This happened to me for a different reason, but it was the same level of frustrating.
After months of playing MW and Black Ops, one day I queue up with friends and after waiting 5+ minutes no server would be found. We try over and over finally we realize its me.
Googling around shows that I am "Shadow Banned" and everyone is like "go away cheater" online.
I've been playing online games with an in game name that contains the word "Erotica" for a while now (4+ years) and have had zero issues.
Turns out the word "Erotica" is BANNED by Activision, and they synced their identity management with Blizzard it got flagged.
I found ONE random thread on Reddit where a guy ran into the same problem and gave a link to directly log into their system.
Once logged in I got "Your username contains adult content and must be changed".
After changing it, and waiting 3 days, it 'synced' and my account was unbanned.
The whole thing was absolutely stupid, I had paid $60 and could not play any of their games.
It pretty much ruined the game for me, I haven't given them a dollar since.
It usually doesn't take a lot of work for engineers to do some brainstorming around who will be affected and send a direct email letting users know what's up. That would have saved you days of fumbling around and frustration.
I have a growing enthusiasm for companies that consistently care for users, and conversely a callous distain for companies that don't.
I feel as though the list of companies that consistently care for users is shrinking by the day.
In fact, I can't really think of many businesses where I feel appreciated or cared for as a customer, but the few that I can are all small businesses and most of them are local to me.
This is fundamentally a support and UX problem, not a dev failure. Big production user management and authentication systems can get pretty complicated and trying to figure out every weird edge case when combining them is not low-effort by any measure. "What if someone's username wasn't caught in their profanity filter but gets caught by ours" seems like a pretty rare edge case in a huge pool of big problems to solve. Their shortcoming was not giving their users proper guidance on how to address the inevitable kinks that pop up.
That is insane. Had similar issues but not really banned... just "error-less" issues coming up that would lead you to believe the problem is something else entirely.
Sounds very annoying. Conversely, many of activision’s users are minors. In the games you mentioned it’s some what rare to encounter adults, especially as a new player. Perhaps not the best place to advertise ones love of erotica. Personally it bothers me when I walk past my 10 year old nephew and the other players in his squad have names that are sexual, racist or inflammatory; so I report them. If the people that I report have to work hard to realize that they are disrupting a community and making people uncomfortable I am ok with that too. +1 for activision in my books.
Unfortunately we gave up our right to own software when we let companies own the servers. Back in the day you could get banned from a server and go find somewhere else to play. Now you'll get banned for life, and in some cases, even banned from the single player mode. Sorry, no refunds!
There's a reason pirate crews are hailed as heroes...and it's not the free software. Games legitimately work better when they are cracked almost 100% of the time.
Having community hosted servers with their own moderation was just so much better. Sure, the moderation level would vary from server to server, sometimes with immature admins giving out bans for no reasons, but you would ultimately find your way to servers that match you the best. And often, people would become regulars, finding the same players on the same servers, that was the best aspect of online gaming, finding a community.
Games stopping to provide self-hosted servers is also what made LAN parties increasingly difficult. Having to rent game servers, provide decent bandwidth and not being able to run third party tools (for recording scores or set modifiers) made it impossible to use modern games in a 50 people LAN party with a low budget.
I really can't blame them entirely. Perhaps you could blame companies for not using a hybrid model where players can host privately plus maintaining their public servers.
Why? Because in a similar vein to how social media needs to be moderated to prevent the bad apples from spoiling the bunch, games now need to be moderated to maintain reputation among the community. If a player hearing about CSGO for the first time has no idea what they're getting into finds only a public server running 24/7 CS_OFFICE with Warcraft Mods they might get a bad impression of what the game is. Having consistency in user experience is highly important, and public servers being maintained and moderated by the developer is probably the most important part of that. What about all those servers that have massive latency issues? That's a bad look on the game because most players won't recognize community run servers are the reason the game behaves buggy.
Do I dislike it? Yes. I think it has created irreparable harm to the ability for gaming communities to build organically but so long as central hubs like Reddit or Discord continue to pop up I figure they've just offloaded the community aspect to external sources. Is that better? I'm not sure. Partially yes. Losing contact with a friend because they stopped logging into your preferred server isn't really a thing if you're Discord friends or Steam friends.
As long as there's a clear UI separation, there's no harm in providing both first and third party servers for brand perception & user experience. A similar issue is content provenance. In StarCraft II, for example, official maps and custom maps live in separate tabs. No one expects a Dragon Ball-themed map to be made with the same standard as an official Blizzard map.
I suspect it's simply to control monetization and without the extra engineering cost of private server releases.
And, tbh, wtf does it matter if I wanted to "cheat" in single player mode? Oh no - it would be unfair to some AI NPCs? At one point "cheating" in single player mode was called modding -- and it drove communities and made software publishers money by keeping games fresher longer.
> Unfortunately we gave up our right to own software when we let companies own the servers.
Some games managed to balance this quite well despite no self-hosted servers, for example BF4 which allows community managed "rented" servers.
But one thing to note though is that nearly all of them will very quickly adopt global blacklists with cheaters. So for a community BF server you'd hook your server to a global anti cheat database, and any bans from the server would end up on the global cheater blacklist. While the choice of using a global blacklist was of course up to the administrators, it wouldn't be very easy to find a server that didn't use this type of system if you happened to be blacklisted.
So the community will invent exactly the same kind global bans that the game studio has. I never saw a problem with that (likely because I wasn't a false positive).
Generally speaking, if you are a suspected cheater, I can see why you would be barred from online-play.
There's always going to be false-positives though. How often that happens and what means of recourse one has (or should have) is IMO another discussion. And in this particular case, it seems Activision is doing pretty much all the wrong things(tm) though.
> even banned from the single player mode.
The fact that an account (and a server) is required to play a game you've bought in single-player mode is on another level outragious.
That itself should be illegal.
> Sorry, no refunds!
Again. Clearly this needs to be illegal.
If you take away a product you've allowed someone to "buy", then you've broken your end of the bargain.
> If you take away a product you've allowed someone to "buy", then you've broken your end of the bargain.
Obviously doing it for no valid reason is a breach of contract, but I'm sure the legalese is pretty thick. No one "buys" anything obviously and the license agreement will clearly say you forfeit your license if you cheat. And here I'm pretty sure the legalese would say "Whether or not you actually cheated is up to us to decide so we define it as when our tools say you did".
So basically: you have a license, and that license is valid until their tools say it isn't.
Now, will such a license agreement hold up if tested legally? Maybe not. But it's likely what I clicked "Accept" on.
Lol we were lucky we had the ability to host our own servers back in the day. The IP owners have always had to full right and power to do whatever they want to extract as much profit as possible. We have never had any power over what they do.
Keep in mind that there wasn't flexible infrastructure on demand in those days. User run servers was sort of a low cost market based demand scaler for IP owners. If the game is really a dud, they didn't buy N servers and M bandwidth. If it's a hit, they can add an official hosted distinction if it makes sense.
Stop buying the games. It's really that simple. I can't understand the people who say "well, I'll try this game out but I hope they fix it next time". That's not how business works.
This is one of the main reasons Minecraft is still one of the most popular games to this day, after over a decade. Open-source third-party servers and their development contribute to development of new fun plugins, which allows more and more independent server creators to build cool unique servers.
And best of all: you can only get yourself banned from individual servers.
This isn't the case anymore since version 1.19.1 [1], where "reported players can now be banned from online play and Realms after moderator review": https://i.redd.it/hoyh22jsh9791.png
These bans also block the single player mode?! That is absolutely absurd. False bans for multiplayer aren't anything new (unfortunately), but also blocking the singleplayer mode, making the purchased product 100% unusable seems criminal.
This is what happens if you "buy" Activision/Blizzard software - they're driving the service model to the max and will exploit it as much and as deeply as possible. They're the worst of the worst and anyone familiar with their games will tell you the same.
In the end, there's nothing you can do but to put your money into games that respect you as a customer, which is very rare in AAA. These companies hate you. No one will listen to you and nothing will change, as it's extremely profitable. No one will regulate it. In 3 weeks, a dev there will notice that some updater code can break game files which flags people's accounts or something like that, it'll be quietly patched and everybody will forget about it.
its not just Activision/Blizzard. Single player bans are in a lot of AAAs.
> In the end, there's nothing you can do but to put your money into games that respect
Could always pick up a copy of IDA...
> In 3 weeks, a dev there will notice that some updater code can break game files which flags people's accounts or something like that, it'll be quietly patched and everybody will forget about it.
As a side note if you want some fun you should fire up wireshark when you're playing a game and watch how much "metadata" is sent from your PC to the game company. They know more about you than your doctor in some cases. EasyAntiCheat and Denuvo seem to be the worst offenders.
Google is the worst of the worst. At least you can easily choose not to play Activison games. It's much harder to choose not to participate in the Google ecosystem, and actions in one service or account can have deep repercussions to other services and "associated" accounts. Appealing to an actual Google support human being is seemingly impossible
Yeah, but then ActiBlizz has been doing the "online only" thing at least since Starcraft 2 (2010), also removing multiplayer not through Blizzard's servers in the process !
And they recently did the same with the Diablo 2 """remaster""", preventing multiplayer-heavy mods running in the regular online mode from operating !! (They are not allowed on battle.net, partially for anti-cheating reasons of course.)
Meanwhile other games still allow normal connection through IP/server name, provide a matchmaking server for players to organize their games, including modded ones, and provide an *optional* ban list for server owners using the official matchmaker to enforce on the worst offenders that in no way affects the singleplayer or the direct connection multiplayer experience !
I've always enjoyed playing and modding D2, so when D2R launched I bought it and again went into modding and what not, all single player. A while after that i got an email saying i had been banned. I tried hopping on a single player game and it worked so i didn't care too much since i don't play online anyways. However, to my surprise, 30 days after the ban when i tried to play i was greeted by a message saying that i had been offline for too long and needed to log back in to "verify ownership" of the game, which i obviously couldnt since i got banned, so i couldn't even play offline/single player.
Luckily i managed to get in touch with an understanding support rep who unbanned me, but not without a "stop modding if you don't wanna get banned again" message, which is absurd. I paid for the game and i should be able to do whatever i want with it within the confines of my own computer.
They want to be in control of the mods (for 'security' reasons). So they can sell you extra service on top of it. We're moving towards GaaS (gaming as a service) really quickly and it's disheartening to see.
My XBL 2001 account got permabanned with 10~ years of purchased content on there, all my network of friends and leaderboard achievements and the likes, the works. Lost access to literally everything that wasn't on-disc, and appeals didn't help.
I'd had one genuine temp-ban beforehand, and my theory is over the years I got enough reports from opponents that they just built up into saying t'ra to my account and purchases. Yay, right?
I started the wiki linked in the article (codconsumer.org). Long time HN lurker and was pleasantly surprised to see this here!
I was only banned for a week, but I'm absolutely certain that there was nothing sketchy happening on my side. It's pretty annoying when they're charging money for time-limited events like Battle Passes, then you lose some of that time. Of course, it's a much bigger problem for the many who have been permabanned and don't know why. And it's still happening to others.
I would really like for this to end quietly with some better policies on account reviews, and more transparency on the findings of those reviews. I don't think that's too much to ask after being locked out of a $70 purchase. So far they have been completely silent on the matter. So the wiki stays up and we hope to someday get a word out of them.
Paying a few bucks doesn't give you a free pass to, say, spam racist epithets over and over in chat, or sabotage every multiplayer game you join by running into the enemy team every single match. That said, yeah, "being blocked from a $70 game for no actual discernible reason" should be prevented by some form of consumer rights that can't be waived by agreeing to a EULA.
Microtransaction games will happily ban players without recourse or explanation after they spend hundreds of dollars. No refunds, they make the rules and regulators don't care
They should have to specify the cause and provide evidence. If, say, you’re a Nazi and spammed threats in chat that’s very easy to demonstrate and very few courts are going to even blink at the idea that it’s a terms of service violation which doesn’t warrant a refund.
Where that’s harder would be things like “our ML system thinks your input timing wasn’t humanly possible” and it’d be great if this forced companies to be more nuanced about how they handle things like that by doing things like requiring multiple independent checks.
This is a consumer rights issue across our industry. Algorithmic customer support “decisions” should always be appealable to a human audience.
My Google account was banned years ago, “computer says no” - all of my attempts to appeal failed. I at no point broke their terms. Nobody cares, I lost all of my data.
I hope that a class action prevails against Activision. And I hope that across our industry consumers receive more robust rights. Not being able to reach a human at your company quickly escalates from a being cost optimization, to outright fraud.
Yeah.. you can do a chargeback or take them to small claims court, but then you'll be blacklisted as a customer for life. There needs to be a better process
Yes, and it was denied, with no explanation, no ability to defend against claims, etc. If there is monetary loss, then a proper appeals process should be put in place. If they refunded the money, then that’s one thing, but they kept the money, and so this is theft.
In this case, it really looks like Activision's Anti-Cheat is broken and banning people unfairly (if we can trust OP, which I have no reason not to).
A related problem though is that game developers have a really hard time trusting anyone who says they've been banned unfairly. Almost everyone who gets banned for valid reasons will claim they did nothing wrong, etc. This is especially true for delayed bans, as the person doesn't even realize that their account got flagged to be banned weeks before the actual ban took place.
Given that problem, when a developer gets reports of users being banned unfairly, it's very easy to ignore them as salty cheaters. Ideally there is a way for them to know exactly what tripped the anti-cheat, but sometimes it's hard as the client has to covertly tell the server to ban itself.
Not as strong As you might think. The Cronus is a very strong cheating device for consoles, and it’s ubiquitous enough to be sold in some big-box retail stores.
I'm a stock Xbox Series X console player in DMZ mode. I also sometimes get the random crashes and "DEV ERROR" messages after being removed from the game. I also have been removed from games several times with the "Player kicked" message. I can share my userId with any Activision employee here who's looking into the matter where you can see my K/D ratio is far too poor to be a "cheater".
This has been going on since the release of MW2019. I myself was banned after trying to launch and play the single player campaign on Linux through Wine/Proton. I was unable to even launch the game to play the campaign again on Windows after that, and I no longer use Windows at all.
I emailed Activision support back and forth more than a dozen times explaining the issue, finally resulting in them saying they were escalating to another team. I sent them another four emails over three months, asking if there was any update, before asking if there was even anybody left alive at the company that my emails were reaching, with no response.
I really enjoyed the MW2019 campaign, but I won't be buying another game from Activision.
Unfortunately, this ban happened close to a year after the original purchase, and my intent and goal was to play the single player campaign of the game I purchased, not get my money back.
Good timing, I was just today considering playing Diablo III on my Steam Deck (or trying to)... based on your experience, I guess that might be a bad idea to even try.
I know Activision now owns Blizzard, but I don't know the extent to which these policies apply across other games. I know World of Warcraft has an active and thriving Linux user base still. I recommend checking https://appdb.winehq.org and https://protondb.org for reports on game compatibility.
I really enjoy Call of Duty. Got extremely good at it in high school, along with my group of friends. Since then, I've had to move away and CoD has kept us connected multiple times per week. It's been a very enjoyable game for well over a decade.
In the past few years, it's become extremely clear to me that something is seriously wrong with CoD - and perhaps Activision as a whole. I'm willing to explain much of it away as "it's hard to run a big game at scale", but some the bugs are just inexcusable. Activision offers little to no insight or recourse when things break.
I have 700 hours in MW2/WZ1. I can't even stand to play the new game. It's just too broken.
IMO, the release of Warzone 1, Call of Duty’s Battle Royale mode that released a few months after Modern Warfare 2019, has completely changed the priorities and incentives for the company. The goal is to sell in game cosmetics more so than the game itself, as many other games are turning to as well.
The yearly release cycle, which may be ending soon, leads to bugs that re-emerge each year and features that appear and disappear. Sure, the different studios which produce the games need some room to innovate, but the inconsistent base set of features is incredibly frustrating. CoD games are one of the games I play the most, with the other being a game which is the complete opposite, Old School RuneScape, that has been built on for ~20 years.
I play the current game MWII with friends a few hours a day most days of the week. Multiple times per session my game crashes at random, something I can’t remember with any other major games with a top of the line PC. Like many other pieces of software, chasing other revenue sources seems to have made the quality of the product take a nose dive, with consequences yet to be seen. This is disappointing to me as someone who enjoys playing the game with friends, who has competed in open-bracket events at major tournaments over a span of a few years, and worked directly with the professional league and teams (CDL and CWL) for analytics and software.
> The goal is to sell in game cosmetics more so than the game itself, as many other games are turning to as well.
This has nothing to do with cosmetics and everything to do with customer standards. We're living in an age where the average customer has absolutely zero standards for the products they purchase, they simply do not care if the game barely works and crashes every 10 minutes, they will happily enjoy it and praise it anyway because they probably do not have the intellectual capacity to notice or care.
The newest Pokemon game is a prime example of this, it has no cosmetics, no microtransactions, nothing, yet it's so much more of a technical trainwreck than any CoD game, you really have to play it to believe it. It costs $60 and looks and runs worse than many PS2 games, but it sold tens of millions anyway because the people buying it are effectively zombies that only exist to obey corporations and will happily consume whatever is sold to them no questions asked.
Same experience here. I crash/bug-out multiple times per day. Every day I play, the first time I play a map it lags for the first 3-5 minutes, cycling between full speed and 20FPS. I have run into _several_ game breaking bugs in multiplayer, one of which locks me out of playing consistently (detailed in another comment in this thread).
I am big on boycotting and generally have avoided Activision games because of how they have milked things in the past. I'm incredibly frustrated with the state of the game, and disappointed I got talked into buying it by my buddies. Even worse, they just stockholm it saying things like "they just released it, you have to give it time". What? We played Halo 2 and Modern Warfare 2 at launch for a week straight and the only issue I can remember is server instability which was transient. I'm so tired of this public beta workflow, which if you are pushing a game per year you end up getting what, 9 months of _actual_ gameplay, and thats assuming the game doesnt need app-level modifications (vs fixing actual bugs) to smooth out the experience.
If you can convince your crew to try something new, there are some great FPS games nowadays. I've enjoyed those, though I haven't been able to put in anywhere near your number of hours.
Beauty with CoD is that you can turn it on, play for 10 minutes and then move on to other stuff in your life. None of those games (except maybe Rising Storm 2: Vietnam, I'm not familiar with that one) look like you'll be able to do so. CoD is essentially a arcade FPS, while the ones you listed are more on the "realistic" side of things.
BTW... sometime ago there were people on Forums convinced they got banned on EFT due to WSL and Virtualbox, as there were hacks using VMs. Worth take a look first.
EFT requires a huge amount of free time, it feels like a day job. I would consider that before putting time on that game. Its nothing like COD.
+1 for Tarkov, its what CoD's new DMZ mode is a watered down imitation of.
I highly recommend single player mods/server emulators for EFT like Altered Escape, its a nice break from going up against meta geared super competitive players.
My old Counter-Strike 'clan' Mousesports became a 'team', then it became an 'organisation'. These kids make a lot of money now and travel the whole world to play in their 'clan'.
Its not just the bugs though. Its the glaringly obvious "move fast" mentality as a dev. There is no way anyone looked at the warzone 2 ping system and thought "thats good enough, ship it". In all of the dev-run cycles, or the playtesting, or the beta testing you are telling me it wasnt _glaringly_ obvious that the system was broken?
QA can file all the bugs and tickets they want but when management says you can't work on anything that doesn't stop someone from playing the game they won't be fixed. Video game management doesn't care, and why should they? Bethesda games have been hot garbage from a bugs standpoint since the very very beginning and they only get more successful. Even after Fallout 76, I promise you the new elder scrolls will have quests that are impossible to complete for no reason sometimes, will struggle to function after a 100 hours of playtime for unexplained reasons, will have trivial exploits (though I don't think that's a problem) and just be unreliable and bad, but it will make millions of dollars still.
Nit: mw2 is the new game, you meant mw1 (2019) presumably.
Similarly for me cod has kept me connected with friends and family across the world as we travelled and went our own ways. But all of us have actually moved onto mw2 by now and are enjoying it a great deal. (We don’t play Warzone and only play s&d or prison rescue). There are bugs here and there but not too bad overall. We are a mix of PC and Xbox players.
I would still recommend giving the game a try in a few “seasons” as it will likely stabilize further.
I've been SUPER confused as to what this "Modern Warfare 2" is that people are talking about, because I played that in, well, 2009. At least they called it "II" instead of "2" (as if anyone will notice this difference)... >_>
I have a _bunch_ of issues with MW2 in warzone, but by far the most absolutely frustrating is a multiplayer bug. It seems that if I get a UAV and then die in a S&D style map (e.g. S&D, prisoner rescue, Knockout) then about 50% of the time I am soft-locked for the remainder of the _game_. By this I mean my HUD goes away, the game runs at 5FPS, and I _cant use the UAV I got_. I used to be able to unglitch it by killing myself and spectating a teammate before the next round, but that doesnt work any more. I just have to wait for the game to finish. So incredibly frustrating.
Readit News
After months of playing MW and Black Ops, one day I queue up with friends and after waiting 5+ minutes no server would be found. We try over and over finally we realize its me.
Googling around shows that I am "Shadow Banned" and everyone is like "go away cheater" online.
I've been playing online games with an in game name that contains the word "Erotica" for a while now (4+ years) and have had zero issues.
Turns out the word "Erotica" is BANNED by Activision, and they synced their identity management with Blizzard it got flagged.
I found ONE random thread on Reddit where a guy ran into the same problem and gave a link to directly log into their system.
Once logged in I got "Your username contains adult content and must be changed".
After changing it, and waiting 3 days, it 'synced' and my account was unbanned.
The whole thing was absolutely stupid, I had paid $60 and could not play any of their games.
It pretty much ruined the game for me, I haven't given them a dollar since.
I have a growing enthusiasm for companies that consistently care for users, and conversely a callous distain for companies that don't.
In fact, I can't really think of many businesses where I feel appreciated or cared for as a customer, but the few that I can are all small businesses and most of them are local to me.
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There's a reason pirate crews are hailed as heroes...and it's not the free software. Games legitimately work better when they are cracked almost 100% of the time.
Games stopping to provide self-hosted servers is also what made LAN parties increasingly difficult. Having to rent game servers, provide decent bandwidth and not being able to run third party tools (for recording scores or set modifiers) made it impossible to use modern games in a 50 people LAN party with a low budget.
I really can't blame them entirely. Perhaps you could blame companies for not using a hybrid model where players can host privately plus maintaining their public servers.
Why? Because in a similar vein to how social media needs to be moderated to prevent the bad apples from spoiling the bunch, games now need to be moderated to maintain reputation among the community. If a player hearing about CSGO for the first time has no idea what they're getting into finds only a public server running 24/7 CS_OFFICE with Warcraft Mods they might get a bad impression of what the game is. Having consistency in user experience is highly important, and public servers being maintained and moderated by the developer is probably the most important part of that. What about all those servers that have massive latency issues? That's a bad look on the game because most players won't recognize community run servers are the reason the game behaves buggy.
Do I dislike it? Yes. I think it has created irreparable harm to the ability for gaming communities to build organically but so long as central hubs like Reddit or Discord continue to pop up I figure they've just offloaded the community aspect to external sources. Is that better? I'm not sure. Partially yes. Losing contact with a friend because they stopped logging into your preferred server isn't really a thing if you're Discord friends or Steam friends.
Because they allow it
And it was great part of their cs 1.6 succesa
I bet devs are scares that too many people would play private servers
I suspect it's simply to control monetization and without the extra engineering cost of private server releases.
Some games managed to balance this quite well despite no self-hosted servers, for example BF4 which allows community managed "rented" servers.
But one thing to note though is that nearly all of them will very quickly adopt global blacklists with cheaters. So for a community BF server you'd hook your server to a global anti cheat database, and any bans from the server would end up on the global cheater blacklist. While the choice of using a global blacklist was of course up to the administrators, it wouldn't be very easy to find a server that didn't use this type of system if you happened to be blacklisted. So the community will invent exactly the same kind global bans that the game studio has. I never saw a problem with that (likely because I wasn't a false positive).
Generally speaking, if you are a suspected cheater, I can see why you would be barred from online-play.
There's always going to be false-positives though. How often that happens and what means of recourse one has (or should have) is IMO another discussion. And in this particular case, it seems Activision is doing pretty much all the wrong things(tm) though.
> even banned from the single player mode.
The fact that an account (and a server) is required to play a game you've bought in single-player mode is on another level outragious.
That itself should be illegal.
> Sorry, no refunds!
Again. Clearly this needs to be illegal.
If you take away a product you've allowed someone to "buy", then you've broken your end of the bargain.
Obviously doing it for no valid reason is a breach of contract, but I'm sure the legalese is pretty thick. No one "buys" anything obviously and the license agreement will clearly say you forfeit your license if you cheat. And here I'm pretty sure the legalese would say "Whether or not you actually cheated is up to us to decide so we define it as when our tools say you did".
So basically: you have a license, and that license is valid until their tools say it isn't.
Now, will such a license agreement hold up if tested legally? Maybe not. But it's likely what I clicked "Accept" on.
And best of all: you can only get yourself banned from individual servers.
[1]: https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/minecraft-1-19-1-pre...
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People gave up on software ownership when they stopped demanding the source code. The source code is the software, not the binary.
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In the end, there's nothing you can do but to put your money into games that respect you as a customer, which is very rare in AAA. These companies hate you. No one will listen to you and nothing will change, as it's extremely profitable. No one will regulate it. In 3 weeks, a dev there will notice that some updater code can break game files which flags people's accounts or something like that, it'll be quietly patched and everybody will forget about it.
> In the end, there's nothing you can do but to put your money into games that respect
Could always pick up a copy of IDA...
> In 3 weeks, a dev there will notice that some updater code can break game files which flags people's accounts or something like that, it'll be quietly patched and everybody will forget about it.
As a side note if you want some fun you should fire up wireshark when you're playing a game and watch how much "metadata" is sent from your PC to the game company. They know more about you than your doctor in some cases. EasyAntiCheat and Denuvo seem to be the worst offenders.
And they recently did the same with the Diablo 2 """remaster""", preventing multiplayer-heavy mods running in the regular online mode from operating !! (They are not allowed on battle.net, partially for anti-cheating reasons of course.)
Meanwhile other games still allow normal connection through IP/server name, provide a matchmaking server for players to organize their games, including modded ones, and provide an *optional* ban list for server owners using the official matchmaker to enforce on the worst offenders that in no way affects the singleplayer or the direct connection multiplayer experience !
Luckily i managed to get in touch with an understanding support rep who unbanned me, but not without a "stop modding if you don't wanna get banned again" message, which is absurd. I paid for the game and i should be able to do whatever i want with it within the confines of my own computer.
I'd had one genuine temp-ban beforehand, and my theory is over the years I got enough reports from opponents that they just built up into saying t'ra to my account and purchases. Yay, right?
I was only banned for a week, but I'm absolutely certain that there was nothing sketchy happening on my side. It's pretty annoying when they're charging money for time-limited events like Battle Passes, then you lose some of that time. Of course, it's a much bigger problem for the many who have been permabanned and don't know why. And it's still happening to others.
I would really like for this to end quietly with some better policies on account reviews, and more transparency on the findings of those reviews. I don't think that's too much to ask after being locked out of a $70 purchase. So far they have been completely silent on the matter. So the wiki stays up and we hope to someday get a word out of them.
Where that’s harder would be things like “our ML system thinks your input timing wasn’t humanly possible” and it’d be great if this forced companies to be more nuanced about how they handle things like that by doing things like requiring multiple independent checks.
My Google account was banned years ago, “computer says no” - all of my attempts to appeal failed. I at no point broke their terms. Nobody cares, I lost all of my data.
I hope that a class action prevails against Activision. And I hope that across our industry consumers receive more robust rights. Not being able to reach a human at your company quickly escalates from a being cost optimization, to outright fraud.
A related problem though is that game developers have a really hard time trusting anyone who says they've been banned unfairly. Almost everyone who gets banned for valid reasons will claim they did nothing wrong, etc. This is especially true for delayed bans, as the person doesn't even realize that their account got flagged to be banned weeks before the actual ban took place.
Given that problem, when a developer gets reports of users being banned unfairly, it's very easy to ignore them as salty cheaters. Ideally there is a way for them to know exactly what tripped the anti-cheat, but sometimes it's hard as the client has to covertly tell the server to ban itself.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/nfeupc/modern...
I emailed Activision support back and forth more than a dozen times explaining the issue, finally resulting in them saying they were escalating to another team. I sent them another four emails over three months, asking if there was any update, before asking if there was even anybody left alive at the company that my emails were reaching, with no response.
I really enjoyed the MW2019 campaign, but I won't be buying another game from Activision.
Not a good look for Activision, in my opinion.
I really enjoy Call of Duty. Got extremely good at it in high school, along with my group of friends. Since then, I've had to move away and CoD has kept us connected multiple times per week. It's been a very enjoyable game for well over a decade.
In the past few years, it's become extremely clear to me that something is seriously wrong with CoD - and perhaps Activision as a whole. I'm willing to explain much of it away as "it's hard to run a big game at scale", but some the bugs are just inexcusable. Activision offers little to no insight or recourse when things break.
I have 700 hours in MW2/WZ1. I can't even stand to play the new game. It's just too broken.
The yearly release cycle, which may be ending soon, leads to bugs that re-emerge each year and features that appear and disappear. Sure, the different studios which produce the games need some room to innovate, but the inconsistent base set of features is incredibly frustrating. CoD games are one of the games I play the most, with the other being a game which is the complete opposite, Old School RuneScape, that has been built on for ~20 years.
I play the current game MWII with friends a few hours a day most days of the week. Multiple times per session my game crashes at random, something I can’t remember with any other major games with a top of the line PC. Like many other pieces of software, chasing other revenue sources seems to have made the quality of the product take a nose dive, with consequences yet to be seen. This is disappointing to me as someone who enjoys playing the game with friends, who has competed in open-bracket events at major tournaments over a span of a few years, and worked directly with the professional league and teams (CDL and CWL) for analytics and software.
This has nothing to do with cosmetics and everything to do with customer standards. We're living in an age where the average customer has absolutely zero standards for the products they purchase, they simply do not care if the game barely works and crashes every 10 minutes, they will happily enjoy it and praise it anyway because they probably do not have the intellectual capacity to notice or care.
The newest Pokemon game is a prime example of this, it has no cosmetics, no microtransactions, nothing, yet it's so much more of a technical trainwreck than any CoD game, you really have to play it to believe it. It costs $60 and looks and runs worse than many PS2 games, but it sold tens of millions anyway because the people buying it are effectively zombies that only exist to obey corporations and will happily consume whatever is sold to them no questions asked.
I am big on boycotting and generally have avoided Activision games because of how they have milked things in the past. I'm incredibly frustrated with the state of the game, and disappointed I got talked into buying it by my buddies. Even worse, they just stockholm it saying things like "they just released it, you have to give it time". What? We played Halo 2 and Modern Warfare 2 at launch for a week straight and the only issue I can remember is server instability which was transient. I'm so tired of this public beta workflow, which if you are pushing a game per year you end up getting what, 9 months of _actual_ gameplay, and thats assuming the game doesnt need app-level modifications (vs fixing actual bugs) to smooth out the experience.
- Squad
- Escape from Tarkov
- Rising Storm 2: Vietnam
EFT requires a huge amount of free time, it feels like a day job. I would consider that before putting time on that game. Its nothing like COD.
I highly recommend single player mods/server emulators for EFT like Altered Escape, its a nice break from going up against meta geared super competitive players.
It was a neat idea where the clan was the focus and less so the game.
Similarly for me cod has kept me connected with friends and family across the world as we travelled and went our own ways. But all of us have actually moved onto mw2 by now and are enjoying it a great deal. (We don’t play Warzone and only play s&d or prison rescue). There are bugs here and there but not too bad overall. We are a mix of PC and Xbox players.
I would still recommend giving the game a try in a few “seasons” as it will likely stabilize further.
I've been SUPER confused as to what this "Modern Warfare 2" is that people are talking about, because I played that in, well, 2009. At least they called it "II" instead of "2" (as if anyone will notice this difference)... >_>
Though, MW2 (og) is where I got hooked on cod.