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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2550 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 2, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Euros of The Motte, what could be more fun than effecting real life change? You should sign this ballot initiative in the hopes that less live service games get killed by publishers that don't care once they drop support. (And get all your friends, family, and acquaintances to sign it too.)

If that's not fun enough, I guess this can be a thread where you can list your favorite MMOs or other live service games. I know @self_made_human likes Tarkov, very rational because it might be the best and most unique of its kind. Once there was a game called Fallen Earth that was pretty cool, but I think it died ages ago. I also used to play Lord of the Rings Online a lot, but I'd rather drive around the map in a car than actually play the game. There should be another initiative to just release the maps so that someone can port them to Unity or something and do whatever the hell they want with them.

A game developer has delivered an interesting rebuttal video.

Why shouldn't we have the right to the server binaries so we can keep playing these games?

Are you going to allow monetization of these servers or not?

If we don't allow monetization - Who would be the party that enforces non-monetization of that server?

If it's the government I feel like we're making an insane amount of red tape.

If it's the original company then this doesn't work if they shut down.

If we don't allow monetization - Who is going to pay for the hosting if the servers cannot be monetized?

If they cannot be monetized then these servers will also eventually shut down due to cost.

We don't up preserving games like this we just shift their death down the road.

If we do allow monetization - This leads to a really weird attack potential if people can monetize the servers.

  • You make an awesome game that has a small community.
  • I want to monetize that game and run my own servers.
  • I create a shitload of bots and constant exploits to erode the game and your business.
  • Your business closes and now I can monetize your work without anyone stopping me.

This isn't unlikely as we've seen mass attacks such as with TF2.

We actually see echoes of this in the mobile market already as well.

The only defense right now is DMCA or other takedown measures.

Devs legitimately have very little protections as-is and this would erode that further.

This creates an incentive for abuse where the abuser is protected as they are within their legal right to operate said "abandoned" games servers.

@cjet79

Looks like Ross saw it and responded, but it got deleted somehow. https://x.com/accursedfarms/status/1820776020074512657

cjet raised some pretty good points if you ask me -- third party dependencies could really trip things up. And then you never know what the legislators really are going to pass. They don't understand technology in pretty much any circumstance, so that could easily go badly. But monetization doesn't strike me as a real big concern. What do companies do already for, say, Club Penguin Rewritten, or private WoW or Runescape server? I would lean towards not allowing monetization (or rather, allowing companies to set rules for private servers beyond you-can't-have-private-servers), but also, the companies shut the servers down themselves. I can't really feel too bad for them if they see someone making money on a product they killed on purpose. As for who pays for it, that's up to the consumers. If it dies, that's on them; they can resurrect it later, anyway, if the software is out there. You don't need a huge server infrastructure to run single player Tarkov. You just launch a server locally and connect to it. Probably going to be more complicated for a lot of games, but it isn't always.

Moreover, if devs see themselves getting screwed by the EU for releasing games that they kill later, maybe they'll be a little more careful about making games and then killing them for no reason. The Crew is a great example. There is absolutely no good reason that that game is dead right now, since it had no online capabilities to speak of if I'm not mistaken, except to check that you have the game legitimately. If you know from the outset that this legislation requires you to have a game that functions after a decade, you will write the software differently. Maybe you'll whip together some single player mode. Maybe you'll write it to be more server agnostic. Mostly it's AAA companies that sell live service games and MMOs. They can think of something. Or they can stop making games they will kill. Or stop selling in the EU.

Serious question: does Europe understand that regulations have costs?

I swear they come up with new consumer protection or worker protection laws all the time that make me think "I'm not sure those tradeoffs sound remotely worth it".

Here my immediate thought is: that is really going to discourage releasing MMO type games in Europe.

Sure I get that digital lockouts are annoying and this will likely work to prevent those (I generally choose to never buy those games in the first place).

But what is the cost of keeping all types of games running and in a playable state? Does that playable state require ongoing updates based on operating system or hardware changes? Does that playable state require servers that host large Gameworld to be permanently online? What happens if there is a severe outage with servers, are Euro regulators gonna start prosecuting if a game is offline for too long?

Lot of uncertainty, plus Europe tends to set fines at ruinously expensive levels. Usually millions of dollars or percentages of global revenue, whichever is higher.

Serious question: does Europe understand that regulations have costs?

European Union treats regulation like great adventure rather than necessary evil.

plus Europe tends to set fines at ruinously expensive levels

This one makes sense if you want regulation to be enforced. Alternatives are fining Microsoft less than they earn in one second.

You misunderstand. Because Europe doesn’t have or want a significant domestic tech industry, it’s just another tax on foreign companies doing business in Europe. As such, the average European won’t perceive themselves as negatively affected, because “what are they going to do, stop doing business in Europe?”

For indie games, ya absolutely they'll stop doing business once a few of them get burned.

I think it’s just a question of regulations not having had serious consequences for most people (in Europe and elsewhere).

Fortunately, though, the Americans don’t seem to be too fond of Euro-taxes, so as long as you don’t set foot in Europe or open non-Swiss bank accounts…

Most regulations don't have obvious effects. But the cumulative effects are glaring. The living standards in Europe are lower than most US states. They have a permanent unemployment rate that is about double the US. European citizens that manage to move to the US can immediately get large increases in their effective base salaries. In addition to enjoying lower tax rates.

Most regulations don't have obvious effects. But the cumulative effects are glaring. The living standards in Europe are lower than most US states. They have a permanent unemployment rate that is about double the US. European citizens that manage to move to the US can immediately get large increases in their effective base salaries. In addition to enjoying lower tax rates.

note that (over)regulation is not the only thing causing such results

I would bet on over regulation being most of the cause of the unemployment rates. General over regulation for many decades slowing down their economy to make them overall poorer. And a generous welfare state for the high taxes.

"most" is likely overstating things unless you count taxes as part of regulations. There are also other reasons.

40% for regulation, 30% for taxes, 30% for literally everything else is likely still giving too much credit for regulation.

More comments

Ah, I forgot to link the associated movement, Stop Killing Games started by Ross Scott of Freeman's Mind fame. The campaign isn't about forcing companies to continue running MMOs forever. It's about forcing them to release the server software for users to run themselves, or some other patch of their choosing that lets users continue playing the game instead of just unceremoniously killing the game. Forcing them to run it forever would be pretty short sighted. As for the specific details, I don't know that anyone knows what that's going to be, because I don't know that it's up to the citizens what the actual regulation passed will be, if there is any. But frankly these are not big asks. I doubt it will do much against the MMO industry.

Also, since this is a campaign being pushed by an American in basically any venue he can get, I don't think you can say this is a case of Europe not understanding regulations have costs.

I generally agree with the effort to preserve games. If you also agree I think you should do the following things:

  1. Buy games from companies with a reputation for preserving or releasing games. Bethesda open sources their games after some amount of decades.
  2. Don't buy games from companies that have a reputation for locking them or destroying them after some period. Review bomb any games that get locked.
  3. Go on patreon or other crowdfunding sites to pay money towards people that preserve games.

The thing is I strongly doubt legislation is going to get them what they want.

There are a few paths this goes down:

It immediately starts too harsh and too broad. Gaming market in Europe is generally destroyed except for the largest games. No one else can afford the compliance or lawyers for what is already a hard market to serve (non-english translations for small player base). It never gets fixed because gamers aren't a strong enough political entity, and mostly it just enshitified the market, so it screws over niche gamers in niche markets. And everyone else thinks it worked and any attempt to reverse it will be an uphill battle.

It starts too narrowly. The rules are easily dodged. This could be like some exception written for MMOs and then every game puts in a dumb feature that allows them to be an MMO by whatever standards the law has laid out.

It stays too narrow and continues to do nothing or it gets expanded into the first scenario.

At no point do I think the EU will be "too lenient". They'll use their regular fee structure which is % of global revenue or instantly crippling payments for a small business. Not that the size of the punishment for small businesses will ever matter. The legal hassle alone won't be worth it.

I'm also surprised from a programmer/coding perspective. Surely this guy must know what it's like messing with old code? Maybe I'm super ignorant or an absolutely shitty coder. But I'd say it's almost an order of magnitude harder to write code that can work in two decades then it is to just write code that works for two years.

I'm also pretty certain that any games with live services and large companies might be a mess of dependencies on external proprietary 3rd parties. Say a game company works with a hosting company for the online aspects of their game. The hosting company does a bunch of optimizations for the game company as both a service and lock in effect with that game company. The game is nearly unplayable without these improvements from the hosting company.

I basically see most programs that work for ten years as minor miracles. I'd compare them to buildings, but that they age way faster. A ten year old software program that does a significant amount is like a large fifty year old building. Probably with similar maintenance costs. The parts are no longer standard. The people that built it have long moved on. No one would build it the same way if they started today. And while the structure is still sturdy and fine, all the piping and internals that move stuff around is really starting to show it's age. If it wasn't built to last this long then its probably getting to the point where you could tear it all down and build it from scratch for cheaper.

If you aren't a programmer you are probably rolling your eyes and thinking "how does software wear out faster than copper piping". And I'm shouting "it's the demons!" with a crazed look in my eyes, cuz I don't fuckin know how it happens. Better people than me have written about how programming sucks.

The people at valve are top level geniuses in their field and they've written stuff that is still chugging along as some of the best modding software 20 years later. Maybe this petitioner got their start on valve related stuff, so my best explanation for him is that he is super spoiled. But if you wrote the perfect law that basically said "be like valve" it would still basically destroy the gaming industry, because no one can meet that standard. (Unless the valve devs released some super amazing software to make it easier for everyone, and they probably would if it meant saving Steam).

Sorry that rant got way longer than expected, also typed it on my phone, so it might have more spelling and grammar mistakes.

And I'm shouting "it's the demons!" with a crazed look in my eyes, cuz I don't fuckin know how it happens.

I shout "it's the demons!" all the time because that's the traditional example of how it happens.

A coworker writes code with Undefined Behavior. I point out that the C or C++ standard says the compiler is now allowed to let their executable do anything, including make demons fly out their nose. They point out that their code passed a couple tests. I point out that the nasal demons are actually still a best case scenario, because "anything" also includes "passing tests selectively or temporarily".

The worst case scenario is also a typical scenario: the UB works at first, but then in a couple months or years someone uses a different CPU type, or a linker goes to a different object file first, or a compiler gets a more aggressive optimizer, or an updated library leaves the heap in a different state, or a different thread starts winning races, etc. and then the code starts obviously breaking, out in the wild, where if we're lucky it is now crashing and making users scream at us or if we're unlucky it is just producing silently corrupted results, and where in either case the original concern has long been forgotten and the debugging will have to rediscover it from scratch.

And one might read that and smugly think "so don't use C/C++", but they're actually much better about UB than most dependencies. UB in C++ is "you wrote code clearly described as UB in a 300 page standards doc", but in most libraries it's "the API and the scraps of documentation said you needed to do 'X' but the developer really meant you needed 'W,X,Z' and if you did 'W,X,Y' instead you'll start breaking after the update next July, which you can't avoid because it's the only bugfix for a corner case your users started hitting in May"!

(I try to explain this without getting a crazed look in my eyes; success rates vary.)

As an example, I'd point to City of Heroes as kinda a best-case scenario: an employee of the studio operators for an MMO leaked pretty much everything (source code, development tools, even player data!), the code ended up being relatively drag-and-drop for standard off-the-shelf desktop machines (modulo a pretty steep RAM cost even by the standards of 2020), and the dependency list wasn't that bad while the paid dependencies were scaling up their free versions rapidly.

((And, bluntly, NCSoft pissed off almost every single person at Paragon Studios, in ways that they were quite willing to hurt NCSoft for so long as they couldn't get sued over it.))

But it still had people working on it had to do a ton of tweaking work, either to get it to run even moderately stably without dedicated staff, to update the client to handle arbitrary server addresses, and a decent amount of other black magic that SCORE wasn't talking about publicly. And it is a best-case scenario, without much in the way of middleware, jealously protected internal code for other competing products, or obnoxious infrastructure asks. If rather than free(ish) MS-SQLExpress it'd been some weird solidDB bullshit, or if the instances required some goofy mess of microservices as a minisharding behavior? What if some code dependency had license that couldn't be passed to users or resold?

By contrast, take Glitch. Not only were its assets in a much more complicated state given the development of the game, it depended on Adobe Flash. Some of it was open-sourced, surprisingly, but even before the death of Flash and ActionScript it wasn't anywhere near usable; now, much if it's barely useful. Even had every single part of the game leaked, it'd be a significant project to convert. ((And then OddGiants moved to Unity, right before the license rework.))

In practice, this puts really strong pressures toward either leaving MMOs in maintenance mode forever, breaking them off into other companies that go completely can't-punish-us bankrupt, or not releasing anything but what their investors are absolutely sure will be a forever hit. Maybe that's worth it, or there are ways to reduce these pressures by careful framing of the regulation.

But I'm not optimistic, and too many responses just feel like kicking the can down the road under the assumption someone will fix them, or make them not count.

I had close to zero knowledge of game preservation efforts, but what you describe is exactly what I would expect given my history in software.

Buy games from companies with a reputation for preserving or releasing games. Bethesda open sources their games after some amount of decades.

Huh? What games did they open source?

Search engines suck nowadays. Can't find source. Chatgpt agrees with me that they've released source code for TES 2, 3, and 4. I think they do so after they drop all support for the game.

If TES3 refers to OpenMW, that's not Bethesda opensourcing their game, that's a bunch if fanatics rewriting the game from scratch, after reverse-engineering the game's data files. If the other TES games have their own FOSS versions, I expect them to have come about the same way, rather than being released by Bethesda.

Big studios releasing their code happens, but is very rare.

Ya I got a few things mixed up. Bethesda released Arena and TES 2 as freeware, and I must have mixed that up with hearing about the open source projects for Morrowind and Oblivion.

Serious question: does Europe understand that regulations have costs?

No, it does not.

Any alternate hypothesis has less explanation power.

Yes, government is bad. But, as I understand it, Accursed Farms does not want to force the publisher to maintain the servers forever. Rather, he wants to force the publisher to make it possible for players to set up their own servers after the publisher's servers are shut down.

Quote from the petition:

An increasing number of publishers are selling videogames that are required to connect through the internet to the game publisher, or "phone home" to function. While this is not a problem in itself, when support ends for these types of games, very often publishers simply sever the connection necessary for the game to function, proceed to destroy all working copies of the game, and implement extensive measures to prevent the customer from repairing the game in any way.

"Repairing the game" includes setting up non-publisher-controlled servers.

I have generally two brains when thinking about policy. One is my libertarian brain that does indeed say "government is bad". But the other is my economics degree brain that mostly screams about tradeoffs, and tells my libertarian brain that some forms of "government bad" are worth it for the product they provide.

My libertarian brain is mostly not concerned with places where I don't live. In fact, if they have an awful government it can serve as an example of what not to do where I live.

My economics brain is still bothered though.

The existence of regulation can create tradeoffs but there is also sets of tradeoffs within regulations.

The rules can be clearly written and fail to cover all edge cases. Or the rules can be vaguely written and operate on vibes and feels at a court level.

Large entities mostly don't go for vibes. It rightfully scares the crap out of everyone, cuz outside of small communities vibes are not very legible.

So they've got to get super detailed legislation written by bureaucrats in Brussels that will somehow appropriately understand different game type and business models. And then craft a set of tradeoffs in the legislation that make the specific practice they don't like unprofitable.

It's a tight needle to thread. And my previous experience with EU legislation doesn't make me hopeful. They've added a minor annoyance to literally every website I visit with those annoying cookie popups. They've had like a decade to correct that ... and yet I still get the stupid popups.

And cookie tracking on websites is way simpler than any individual game preservation effort.

Given what happened with the EU cookie warning law, I feel like signing this would be one of those 'be careful what you wish for' things.

Can't meaningfully sign, since not a Euro, but good luck. The collapse of online-dependent software has a lot of legal stuff that makes it understandable, but it's absolutely wrecked a lot of archivist spheres, and in many cases even when stuff leaks, it's still impossible to go home again.

I've not followed it much, but Fallen Earth's apparently still online somehow, though the servers and maintainers have been replaced a few times and spent a few years dead. Was an interesting idea when it came out, but trying to straddle survival gaming on one side and the time-gates of Runecrafts on the other was more compelling as a sell than it was to play in early release.

((I'm still amazed that Tabula Rasa is the deadest MMO I've ever played, given some of the absolute stinkers, but given the circumstances, maybe that's not that much of a surprise. And Glitch and Skysaga only avoid giving Tabula Rasa a run for its money only because of weird fan projects that aren't likely to go anywhere productive anytime soon.))

Cries in Brexit

Now Tarkov, that's a game I can both recommend and also strongly advise people stay clear of. It's such a mixed bag, the highs are incredible, but damn, the devs can stoop low. Talking abandoning the megatransaction P2W "all future DLCs included" $150 version (that I own) in favor of a new $250 version that pinkie promises to provide all the DLC this time, while being so P2W it goes from annoying to farcical. Sadly none of the alternatives are quite as hard core, though I'm still harboring hopes in Gray Zone Warfare and Arena Breakout.

Someone, somewhere, will make a solid gritty extraction shooter, who knows, it might be the next Arma mod. And my sleep cycle is going to suffer for it.

Besides, the Tarkov devs are assholes who do their best to do fraudulent takedowns of content featuring an entirely legal mod for their game that lets you enjoy it in singleplayer, to piss on the digital preservation parade.

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