Yet another Hacker News

Redditor buys used CPU, turns out it was banned on Valorant and they are SoL

50 points xbmcuser 4 hours ago 28 comments

2OEH8eoCRo0 4 hours ago | parent

When did video games get so serious that we need to do these things? Ridiculous.

vjsrinivas 4 hours ago | parent

I wonder if it has anything to do with the rise of e-sports and the monetary aspect of "professional" multi-player games?

2OEH8eoCRo0 3 hours ago | parent

That's one of my theories. Money got involved and here we are. Now games are serious business! Remember when they were just fun?

xeonmc 3 hours ago | parent

Esports used to be just fun grassroots competition until Riot Games bulldozed over the nascent self-sustaining scenes and started the rat race of astroturf-bankrolling "professionalized" scenes lacking the foundation of any sort of viable business model, propped up only by VC sponsors. When those ran dry, the Saudi oil funds swooped in to buy up all the tournament rights as part of their sportswashing campaign.

Riot Games was also the one that introduced the nanny policing of "if you deviate from the squeaky clean advertiser-friendly image we stipulate, we'll make sure you have no future in the pro scene ever again" tribunal, presenting themselves as the bastion of "pre-eliminating all toxicity from online gaming", which is ironically hypocritical considering their scandals after scandals of toxic workplace culture.

7bit 2 hours ago | parent

Esports was serious loooong before Riot games existed.

xeonmc 2 hours ago | parent

Serious competition as a fulfilling grassroots activity? Sure it existed before Riot.

Artificially propped-up unsustainable "professionalization" whose eventual conclusion is to enforce spyware on casual participants? That's Riot's gift to the world.

orbital-decay 1 hour ago | parent

Kernel spyware is at least 2 decades old, and manual scrutiny of casual participants is as old as networked competitive gaming and cheating themselves (id games had that from the start!). It has nothing to do with money.

mmmlinux 1 hour ago | parent

They were never just fun though. there were always hackers and cheaters.

nancyminusone 3 hours ago | parent

Probably around the time individual games started to have the term "billion dollars" associated with them in some way.

bigmadshoe 3 hours ago | parent

As someone who has played a decent of competitive games in the past, it is less about them being extremely serious, and more about how much people cheating ruins the fun for everyone else.

For example, a soccer Sunday league might not be that serious, but you still wouldn't want someone frequently running on the pitch with a golf club and whacking the ball into your goal with no consequences.

cronin101 2 hours ago | parent

Definitely not frequently, but once or twice a lifetime would provide a measurable uplift.

ElevenLathe 1 hour ago | parent

GTA Online has this feeling at times. I always find it a refreshing distraction when somebody comes into a public server with obvious hacks and starts spawning bizarre weapons, vehicles, giving out money, changing the weather or day/night cycle abruptly, teleporting everyone to the same location. It's easy to leave to another server when it gets boring or frustrating, but these are the times when I put out the call on Discord for other non-currently-online friends to join me!

Eridrus 2 minutes ago | parent

People buying cheats do not stop at once.

orbital-decay 1 hour ago | parent

Anticheats started moving into ring0 and became rootkits in early 2000s with nProtect GameGuard, HWID checks started in mid-2000s with myAC (or even earlier? I think myAC first appeared during CS 1.5).

Sohcahtoa82 5 minutes ago | parent

First anti-cheat I ever ran into was PunkBuster. I don't remember when I first used it, but apparently it was released in 2000.

tadfisher 5 minutes ago | parent

Those were easily worked around with unsigned drivers or physical hardware. Now Secure Boot is required to run Valorant games, which should be a harbinger for what will happen to your online banking experience if consumers allow this to continue.

RicoElectrico 1 hour ago | parent

When tryhards flocked to ranked games; more broadly in the world with no opportunity for the young people e-sports emerged and they saw it as one.

sippingabonedry 23 minutes ago | parent

When people ruined multiplayer games for everyone by cheating.

m-p-3 3 hours ago | parent

We'll eventually need something like CarFax where you can look for hardware bans for multiple softwares and games before you purchase a part..

yusyusyus 3 hours ago | parent

uhh.. i dont think amd or intel has even attempted to make a s/n accessible on their CPUs since the big stink in the 90's.

rasz 2 hours ago | parent

TPM 2.0 Endorsement Key (EK)

crostlybostly 2 hours ago | parent

Video Game has to be one of the areas enshitification is most visible to me.

Unfinished games being released, no LAN, paywalled features, pay to win, games unusable after support ends, etc.

I think we are due for surge of people just playing classic games and boycotting all the new BS that is coming out. Piracy should be encouraged as a check and balance against shitty UX.

orbital-decay 2 hours ago | parent

That's a well known risk when buying used hardware, although I doubt a blacklisted CPU could do that alone. I used to host a bunch of pretty popular servers for survival games many of which used hardware ID checks, and we had about a dozen people banned due to this in ~5 years. We had extremely thorough investigations and they were 100% clean.

dataflow 19 minutes ago | parent

Not sure what well-known means, I don't think I'd ever heard of even the idea of hardware bans until now. Feels like banning a student's notebook because they took notes with it to cheat in school, rather than suspending or expelling the student.

happytoexplain 12 minutes ago | parent

Maybe well-known among people whose business it is to buy and sell hardware. I personally have never heard of this, and I imagine a strong majority of normal people buying hardware don't know either.

Eridrus 4 minutes ago | parent

Definitely not well known to most people lol.

tamimio 2 hours ago | parent

Same happens on smartphones btw with some apps that take the hardware fingerprint

niels8472 19 minutes ago | parent

Big game needs you to install a rootkit to play. But hey you can trust people selling crack^wloot boxes to kids right.