AtheistPreacher

Well, now that it's entered Early Access, I have in fact taken the plunge. What are people thinking of it so far?

I've done five runs now. Reached Hecate on my second run but barely lost. Have beat her every time on runs 3-5 but have not beat the second area boss yet. I've also unlocked two of the alt weapons. but so far I prefer the default one. In the first game the Chiron bow with the seeking arrows was my favorite, but that first ranged-focused weapon I unlocked in this game seems disappointing. Of course there's loads still to unlock, I'm looking forward to continuing and watching the game unfold itself.

@bigsocrates: I did add an "edit" in the middle of my response above (which maybe you didn't see?) acknowledging that I'm also extremely not clear about how adding a PSN account would actually help the problem, but that this doesn't necessarily have anything to do with their intent. I fully acknowledge that it may well be sheer hubris on Sony's part to think that adding this requirement would actually meaningfully move the needle. The truth is that I know next to nothing about how such anti-cheating/policing actually works (probably by design! because if everyone knew exactly how it all worked, it probably wouldn't be very effective!), so I just don't have an informed enough opinion to weigh in on the matter. But yeah, they may well be deluded there.

Also, I should probably just append that when it comes to the whole malice vs. stupidity/incompetence thing, this is hardly a binary. There's a continuum there and almost everything falls somewhere in the middle. This is intuitively obvious, but neither of us actually stated it explicitly. E.g., with regard to that whole 20 captcha thing (first I'd heard about it), I'm sure some executive ultimately signed off on it at some point, but did they even realize how ridiculous it was when they did so? Does that make them malicious/evil, or just lazy/incompetent for not fully realizing what they were approving or thinking through all the implications? Probably a little from both buckets. But I try not to begin by assuming bad faith, because we tend to ascribe malice to others very easily, but never to ourselves, and as a practical matter, assuming bad faith often just puts everybody's backs up rather than leading to a resolution.

Hah. You're right about that. The whole "PC Master Race" thing. "We don't want to be in any way affiliated with those console peasants!" Pardon me while I roll my eyes so hard that I need to retrieve them from off the floor.

I don't. And here I speak from personal experience as a consumer.

Whenever there's a multiplatform, cross-play game, the most rampant cheaters are always on PC, because as an unregulated platform it's just way easier to do. It's why PS5 suddenly no longer allowed offloading saves to USB, because that made it all the easier to move a save over to your PC and edit it for purposes of cheating. Yes, there are various PC anti-cheat services that everyone hates, but as an added bonus, they never seem to actually work.

In Helldivers 2 specifically, from the beginning there were players cheating, and it was affecting other random users. E.g., they'd end a mission and be rewarded with the max number of resources because there was a cheater in their group, and then their account is sort of ruined because they wanted to play the game legitimately, not just give themselves 9,999 of everything (let alone open themselves to a ban for something that wasn't their fault). I can name half a dozen multiplayer games off the top of my head where I've stuck to the console version because I didn't want to be in a pool with so many people with hacked saves. And I typically turn off crossplay for just this reason in any games that have it.

So when Sony says: "We're implementing this to protect our players," I don't immediately jump to the conclusion that they're lying, because as a general rule, I have personally found the closed console environment to be more secure from these kind of hijinks. Now, does that mean that Sony doesn't also want that sweet, sweet personal data? Of course not! Both can be true. And yet you're telling me that you're completely certain they're lying about the intended reason, when you simply have no way of knowing that. It is almost always a safe bet that the reality is more complicated that a single reason, particularly a nefarious one.

EDIT: I should probably also clarify that I don't necessarily think Sony would have done a better job at *actually* stopping cheating; these players are still on PC and it's not clear to me how exactly tying them to a PSN account would help with regulation. But that doesn't mean I automatically dismiss the stated *intent*. After all, I don't actually know how any of this stuff works.

Yes, we completely agree on this and have from the beginning. I never said otherwise.

There are, but my feeling is that that the ratio of entitled whining to legitimate grievance is somewhat higher that you apparently think it is. There are legitimate reasons, but those are so often not the real reasons. As @nodima already said, "I found the data warrior angle pretty embarrassing, considering these were Steam/Twitter/Reddit blatherers taking a so-called stand for data privacy." And you yourself speculated that "the vast majority of Steam sales are in territories that have PSN." My feeling is that a whole lot of people got fairly irrationally angry and then sought more legitimate reasons to justify it.

Doesn't mean Sony didn't royally fuck up! They did! It was a dumb decision and now they've paid the PR price and reversed it, and will hopefully stop to think a little more next time. This whole thing resembles an extremely miniaturized version of Microsoft with their epically disastrous Xbox One Launch; they assumed that since people already accepted most of their proposed DRM stuff from Valve/Steam, they would accept it from a MS console. Boy were they wrong; the console loyalists were used to physical games and weren't ready to make that switch, and now it's a decade later and MS is the perpetual underdog because of it. Somewhat ironically, this time it is the Steam users complaining from the other side for being asked to do something that is, as you say, getting more and more common these days anyway.

Anyway, this is still a win for consumers, and I think that we ultimately agree on a lot, with the proviso that I am slightly less cynical about Sony and more cynical about the userbase. But as I've said, aside from people in those territories which actually can't create PSN accounts, EHS. And certainly this will be a candidate on @allthedinos' "Hottest Mess" list for our due consideration. It blew up so much that, who knows, it might actually end up being one of the winners...

@bigsocrates: Your (3) fits the definition of "inconvenience" exactly.

And yes, of course (1) is a factor, as we've already discussed; whether this was "malicious" or not, it certainly at least gives the appearance of intent to bait-and-switch (though I'd argue that if this were the true intent, it would have happened much earlier, much like those added cash shops). But also, bait-and-switch isn't a reason in itself; it only matters if the "switch" is something people actually care about.

(2) is true, Sony has a bad reputation on data breaches. But that still doesn't make it the real reason. People should realize by now that their data isn't safe with anyone. I should know, I was in the Equifax breach. Your data is out there somewhere already.

I still find it more plausible that most of these people screaming are doing it because it's a minor inconvenience and they enjoy screaming and feeling self-righteous. See: all of Twitter now.

I dunno, I find it funny that you seem to assume everything Sony does is malicious, while apparently all consumers are pure as the driven snow and are never performative assholes on the internet for dumb reasons. Aside from the people genuinely affected by being in regions that can't create PSN accounts, I think this is more of an "ESH" situation.

Pretty much this. It made me think of my own reaction when Dauntless came out of early access and decided to go to Epic instead of Steam. I was annoyed, because I simply didn't want a whole other PC game software platform, it's easier and simpler to have it all in the same "container." Most people feel the same way. That doesn't mean that Epic is any worse than Valve; Valve does plenty of bad and stupid shit. But people who don't want to deal with an inconvenience like this will then scream at the top of their lungs various justifications for why they don't want to do it--including data privacy concerns--when they're just not the real reason (and sometimes they even start to believe their own performative justifications). My dudes, just admit that you don't like it because it's an inconvenience. But no, they enjoy screaming and feeling self-righteous.

Whereas, yeah, this was ridiculous. It's like Sony forgot that the reason they allowed a concurrent release in the first place was that Steam reached places they couldn't. Derp.

You're really putting words in my mouth here. I was talking about this specific case. The cash shop thing clearly is malice, trying to get around negative press from reviewers. Also, never seen the 20 tasks thing, not even close. Once at most. Nor do I think 20 tasks would be intentional, sounds like something hinky.

I don't see how this logically follows.

Looks like the linking thing isn't happening now. I guess everyone just made a big enough stink about it.

https://twitter.com/PlayStation/status/1787331667616829929

I do try to remember that as a general rule, one should not attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity or incompetence. I don't really have any trouble believing that there were technical issues with intended PSN account linking at launch and that they just shoved the issue down the road for later (especially since there turned out to be far more urgent server capacity issues to address). Nonetheless, even if one gives them the benefit of the doubt there, they should have been more aware of the optics for its delayed implementation, because it does end up looking like a bait-and-switch, even if it was never intended that way. There's no denying that they really failed to read the room.

But also, the most insane part of this little saga was that a lot of countries don't have PSN, and hence people in those countries who'd already bought the game would not have been able to play the game they paid for at all anymore.

https://twitter.com/PirateSoftware/status/1787163524575490404

I believe Steam had been denying refunds based on the account linking issue, but it's not hard to imagine Valve contacting Sony after they removed access to the game for all these countries and saying, "Yeah, you guys are gonna have to refund all these now," and Sony realizing that implementing account linking just wasn't worth the cost of refunds and/or court fights.

@undeadpool: No argument here, you're preaching to the choir. Was just pointing out that the base price for an AAA game used to be well over $100 when adjusted for inflation, and even with the recent increase to $70 for gen 9, it's still well under that. That doesn't mean I condone all the microtransactions we get now, or CEO pay skyrocketing, etc.

Of course all of this isn't exclusively a video game problem. There's a reason that Cory Doctorow coined the term "enshittification" only a few years ago and it already feels like a term that's been around forever.

EDIT: Incidentally, I also just read Doctorow's (relatively) new article, "‘Enshittification’ is coming for absolutely everything." It's a good read!

This was fun to read, comes off as a little unhinged, but in a good way, if that makes sense. And yes, of course all this stuff sucks, the only thing we can do is vote with our wallets and hope other people will vote similarly so that the nickel-and-diming becomes less profitable. Doesn't seem likely, but eh.

The only obvious counter-argument I can think of that deserves to be mentioned is that some of this can be laid at the feet of people not wanting to pay a higher base price for an AAA title, even though inflation means that this cost has actually gone down significantly. Don't get me wrong, you're preaching to the choir, I'd prefer to pay more up front and not be nickel-and-dimed subsequently, but it seems like raising that base price more was just not something that most consumers were going to accept, and so publishers looked for other avenues to generate revenue.

Good image, I like it.

I take your point, but also that sounds hilarious, I would buy that game.

Just curious, is there a third blog on these forums about DD2 that somehow isn't displaying for me? Because I only see this one and mine.