. If they had some kind of USB bus back to the main rig it would've been great.
Biggest issue for the Link was not being able to port over voice channels. I was gonna buy one, then realized after research that I couldn't access discord (kinda expected but disappointing) or any other voice channel through Steam itself. Combined with the Steam controller, I could have seen playing several games from the couch, but would have effectively been cut off from playing any of these games with friends.
I know you can access Discord from the phone as well, but then you get into further logistics issues. I don't have a bluetooth headset. For those that do, you'd need a single ear deal because you couldn't connect both your phone and the link at the same time, rather than say, the xbox headset I already had. Etc. Etc. Was bad planning on their part.
It seems a lot of folks here are missing the incentive piece. The loot crates they added have created the incentive to cheat, much like the gold farmers from WoW days. When you unlock a crate, you get an accessory item that can be sold or traded after 7 days. With a super popular market right now, I've seen some of the more rare items go for over $100. The winner of each match gets the bulk of the 'Battle Point' reward, as well as bonuses for each kill. You then in turn use those BP to buy crates. It still costs a small amount of real world currency to unlock each crate once you've bought it with the in game currency, but with the marketplace being a seller's market at the moment, it's generally a winning proposition to take.
The only way to combat it will be to remove the incentive, or to find a way to significantly dampen it without knock on negative effects for the community. Even most MMOs struggle to fix this. WoW recently threw in the towel and started selling the gold themselves, I guess deciding that since it couldn't beat them, it may as well profit from it. The 1.0 patch in PUBG has helped a good bit, adding in a kill cam and a means to report a player via recording. They've also tried to tighten up BattleEye, the anti cheat mechanism. Honestly it's just going to be a matter of enforcement. If they can discover and ban a hacker on average before the account has a chance to become profitable (reasonable profit - (game cost + crate cost)) then we'll start to see it decrease. Otherwise bans won't be effective. Most cheaters aren't here to have fun any more than the Chinese gold farmers were playing WoW for leisure. This is what happens when you open a vector for indirect profitability and they shouldn't have been surprised, but loot crates tend to be easy money for a developer. I personally think making them openly available for direct sale was dumb to the highest order without significant cheat protection and let's be real, this is the Unreal engine we're talking about.
Region locking would be somewhat successful due to this. Obviously the occasional cheater will find you because there will always be curious shithead little 13 year olds, but the amount of people doing this simply to turn a profit, the professional farmer types, will almost instantly drop from our (US) servers. There just isn't enough profitability to support a large market of cheaters in first world countries, and bans are fairly effective against non-professional cheaters. That may not be exactly PC according to Mr. PlayerUnknown, but it's kinda hard to deny.
Selling his 513 bitcoins? Isn't that like 8.4 million in dollars? Shouldn't they hold onto the 7.6 million instead? I mean, what happens if that 9.3 million in bitcoin is liquidated and the man is innocent? They'll have a hard time paying back that 6.7 million.
Had everyone who pushed the boundaries of progress before us decided that every "difficult to explain" data point was merely the work of Intelligent Design, we wouldn't be having this conversation right now... On the internet... Using electricity.. On a keyboard most likely derived from oil polymers. History shows time and again that "higher power" excuses are the crutch of the intellectually lazy or the ignorant.