I reflect on university, and one of the most interesting projects I did was an 'essay on the history of <operating system of your choice>' as part of an OS course. I chose OS X (Snow Leopard) and digging into the history gave me fantastic insights into software development, Unix, and software commercialisation. Echo your Mr Kay's sentiments entirely.
I had an old colleague who had a favourite lunch room trick - if challenged to Scissors, Paper, Rock then he would win every single time. I presumed it was some kind of behavioural psychology trick, but it didn't occur to me it's just a pattern recognition. Or maybe it was both. I should get in touch again...
That split second before a throw resolves is a slice of time where you can observe what your opponent is throwing, and change yours at the very last moment.
I remember telling a friend I’d always beat him at the game, and I always did. I had no more skill than telling him I’d win each time and I pretty much always did especially if it was best of three
For a time, we did not have an “R” rating for video games and this sort of content called for this rating, which legislation said could not be given. Fortunately saner heads prevailed and they created an “R” rating for video games and this oddity went away.
I feel like far too much attention is given to `[[]] * n`. In the grand scheme of things, no serious python programmer is using multiply on a sequence outside of the string construction convenience.
It's also remarkebly easy to diagnose once you see the unexpected behaviour, so anyone asking for help is going to be instantly told not to do it and use a comprehension instead.
I'm sure there are plenty of other pitfalls in other languages, though I concede this one is especially unintuitive to a new person.
- Drawn out "oiiiiiii" and a pointed finger when someone makes a witty remark or has some kind of success. As in, "oiiii, nice one".
- "OI!" as a generic "hey!" shouted at someone to get their attention in the street.
- "oi?" with an upwards inflection to express disbelief
- Getting your friend's attention, usually followed by an insulting term like 'dickhead'. As in, "oi dickhead, watch out" when someone is trying to pass them on the street.
That's very interesting - the Chinese "oi" has pretty much exactly the same usages, down to the little details! (I'm most familiar with the Cantonese 喂 wai2, though it's not my first language)
I wonder if that suggests this is one of those universal pre-linguistic words, like "huh" [1]. That feels especially believable given the utter simplicity of the mouth sound. It's almost just a yell, in the same way that "huh" is almost just an outbreath.
The only real solution to the cheating problem would be to get rid of automated matching systems and go back to moderated gaming rooms where there is always a human who can decide if they think someone is cheating and boot them.
You do lose a lot of features that way though, such as a reliable global ranking, since it would be easy to create a room with only your friends and allow eachother to rank up quickly.
It's also a huge coordination issue if you want to arrange a game of 50-100 players who aren't all total strangers to eachother.
But the alternative seems to be in stripping the ancient practice of gaming of its social functions and turning it into a faceless slot machine where the only goal is to win enough times to increase a mostly meaningless number on a screen.
I wonder how a controller can viably be used to cheat, and if so, how would rigging an official controller not have the same effect. Additionally, single player games don't have a cheating problem.
Look up Xim, it gives an unfair advantage to console players by allowing a mouse and keyboard input when the developer hasn’t intended so (official APIs exist if they do). Cronus is also especially bad.
It also allows you to effectively nullify recoil through custom scripts uploaded to it. It’s everywhere in multiplayer PvP games on console.
Doesn't the Adaptive Controller basically give you the same thing?
If people want to plug random usb controllers, this doesn't stop them. It just means that Microsoft gets to charge you for the adaptor rather than a 3rd party.
> It also allows you to effectively nullify recoil through custom scripts uploaded to it.
Valve seems to have done a pretty good job dealing with this in their games. Surely there exist more sophisticated anti-cheat mechanisms than "just ban third-party accessories"?
Valve's anticheat is atrocious, Counter-Strike is an absolute cesspool (so much that they've had to separate players who bought the game from players who play the free version), and Team Fortress 2 has had more bots than players for like 10 years now.
This seems like the kind of thing that is repeated so much because some people want to believe it, and most of the time I bet it's people who haven't played a Valve multiplayer game ever.
To be fair -- it's been a couple of years since I played Valve multiplayer games regularly. Has cheating increased at a high rate in the past, say, 3-4 years?
I will say, I think the biggest problem contributing to high levels of cheating is the move away from dedicated servers. I actually find that VAC is historically very effective at catching cheaters, but with a necessary lag between detection and bans -- and that lag used to be handled by server admins.
I'm sure somebody will design the exact same thing with an official controller stripped out with the buttons remapped into a mouse and keyboard with a custom pcb.
There's no way to prevent that from happening with software changes.
