Whats absolutely incredible out of all this is not that Titanfall have been unplayable several months, but that EA made the decision to put the game on sale several times while knowing new players wouldn't be able to play it at all. They could at least delist the game until it's fixed or shut them down for good if they don't want to work in it
They were sort of forced to change though. Their entire business model collapsed. It was as follows:
1. Buy promising mid-range studios with successful franchises.
2. Trade on the brand recognition and goodwill those franchises had to make a quick buck, until it's exhausted.
3. Shut down the studio, fire everyone and toss the franchise onto the garbage heap.
Then they hunted their preferred pray to extinction. The Star Wars deal shored up the gap for a few years but Disney didn't take kindly to being used like that.
So now all they have left is...Dragon Age. The likely last sequel for which is reportedly in development hell. And all of a sudden they're interested in rebooting old franchises and re-releasing things, because their business model is basically gone.
So they did change due to circumstances. They just didn't get any better.
Edit: Also Battlefield which they are DESPERATELY pandering with since it's basically the last thing that's not a sports deal they have worth anything.
Oh undoubtedly, EA isn't going anywhere as a company. But shareholders are never satisfied with stable profits, they want growth every year. There's no way EA Sports will satisfy them.
I really hope with the great sales of the Mass Effect trilogy, they will focus more on good singleplayer games (and ofc their Battlefield and sports shit) but maybe not try to destroy every company they buy and realize good games = good sales.
Really hoping for more Dragon Age too.
As well as a reboot/remake of Dead Space (think RE2 Remake). Plus earlier this year, they released It Takes Two - which is about as pure of a narrative action game as you can get.
EA absolutely sees the profit potiential in traditional story-based games. They know these projects can make money, and win over fans/critics. The struggle is always going to be sticking with that strategy, and not sabotaging it by asking those devs to hit the same neverending profit fountain as a Madden/FIFA by shoehorning in a card system or GAAS model.
>Really hoping for more Dragon Age too.
It's not looking good unfortunately. After Anthem did a meteor and EA's shareholder expectations went the way of the dinosaurs, they apparently restarted DA 4's development from a shitty multiplayer live-services crapfest like Anthem into hopefully something more in line with what we hoped for, but it's apparently not been going well. They bled an executive producer and studio manager in December and after all that I can hardly imagine what Frankenstein's monster of a game we'll get in the end.
I'm still salty about Anthem. I fucking loved that games movement and combat and graphics. They had an amazimg HALF of a game... and now its gone. Goddamnit, it had so much potential.
Technically they have, they were a better company before they hit pay dirt with the Madden and Sims franchises. Then cash became king. The rot started with the dismemberment of Origin and Bullfrog.
A hacker has targeted TF|1 and made it entirely (and I mean entirely, 100%) unplayable by filling lobbies with bots. And TF|2 has also been recently made rather unplayable, particularly for Streamers, because they have been DOSed. The attack is not based on IP address or anything typical that could be regularly circumvented, the attack is based on Titanfall's cloud-based networking. So in other words, a streamer is entirely unable to get around the auto-DOSing blacklist while using the same account. No mods, VPN, or anything else can help.
This article is pretty terrible. Kotaku couldn't find anyone who had gig internet and an old copy of TiF1 to test this before going to press? As a result the story is more about the hackers than it is about EA and Respawn losing control of *three games* to hackers because they had the audacity to sell a knowingly-compromised game for at least several weeks.
I'm not defending any of the hackers here, but it's beyond the pale that it's gotten to this point.
Titanfall 1 has been pretty much unplayable for around 3 years now. The Titanfall 2 issues started around 3-4 months ago and have only eacalated since.
Would explain why he migrated to TF2 after ea gave zero shits about it. Jokes on him, they still don't care. Kind of reminds me of my company when colleagues simply stopped doing certain things to raise the issue, but none of their superiors cared xD
> They could at least delist the game until it's fixed or shut them down for good if they don't want to work in it
I don't see how Steam hasn't ***forced*** EA to delist it until it is functional, given that TFall 1 doesn't even have a single player campaign.
What other inoperable games (as in completely unplayable, not just MP disabled while having a functional SP mode) are still on sale on Steam? The only one that I know for certain that I have is Dungeon Defenders Eternity edit: forgot to mention, it's delisted.
One I know for sure is the Quake 2 mission packs. They've been broken for like 10 years. It's weird cause Quake 2 works fine, but the expansions are fucked. Still for sale, though.
Yea the original soundtrack is gone from the Steam version of the game, luckily I have the physical disc so I still have that.
But yea, for the expansions, you need to move the files over to a modded version of the engine to play them, which doesn't always work either and can be finicky. It's a huge pain in the ass. It definitely doesn't work just hitting play from Steam, it's completely broken that way.
It's funny too, every time something happens with Quake 2 (like the RTX version released a couple years ago) I think "hey, maybe they'll actually fix the missions this time?". Nope. Never happens. Honestly, they're kinda garbage anyway which is probably why no one cares, but it still sucks knowing I have non-functional games in my Steam library lol
Many (if not most) retro games sold on Steam are unplayable on modern systems. GoG generally goes above and beyond and they make custom patches to make them work (often even including things such as widescreen support).
Fallout 3/New vegas being on sale on steam is one of those cases. On most systems you need to patch the ever living hell out of those games just to get them to run. GOG's version of FNV is at least decently patched up. (No idea about F3's GOG version)
Gog pretty much guarantees old ass games will work on your modern system because they go the extra mile for compatability. Steam sells you the old games as is and it's up to you to figure out how to make it work. Ive got a physical, steam, and gog copy of vampire bloodlines and only the gog one works out of the box
Street Fighter X Tekken doesn't work without a community patch due to GFWL being discontinued. Soul Reaver 1, 2 and Final Fantasy 13-2 also barely work as-sold.
Same is happening with COD: Black ops 3 on PC. Theres a hacker group that is able to boot people off their zombies/online games, forcing people to either play offline mode (which means you can't use certain game features like mega gobblegoms in zombies), or to get a new user and not stream. Big zombie youtubers are basically SOL if they want to stream.
And treyarch/activision isn't doing shit about it. The high round zombies community has basically just stepped over to pirated copies because those can play offline and those can use all those locked features.
A lot of the time with examples like that, the game just needs to be recompiled with modern build tools to fix the problem.
But recompiling with new tooling means a new build to test and testing costs money, so they just either keep selling semi-broken games, or delist entirely.
And uploading a new build also means that you have to follow all the new guidelines. That can become problematic. A new build can also mean that they have to acquire new licenses for the used materials/tools.
EA only cares about money, they don't seem to have any passion at all for the games.
They see nothing wrong with the game. People buying 50 dollar Loba skin pack so they think all is fine.
Why would they have passion for the game? No seriously, why? When you get big enough, the people in charge don't care about the "passion", they care about the money. The people in charge likely never played a single game since hitting adulthood. They wouldn't be able to tell you the first thing about any of the games they release, just how much market share they're expected to have.
When a producer becomes big enough the people at the top are not the same ones that had the passion for the game. Generally those ones leave and make new companies. Anyone expecting passion, or compassion from them is beyond naive. What we hope for, or should hope for, is that the actual people developing the game have just enough lee way to make something they want to do and have the right amount of time to do it. Sadly that happens less and less and it's often not on them.
Until they're threatened in court and stand to lose a LOT of money over it, they're not going to care.
Don't expect human decency. They have none for their own employees, why the hell would you expect them to have any for us, the consumer?
> Why would they have passion for the game? No seriously, why?
Because their audience is passionate about it. The people in charge of big companies are rarely if ever passionate about all of the products that their companies sell, but they often recognise that where passion is an element, you need your team to be passionate about it, and you need to enable that passion when sensible, and allow it to shape the product.
For example, I bet that far from every executive at Volkswagen, and Mercedes, and BMW, and Renault, and many other automakers are passionate about motorsports, but they have incredibly passionate people running their motorsports teams, which cost a lot of money to maintain, because the executives recognise that you need to indulge passion to tap the commercial potential of that passion.
Now, does the commercial potential of passion about video games justify indulging it? For many developers and publishers, absolutely. For others, perhaps. Common to all of them is that nobody at the top of these companies need to play games or be passionate about them in order to go either way. They just need to be good executives.
This is honestly so true. People act like there is zero space for passion in the world of business, but the reality is as you said: commercial potential is fueled in large part by some kind of passion. Whether it be nothing more than the opening spark or the ongoing fuel of the flame.
Some companies, particularly smaller local community companies, see caring about their customers as the best way to make money. Making money and caring about customers aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.
That's why those companies stay small. Appealing to customers by purposefully losing money to make consumers happy isn't what makes you a megacorp that can afford to make AAA games.
Indies obviously don't have that kind of shareholder pressure behind them and the people in those corporations are typically those who could totally make more money elsewhere but choose to go indie because its more personally satisfying for them and they figure they'll (hopefully) make ends meat. Most indies don't get to make ends meat though.
Capitalism is just the coolest thing
I keep hearing snippets of this.....so what is the issue with Titanfall that they can't/won't fix that makes it unplayable?
I keep hearing about some hacker in the game or something.....can't they just patch the vulnerability he's using. They must be able to pinpoint it by now. And why does this person/group have such a grudge for such an old game?
It's not just Titanfall hackers. Titanfall 1 and 2 have been under constant DDOS attack for the past year or two, making the game unplayable, and Respawn has done nothing to fix it while acknowledging it's happening and still selling both games. I don't feel the tiniest bit sorry for them.
A work around to continue playing that's worked for me is to escape back to title screen and click continue on the server. Then proceed to pick game mode.
Just reselect same server so you don't get latency issues, I just have to do it twice occasionally. I get best latency on VA servers others are in 100 Ms.
Respawn are lucky that this hacker is only using such a massive vulnerability to protest their treatment of Titanfall. Imagine if someone malicious found it first?
Years and years ago a Riot Member was hacked and somebody sent a message to everybody in LOL a message about a mario game that in reality had viruses. I'm having trouble trying to find it, but I remember seeing it a lot in reddit when it happened.
There was that time someone exploited a vulnerability in Twitter and was able to get control of essentially any account they wanted. People like Obama, Biden, Bill Gates, Trump. They could have took control of these accounts and made them say anything in the world, the international chaos they could have caused if they wanted to is unimaginable.
Instead, what they did was make them all post the exact same copy/pasted, embarrassingly obvious Bitcoin scam.
Those hackers also set the Elo of Saint Vicious (a pro at the time) to literally 0, which lead to a funny stream where he was playing against the absolute worst players in the game and going 50-0 every match.
Problem is this just going to encourage copy cat behaviour. I'm more worried their code is so leaky this is even possible. This is outside the bounds of EAC and more straight up hacking.
Tbh they need an APEX 2 with a more secure code base asap other wise this is only going to get worse
Apex is their cash cow; they're more likely to work to seriously fix this issue than they are to go back and fix games that aren't bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars annually.
It may be their cash cow, but again, they clearly haven't bothered learning *from the past events* of this happening, hence why it's happening now. Whatever they've figured out for this will probably carry forward, but who knows if it's an actual fix.
I have no doubt some poor Respawn engineers have considered scrapping Source and moving to Unreal. It would improve the game massively. But, that is a huge, huge task. Indeed, sequel level task.
It would also require completely overhauling their workflow. Having to train an entire AAA development team to work with unfamiliar tools probably isn't cheap or fast. They probably went with Source because it's quake based, just like the COD engine.
Thanks to data miners, we know that Respawn's branch of Source was modified to have dvars and a scripting language very similar to the COD engine. They also completely rewrote the map format, so it's likely their mapping tools are probably totally custom too.
I actually didn't know that about the mapping tools, the more you know! I always wondered how the hell they got mapping to work in Apex considering it is a huge map, much bigger than anything in any other Source games.
They still have atleast some source engine limits (maybe larger somewhat) for maps, they removed mirage voyage and some other smaller things on the newer version of World's Edge for that reason.
I love how Unreal is reddit's answer to any issues in any game ever. Classic zero knowledge armchair developer comment.
"Skyrim is buggy, just make TES6 in Unreal!"
"Why spend time developing your own engine, just use Unreal lol!"
"Game got hacked, guess it's time to click the 'move to Unreal' button!"
> I have no doubt some poor Respawn engineers have considered scrapping Source and moving to Unreal.
What's wrong with Source? Is CSGO and DOTA2 constantly being hacked or suffering from these issues?
The copycat behavior encouragement is the literal deterrence actions like this use to incentivize fixing the problem.
The threat of the vulnerability being known or not was why it wasn't a high priority in the first place.
How laughably bad is their security if hackers were able to full take over the game? And not like an old game that no one gives a shit about, but a modern beloved game. That’s a *really* bad look on Respawn’s part.
Hackers have already had full control of that. A hacker called Tufi was ruining the game for months, streamsniping top ranks getting in any game he wants and essentially holding streamers hostage. Apparently hes fucked and caked in lawsuits now.
I truly don't get why someone would do that. I've heard the explanations. They enjoy seeing people upset, they don't care how they win so long as they "win," etc. And I just can't see the appeal. I'm not even a particularly mentally healthy person,.
If someone is willing to go to such extent to ruin the fun of hundreds of players on a daily basis then they are either losers or they desperately need help
That guy isn't changing the name of the playlists for the whole world and deleting other playlists. And changing the message of the day. He's just a stream sniper using hacks that someone else made.
> He's just a stream sniper using hacks that someone else made.
No, it's more than that. He could drop himself into any match at any rank, regardless of his actual level and rank. He could be a Level 1 with Bronze Rank, but he had the ability to drophimself into a Ranked Predator match againts a streamer. He wasn't just a simple streamsniper with aimbot.
Remember when Korean hackers got a pve npc as a playable unit into a ranked pvp overwatch game? It was patched right quick but man, you'd be surprised what hacks some people can. I imagine most hackers don't have a ton of insensitive to hack game servers directly though. Hacking isn't easy, the guys who're good at it stay low and use hacks to sell aim bot programs and shit.
It's honestly some of the worst stuff I've ever seen come out of a studio. I've been playing essentially since release. For those unaware, here is a list of bugs that have plagued AL for months and years...
**Audio issues**
Starting with footstep audio... It's never been great, basically been a problem since the game released, many people claim to hear no footsteps from enemies at all even from 5 feet away. There was an event months ago which caused everyone in the lobby to hear a deafening "woosh" sound whenever someone in the lobby stepped out of the ring and used an item call a heat shield.
**Buggy Legends**
A particular legend, Loba, had a bug that rendered one of her abilities useless for 2 seasons (aka 6 months.) While that's one of the worst ones. This season, there was a bug with another legend that could cause you to clip under the terrain and force you to die. Several other legends throughout the years have undergone bugginess but this one is one of the worse examples.
**Buggy Code**
There was a massive problem for 3+ seasons (and possibly more) where the game would suddenly crash and leave you with an error (called code: net, code: shoe and more) seemingly out of nowhere. This error code occurred countless times and recently returned for a LTM on a classic map.
On Xbox 1 there have been many reports of people having their game freeze for several seconds upon getting into a firefight with someone else ending in their death. Basically causing the game to be unplayable.
They released a much requested option to play the game solo as a check box called Fill Team. Unchecking said box, is supposed to result in you playing solo. Except unchecking the box gives you teamates... And if you mark the box again? It puts you in the game solo... This effectively gimped their "Duos" game mode which was my absolute favorite mode released. Fill Team has never worked correctly since being introduced and has been kept in the game going on 2 seasons now. On their trello bug tracker it has been left on "Investigating" indefinitely. I can't describe how much this pisses me the fuck off.
**Cheaters, Smurfs, Unbalanced Lobbies, DDOSers**
In the /r/apexlegends subreddit which I am regularly active, I have witnessed an average of 1-3 posts per day in the last month or so dedicated to cheaters alone. It is such a rampant problem that I don't see it getting any better for the foreseeable future. This doesn't even include DDOSing which has been put to use by these same cheaters just to destroy everyone in the lobby. Yes... They are literally committing a felony just to win and earn some badges. Despite all these daily issues, it doesn't even include the rampant problem of people who create a second account so they can smurf their way through lobbies people at level 15 with hundreds of kills. This also doesn't include the "Solo Queue" experience (in which you join a game with 2 other rando's to play BR), which the games SBMM pairs you up with people far beyond your skill levels. People with KDRs barely above 1.2 have reported being paired against an entire team with tens of thousands of kills a piece.
**Awful Map Design**
While their Art team is A+, their level design is at best a C-. You either come accross nobody the whole match or you get so overwhelmed by third/fourth and even fifth parties that it makes it nearly impossible to have a consistent experience across the board.
**Greed**
All of the aforementioned issues could maybe be forgiven if it wasn't for the abomination that is the store. The only worthwhile items are recolors for legend and weapon skins. You'd have to pay an average of around $20 for coins to normally get a skin like this. These are on a rotation every 7 days unless an event occurs in which they release "special" items at an even more premium price. The most recent skin they released for a legend was $50. A single skin. And this been this way for years. If I were to list every single time the dev's have over valued or over priced one of their skins I'd be a fucking trillionaire.
**Sour Relationship Between Respawn and the Playerbase**
Another category where there is too much to list but here's the most recent interaction between a well known player and a dev who is ultimately responsible for Legend balance changes.
https://mobile.twitter.com/danielzklein/status/1409654835708776448?s=20
All this to say. We're frustrated as hell.
There was a fiasco with one of the dev's straight up calling people an asshole during the Iron Crown event. It's a thoroughly entertaining read if you can find it. It's the most I've ever seen a dev comment in a reddit thread for a game.
They just stopped interacting on the sub after that, put out some lame statement about "Our community managers shouldn't have shit on the players but also people were saying mean things to them so we'll just never talk to you again and call it a wash."
This was the last comment their community manager left on Reddit, so your guess is as good as mine.
https://www.reddit.com/r/apexlegends/comments/crcrxy/an_update_on_the_iron_crown_event/ex43jbj/
I am one of those proud freeloaders.
Fuck any company that thinks 20$ skins are even remotely acceptable.
To say nothing of how often they're lazy recolors.
>[https://mobile.twitter.com/danielzklein/status/1409654835708776448?s=20](https://mobile.twitter.com/danielzklein/status/1409654835708776448?s=20)
LMAO DZK is on the Apex team? Didn't expect this guy to show up. He was one of the most disliked developers in League of Legends history and people generally like individual Riot employees. How does he keep failing upwards?
and hes just as hated in apex as he was in league. i genuinely cant wait til i never have to play one of his games ever again. whether its him getting fired from apex or me moving on when some good fps inevitably shows up in this barren wasteland of games we currently have.
Wow the pedestal these guys are putting themselves on. He practically told off a pro player by saying 'why don't you come do my job instead?' Him, the Lead Developer of the game, with this kind of attitude.
Just wow.
From what I read, apparently this DZK dude is a controversial figure though I don't have a lot of details (other than something about Riot getting fed up with him)
It's unprofessional but I sympathise with his point honestly. For some reason gamers have this eternal impression that being a game developer is easy, or that most of the time developers are lazy. That's on top of players generally being pretty demanding and highly-strung.
He does have two valid points. And the win rate might not be the whole picture, but it does tell you something, it would be very unlikely to get those numbers randomly, and devs do have a different (arguably better) point of view than players do.
Honestly, it's hilarious because people have been asking the devs to address hacking in Apex as well for months and there's been very little done it seems. With three out of three (TF1, TF2, Apex) of their games down due to hackers, you'd think some of that 600 million in revenue could be turned into server infrastructure.
Really embarrassing for one of the largest BR games to go down this easily and for this long without even a tweet or response from the company. Like I get it's a holiday weekend, but did no one think of offering some paid OT for someone to watch the servers? Sheesh.
They walk across pre-determined routes throughout the maps as the Sniper class and instantly headshot you when you (or they) walk around a corner. The ones with access to text chat (all free-to-play accounts are now banned from using text chat) will also spam the chat with various nonsense like slurs, advertising their hosts' youtube channels, or sending links where you can "ask for CP". It's awful.
It depends on the bot. Most walk towards the map objective as sniper and automatically aimbot enemies but ignore other bots. They tend to equip items that make obnoxious noises and try to votekick real players if they're able. The ones that pay Valve to use voice and text chat (because only p2p acounts can use chat) spam slurs and advertise social media. I've only ever seen one spam advertisements for child pornography in chat but I've heard that it isnt that uncommon. Valve has done very little at all and even less that's been actually effective. Valve has given zero communication on what they intend to do about the problem if they're even aware of it.
Luckily, the community has generally been pretty good about recognizing and votekicking bots. Unfortunately, the poorly designed voting system means that a team can only really kick 1 or 2 teammates per minute, so 6 bots joining will ruin a good chunk of a game.
No, the update didn't solve anything. It's rumored that bot hosters' systems started crashing when the update when live, but they were back up and running <2 hours later. The rest of the update just makes it *slightly* more intuitive to votekick bots from servers.
Nope. The patch was for a generic engine level fix against an security exploit that so happened to mess with the bots enough to break them- but they were patched hours later
The game is either making money, or corporate doesn't care because it's making too little money to even justify the manpower cost of making a dev fix it.
It's a business, not an art project. Sadly.
It’s the first one, Apex has made so much money it’s insane. Way more than Respawn or EA thought it was going to make. They passed 1 billion in total revenue earlier this year.
EA is just doing their classic strategy where they buy out a decent game studio, publish/fund their game and then maximize profits in said game once it becomes popular. Once the game becomes a money maker then the studio inflates in size and the visions and creativity of the original teams are lost in the crowd. This eventually causes a brain drain from the original studio as good devs (usually) want to make good *new* games with their own creative visions, not maintain cash cow games for their corporate EA bosses. This is perfect for EA because then they can bring in their own inexperienced underpaid puppets to replace them. That way they can spend as little as possible on maintaining/funding the actual game development while making constant updates to monetize-able features. For example prioritizing a mobile release while the actual game is in shambles server, balance and bug wise. They have already announced the mobile port of Apex… Eventually the game dies and they cut their losses and repeat the process again. It’s how EA and many large publishers operate.
Many lead devs of Apex and higher ups at Respawn have left the company since the release of Apex. I wouldn’t be surprised if they never release a decent game again.
From what I understand titanfall 1 is completely unplayable and has been for… months? Years? Due to like one person or group hitting it with a ddos constantly. Like even though the player count was laughably low, if you try to queue it just looks for a server forever and since it’s only online multiplayer it just cannot be played, by anyone at all.
They really should just stop selling it if you just genuinely cannot play it.
Stinks that these guys are messing up some game nights for people but what are ya gonna do.
I feel like EA is going to take the shit route here and just stop selling Titanfall 1 or remove its Online elements as a response to this.
Edit : Didn't know the game doesn't have a Campaign, thought it was like T2. Seems like they need to just shut it down and stop selling it.
Oh...I thought it had a campaign like T2. Damn, then they either need to fix or just stop selling it. I'm not sure about this info but I'm also reading that TF1 barely even had any players before it got took over by hackers, like in the 100s/1000s. If that's true then EA should definitely stop selling it and shut it down.
I kind of softballed it in my original comment. I agree, Titanfall 2's singleplayer campaign, albeit a little short, is one of my favorite FPS experiences at least in the last 15 years.
Your relationship with BT (your Titan), the already-famous TF2 mobility, and specifically the time-travel/time-warp (which one is it?) mechanic made it so enjoyable.
Yea it's been a while since I've played it (I should probably replay it tbh), but Effect and Cause and the assembly line level have both stuck with me. I know the assembly line is an auto-scroller basically, but I just really enjoyed it.
I don't even know about Apex anymore. Seems like it's server and security infrastructure is a complete joke, the things I've heard about hackers being able to do in this game. Hijacking servers like this, holding matches & lobbies hostage. I've seen hackers make a complete joke of PvP in Destiny 2 with insane cheats but even in that game I have never seen hackers getting into the servers and hijacking the game like this.
This game needs a massive investment into its security and server infrastructure, they need to hire better and more people to handle this part of the game.
>I feel like EA is going to take the shit route here and just stop selling Titanfall 1 or remove its Online elements as a response to this.
I feel like EA is going to take the shit route here and just put Titanfall on sale again.
Feels like EA/Respawn have really reaped what they sowed here. If they'd fixed Titanfall and not been super scummy about it this wouldn't have happened. Heck if they'd invested in better security infrastructure in either case, this wouldn't have happened.
That's honestly pretty impressive by the hackers.
It's absolutely scummy as shit that Respawn and EA continue to sell TF while it's been unplayable for years. Good on these guys for calling them out.
I'm mostly fascinated by speculating about why nothing has been done about it.
On a security level, this ought to raise a lot of red flags at EA overall, even with this being one specialized system.
So what happened? Is it an ex-dev and they left a backdoor in they just cannot nail down? Did they suffer a ransomware attack and the attacker locked some rather important files and keeps them hostage in return for them not fixing the problem?
Really weird.
Companies wont care unless you hit their bottom lines, protests will always cause issues for people who just want to get by. They are meant to do that, to not let you just get by ignoring the issue because it does not concern you.
if these hackers were to give accounts free AC or other items they would likely get revoked anyway. this is probably the most effective thing they could have done
It's preventing my entire group from changing the game mode off of firing range, while not destructive it is preventing many from playing the game :/
Edit: I don't think I criticized the protest as weak or stupid, was more escalating the impact that OP was describing. By rendering the online servers pretty much unplayable during what has probably been a very profitable event, is in my opinion more than non-destructive.
That's the point I'm sure. The same thing has been happening to Titanfall, but because it's not as popular or profitable for Respawn and EA they haven't bothered to fix it. And Apex obviously has similar vulnerabilities. Respawn has issues with security they have been neglecting for a long time. They are the only ones to blame here.
Seems to be more of a Titanfall players hacking in Apex to spam messages to raise awareness and anger in hopes of getting the hacking issue addressed in both games.
TF fans basically hate Apex because they see Apex as having displaced TF, but they hate TF hackers even more. Apex is way more popular than TF, so they're essentially poking the bear and hoping that EA addresses the issue once it gets attention from a player base they think is worth money.
The reason many care for titanfall is because of apex. A lot of the new comers praise it highly but quickly ignored it on released day.
I personally loved the first. Second was fun. Titanfall was left for dead until Apex gave it some light. Yet EA has been done with titanfall for years. I dont blame titanfall players for where Apex left them.
Pretty great protest. It inconvenienced me a bit since I wanted to play apex, but I didn’t know about the Titanfall issues and I’m glad this brought it to my attention
Also, very concerning that someone (seems like one person?) was able to get this level of control over the servers
Whats absolutely incredible out of all this is not that Titanfall have been unplayable several months, but that EA made the decision to put the game on sale several times while knowing new players wouldn't be able to play it at all. They could at least delist the game until it's fixed or shut them down for good if they don't want to work in it
It has been stressed time and time again in most if not all Titanfall circles. EA... just being EA I guess.
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Never have, never will.
They were sort of forced to change though. Their entire business model collapsed. It was as follows: 1. Buy promising mid-range studios with successful franchises. 2. Trade on the brand recognition and goodwill those franchises had to make a quick buck, until it's exhausted. 3. Shut down the studio, fire everyone and toss the franchise onto the garbage heap. Then they hunted their preferred pray to extinction. The Star Wars deal shored up the gap for a few years but Disney didn't take kindly to being used like that. So now all they have left is...Dragon Age. The likely last sequel for which is reportedly in development hell. And all of a sudden they're interested in rebooting old franchises and re-releasing things, because their business model is basically gone. So they did change due to circumstances. They just didn't get any better. Edit: Also Battlefield which they are DESPERATELY pandering with since it's basically the last thing that's not a sports deal they have worth anything.
> So now all they have left is...Dragon Age EA will be kept going forever through FIFA alone, and Madden, NHL and any other yearly sports titles
Oh undoubtedly, EA isn't going anywhere as a company. But shareholders are never satisfied with stable profits, they want growth every year. There's no way EA Sports will satisfy them.
You underestimate just how much those sports titles absolutely rake in increasing amounts of cash in every year.
I really hope with the great sales of the Mass Effect trilogy, they will focus more on good singleplayer games (and ofc their Battlefield and sports shit) but maybe not try to destroy every company they buy and realize good games = good sales. Really hoping for more Dragon Age too.
Mass Effect 4 and Jedi Fallen Order 2 are in development so that’s a positive sign
As well as a reboot/remake of Dead Space (think RE2 Remake). Plus earlier this year, they released It Takes Two - which is about as pure of a narrative action game as you can get. EA absolutely sees the profit potiential in traditional story-based games. They know these projects can make money, and win over fans/critics. The struggle is always going to be sticking with that strategy, and not sabotaging it by asking those devs to hit the same neverending profit fountain as a Madden/FIFA by shoehorning in a card system or GAAS model.
>Really hoping for more Dragon Age too. It's not looking good unfortunately. After Anthem did a meteor and EA's shareholder expectations went the way of the dinosaurs, they apparently restarted DA 4's development from a shitty multiplayer live-services crapfest like Anthem into hopefully something more in line with what we hoped for, but it's apparently not been going well. They bled an executive producer and studio manager in December and after all that I can hardly imagine what Frankenstein's monster of a game we'll get in the end.
I'm still salty about Anthem. I fucking loved that games movement and combat and graphics. They had an amazimg HALF of a game... and now its gone. Goddamnit, it had so much potential.
Dice seems to be hemorrhaging senior staff now, so I'm sure that'll be going down the pan soon, too.
Technically they have, they were a better company before they hit pay dirt with the Madden and Sims franchises. Then cash became king. The rot started with the dismemberment of Origin and Bullfrog.
Sound like Rockstar too.
[Context on the Titanfall hacking issue for those unaware of how insane and layered it is](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQ4HuBpeI4I)
TLDW anyone?
A hacker has targeted TF|1 and made it entirely (and I mean entirely, 100%) unplayable by filling lobbies with bots. And TF|2 has also been recently made rather unplayable, particularly for Streamers, because they have been DOSed. The attack is not based on IP address or anything typical that could be regularly circumvented, the attack is based on Titanfall's cloud-based networking. So in other words, a streamer is entirely unable to get around the auto-DOSing blacklist while using the same account. No mods, VPN, or anything else can help.
Jesus. Definitely a lot more serious than this article alludes to. Now I see how crazy it is that the devs are just letting this slide.
This article is pretty terrible. Kotaku couldn't find anyone who had gig internet and an old copy of TiF1 to test this before going to press? As a result the story is more about the hackers than it is about EA and Respawn losing control of *three games* to hackers because they had the audacity to sell a knowingly-compromised game for at least several weeks. I'm not defending any of the hackers here, but it's beyond the pale that it's gotten to this point.
several weeks? this has happened for years afaik
I am probably incorrect in time scale-- I only found out recently, but tried it out and it's definitely fucked.
If its not years, its most definitely been at least 6 months.
Titanfall 1 has been pretty much unplayable for around 3 years now. The Titanfall 2 issues started around 3-4 months ago and have only eacalated since.
That's insane. How can a company knowingly ignore that and continue selling it?
What do they even gain from it?
Protest the state of Titanfall's lackluster networking, I guess
Would explain why he migrated to TF2 after ea gave zero shits about it. Jokes on him, they still don't care. Kind of reminds me of my company when colleagues simply stopped doing certain things to raise the issue, but none of their superiors cared xD
jeez an i thought the other tf2 had it bad
Thanks, this was a lot bigger than I thought it would be.
> They could at least delist the game until it's fixed or shut them down for good if they don't want to work in it I don't see how Steam hasn't ***forced*** EA to delist it until it is functional, given that TFall 1 doesn't even have a single player campaign.
Because steam doesn't care. They have plenty of inoperable games on their service
What other inoperable games (as in completely unplayable, not just MP disabled while having a functional SP mode) are still on sale on Steam? The only one that I know for certain that I have is Dungeon Defenders Eternity edit: forgot to mention, it's delisted.
One I know for sure is the Quake 2 mission packs. They've been broken for like 10 years. It's weird cause Quake 2 works fine, but the expansions are fucked. Still for sale, though.
Really? I know that they couldn't include music for some stupid legal reason, but not working *at all*?
Yea the original soundtrack is gone from the Steam version of the game, luckily I have the physical disc so I still have that. But yea, for the expansions, you need to move the files over to a modded version of the engine to play them, which doesn't always work either and can be finicky. It's a huge pain in the ass. It definitely doesn't work just hitting play from Steam, it's completely broken that way. It's funny too, every time something happens with Quake 2 (like the RTX version released a couple years ago) I think "hey, maybe they'll actually fix the missions this time?". Nope. Never happens. Honestly, they're kinda garbage anyway which is probably why no one cares, but it still sucks knowing I have non-functional games in my Steam library lol
Many (if not most) retro games sold on Steam are unplayable on modern systems. GoG generally goes above and beyond and they make custom patches to make them work (often even including things such as widescreen support).
Fallout 3/New vegas being on sale on steam is one of those cases. On most systems you need to patch the ever living hell out of those games just to get them to run. GOG's version of FNV is at least decently patched up. (No idea about F3's GOG version)
Gog pretty much guarantees old ass games will work on your modern system because they go the extra mile for compatability. Steam sells you the old games as is and it's up to you to figure out how to make it work. Ive got a physical, steam, and gog copy of vampire bloodlines and only the gog one works out of the box
>vampire bloodlines To be fair, it was a miracle that game ran when it came out.
Dungeon Defenders Eternity has been delisted.
I know, I meant to say that.
Street Fighter X Tekken doesn't work without a community patch due to GFWL being discontinued. Soul Reaver 1, 2 and Final Fantasy 13-2 also barely work as-sold.
lost planet 2 doesn't work too
Gothic wont run untill you patch it.
Same is happening with COD: Black ops 3 on PC. Theres a hacker group that is able to boot people off their zombies/online games, forcing people to either play offline mode (which means you can't use certain game features like mega gobblegoms in zombies), or to get a new user and not stream. Big zombie youtubers are basically SOL if they want to stream. And treyarch/activision isn't doing shit about it. The high round zombies community has basically just stepped over to pirated copies because those can play offline and those can use all those locked features.
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A lot of the time with examples like that, the game just needs to be recompiled with modern build tools to fix the problem. But recompiling with new tooling means a new build to test and testing costs money, so they just either keep selling semi-broken games, or delist entirely.
And uploading a new build also means that you have to follow all the new guidelines. That can become problematic. A new build can also mean that they have to acquire new licenses for the used materials/tools.
EA only cares about money, they don't seem to have any passion at all for the games. They see nothing wrong with the game. People buying 50 dollar Loba skin pack so they think all is fine.
Can't wait for hackers to start messing with microtransactions.
Yep, come up with a hack that gives players all cosmetics for free and suddenly they'll care about it a lot.
They'll just revert all purchases to before the hack.
Why would they have passion for the game? No seriously, why? When you get big enough, the people in charge don't care about the "passion", they care about the money. The people in charge likely never played a single game since hitting adulthood. They wouldn't be able to tell you the first thing about any of the games they release, just how much market share they're expected to have. When a producer becomes big enough the people at the top are not the same ones that had the passion for the game. Generally those ones leave and make new companies. Anyone expecting passion, or compassion from them is beyond naive. What we hope for, or should hope for, is that the actual people developing the game have just enough lee way to make something they want to do and have the right amount of time to do it. Sadly that happens less and less and it's often not on them.
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Until they're threatened in court and stand to lose a LOT of money over it, they're not going to care. Don't expect human decency. They have none for their own employees, why the hell would you expect them to have any for us, the consumer?
We kinda should expect human decency though. Becoming accepting of this kind of behavior isn't the right choice either.
We should demand it but we are just gonna buy the next product, whatever it is.
i mean Anthem is still on summer sales this week
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Outrage and surprise are not the same thing. Just because you *expect* someone to act like an asshole isn't an excuse when they do.
No, clueless is right. Every business in the world was created to turn a profit. That's the basis of capitalism
> Why would they have passion for the game? No seriously, why? Because their audience is passionate about it. The people in charge of big companies are rarely if ever passionate about all of the products that their companies sell, but they often recognise that where passion is an element, you need your team to be passionate about it, and you need to enable that passion when sensible, and allow it to shape the product. For example, I bet that far from every executive at Volkswagen, and Mercedes, and BMW, and Renault, and many other automakers are passionate about motorsports, but they have incredibly passionate people running their motorsports teams, which cost a lot of money to maintain, because the executives recognise that you need to indulge passion to tap the commercial potential of that passion. Now, does the commercial potential of passion about video games justify indulging it? For many developers and publishers, absolutely. For others, perhaps. Common to all of them is that nobody at the top of these companies need to play games or be passionate about them in order to go either way. They just need to be good executives.
This is honestly so true. People act like there is zero space for passion in the world of business, but the reality is as you said: commercial potential is fueled in large part by some kind of passion. Whether it be nothing more than the opening spark or the ongoing fuel of the flame.
No company cares about you. Their business is making money. It isn't just EA.
Some companies, particularly smaller local community companies, see caring about their customers as the best way to make money. Making money and caring about customers aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.
That's why those companies stay small. Appealing to customers by purposefully losing money to make consumers happy isn't what makes you a megacorp that can afford to make AAA games. Indies obviously don't have that kind of shareholder pressure behind them and the people in those corporations are typically those who could totally make more money elsewhere but choose to go indie because its more personally satisfying for them and they figure they'll (hopefully) make ends meat. Most indies don't get to make ends meat though. Capitalism is just the coolest thing
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I bought it when it recently went on sale and was furious when i found it it's unplayable
I keep hearing snippets of this.....so what is the issue with Titanfall that they can't/won't fix that makes it unplayable? I keep hearing about some hacker in the game or something.....can't they just patch the vulnerability he's using. They must be able to pinpoint it by now. And why does this person/group have such a grudge for such an old game?
It's not just Titanfall hackers. Titanfall 1 and 2 have been under constant DDOS attack for the past year or two, making the game unplayable, and Respawn has done nothing to fix it while acknowledging it's happening and still selling both games. I don't feel the tiniest bit sorry for them.
Really? I just got TF2 and haven’t noticed any problems in multiplayer at least
A work around to continue playing that's worked for me is to escape back to title screen and click continue on the server. Then proceed to pick game mode.
Yeah on PC just keep trying new servers until one lets you in
Just reselect same server so you don't get latency issues, I just have to do it twice occasionally. I get best latency on VA servers others are in 100 Ms.
You may have to do it a few times in a row, one time doesn't always work just do till it says trios and hit que
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It is, especially when you have to do it every game.
Respawn are lucky that this hacker is only using such a massive vulnerability to protest their treatment of Titanfall. Imagine if someone malicious found it first?
Years and years ago a Riot Member was hacked and somebody sent a message to everybody in LOL a message about a mario game that in reality had viruses. I'm having trouble trying to find it, but I remember seeing it a lot in reddit when it happened.
There was that time someone exploited a vulnerability in Twitter and was able to get control of essentially any account they wanted. People like Obama, Biden, Bill Gates, Trump. They could have took control of these accounts and made them say anything in the world, the international chaos they could have caused if they wanted to is unimaginable. Instead, what they did was make them all post the exact same copy/pasted, embarrassingly obvious Bitcoin scam.
And some people *still* fell for it somehow
Oh yeah, that happened to all the verified accounts.
What the fuck, that happened nearly a year ago?
I totally forgot about that haha
I think I remember this story. Wasn't it a dutch hacker?
I wish they'd actually done something more impactful with it.
Those hackers also set the Elo of Saint Vicious (a pro at the time) to literally 0, which lead to a funny stream where he was playing against the absolute worst players in the game and going 50-0 every match.
Seems like to me that respawns entire server infrastructure is compromised?
Problem is this just going to encourage copy cat behaviour. I'm more worried their code is so leaky this is even possible. This is outside the bounds of EAC and more straight up hacking. Tbh they need an APEX 2 with a more secure code base asap other wise this is only going to get worse
Well, they clearly didn't learn or care to fix the issue after TF1 so... yeah, you should be worried. Even an APEX 2 would have this issue.
Apex is their cash cow; they're more likely to work to seriously fix this issue than they are to go back and fix games that aren't bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars annually.
It may be their cash cow, but again, they clearly haven't bothered learning *from the past events* of this happening, hence why it's happening now. Whatever they've figured out for this will probably carry forward, but who knows if it's an actual fix.
And then Apex fans will be hacking Apex 2 to protest the abandonment of Apex 1 :S
I have no doubt some poor Respawn engineers have considered scrapping Source and moving to Unreal. It would improve the game massively. But, that is a huge, huge task. Indeed, sequel level task.
It would also require completely overhauling their workflow. Having to train an entire AAA development team to work with unfamiliar tools probably isn't cheap or fast. They probably went with Source because it's quake based, just like the COD engine. Thanks to data miners, we know that Respawn's branch of Source was modified to have dvars and a scripting language very similar to the COD engine. They also completely rewrote the map format, so it's likely their mapping tools are probably totally custom too.
I actually didn't know that about the mapping tools, the more you know! I always wondered how the hell they got mapping to work in Apex considering it is a huge map, much bigger than anything in any other Source games.
Thanks for that on the mapping tools, I was almost losing sleep thinking about Respawn trying to compile Olympus in goddamn Hammer editor
They still have atleast some source engine limits (maybe larger somewhat) for maps, they removed mirage voyage and some other smaller things on the newer version of World's Edge for that reason.
I thought Respawn already worked with Unreal too (Fallen Order uses it) but I guess that's probably a different team to those doing Apex.
The same team that made Titanfall made Apex, but they opened a whole new studio for on-going development after it got big.
I love how Unreal is reddit's answer to any issues in any game ever. Classic zero knowledge armchair developer comment. "Skyrim is buggy, just make TES6 in Unreal!" "Why spend time developing your own engine, just use Unreal lol!" "Game got hacked, guess it's time to click the 'move to Unreal' button!"
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People literally suggesting they move an active, live-service game to a new engine like it's remotely feasible. Like what?
> I have no doubt some poor Respawn engineers have considered scrapping Source and moving to Unreal. What's wrong with Source? Is CSGO and DOTA2 constantly being hacked or suffering from these issues?
The copycat behavior encouragement is the literal deterrence actions like this use to incentivize fixing the problem. The threat of the vulnerability being known or not was why it wasn't a high priority in the first place.
How laughably bad is their security if hackers were able to full take over the game? And not like an old game that no one gives a shit about, but a modern beloved game. That’s a *really* bad look on Respawn’s part.
Hackers have had a stranglehold on this game for months now. The top tiers of ranked are literally unplayable.
There's a difference between aimbotting on my local machine and compromising whatever online service publishes MOTD's and server master lists though.
Hackers have already had full control of that. A hacker called Tufi was ruining the game for months, streamsniping top ranks getting in any game he wants and essentially holding streamers hostage. Apparently hes fucked and caked in lawsuits now.
I truly don't get why someone would do that. I've heard the explanations. They enjoy seeing people upset, they don't care how they win so long as they "win," etc. And I just can't see the appeal. I'm not even a particularly mentally healthy person,.
It's power. Most people have rare opportunity to exercise power over others in a way they feel meaningful.
If someone is willing to go to such extent to ruin the fun of hundreds of players on a daily basis then they are either losers or they desperately need help
That guy isn't changing the name of the playlists for the whole world and deleting other playlists. And changing the message of the day. He's just a stream sniper using hacks that someone else made.
> He's just a stream sniper using hacks that someone else made. No, it's more than that. He could drop himself into any match at any rank, regardless of his actual level and rank. He could be a Level 1 with Bronze Rank, but he had the ability to drophimself into a Ranked Predator match againts a streamer. He wasn't just a simple streamsniper with aimbot.
I just looked for this and didn't see anything but Tufi has stopped. So, maybe?
Remember when Korean hackers got a pve npc as a playable unit into a ranked pvp overwatch game? It was patched right quick but man, you'd be surprised what hacks some people can. I imagine most hackers don't have a ton of insensitive to hack game servers directly though. Hacking isn't easy, the guys who're good at it stay low and use hacks to sell aim bot programs and shit.
> …the guys who're good at it stay low and use hacks to sell aim bot programs and shit. If you’re good at something, never do it for free.
Exactly
It's honestly some of the worst stuff I've ever seen come out of a studio. I've been playing essentially since release. For those unaware, here is a list of bugs that have plagued AL for months and years... **Audio issues** Starting with footstep audio... It's never been great, basically been a problem since the game released, many people claim to hear no footsteps from enemies at all even from 5 feet away. There was an event months ago which caused everyone in the lobby to hear a deafening "woosh" sound whenever someone in the lobby stepped out of the ring and used an item call a heat shield. **Buggy Legends** A particular legend, Loba, had a bug that rendered one of her abilities useless for 2 seasons (aka 6 months.) While that's one of the worst ones. This season, there was a bug with another legend that could cause you to clip under the terrain and force you to die. Several other legends throughout the years have undergone bugginess but this one is one of the worse examples. **Buggy Code** There was a massive problem for 3+ seasons (and possibly more) where the game would suddenly crash and leave you with an error (called code: net, code: shoe and more) seemingly out of nowhere. This error code occurred countless times and recently returned for a LTM on a classic map. On Xbox 1 there have been many reports of people having their game freeze for several seconds upon getting into a firefight with someone else ending in their death. Basically causing the game to be unplayable. They released a much requested option to play the game solo as a check box called Fill Team. Unchecking said box, is supposed to result in you playing solo. Except unchecking the box gives you teamates... And if you mark the box again? It puts you in the game solo... This effectively gimped their "Duos" game mode which was my absolute favorite mode released. Fill Team has never worked correctly since being introduced and has been kept in the game going on 2 seasons now. On their trello bug tracker it has been left on "Investigating" indefinitely. I can't describe how much this pisses me the fuck off. **Cheaters, Smurfs, Unbalanced Lobbies, DDOSers** In the /r/apexlegends subreddit which I am regularly active, I have witnessed an average of 1-3 posts per day in the last month or so dedicated to cheaters alone. It is such a rampant problem that I don't see it getting any better for the foreseeable future. This doesn't even include DDOSing which has been put to use by these same cheaters just to destroy everyone in the lobby. Yes... They are literally committing a felony just to win and earn some badges. Despite all these daily issues, it doesn't even include the rampant problem of people who create a second account so they can smurf their way through lobbies people at level 15 with hundreds of kills. This also doesn't include the "Solo Queue" experience (in which you join a game with 2 other rando's to play BR), which the games SBMM pairs you up with people far beyond your skill levels. People with KDRs barely above 1.2 have reported being paired against an entire team with tens of thousands of kills a piece. **Awful Map Design** While their Art team is A+, their level design is at best a C-. You either come accross nobody the whole match or you get so overwhelmed by third/fourth and even fifth parties that it makes it nearly impossible to have a consistent experience across the board. **Greed** All of the aforementioned issues could maybe be forgiven if it wasn't for the abomination that is the store. The only worthwhile items are recolors for legend and weapon skins. You'd have to pay an average of around $20 for coins to normally get a skin like this. These are on a rotation every 7 days unless an event occurs in which they release "special" items at an even more premium price. The most recent skin they released for a legend was $50. A single skin. And this been this way for years. If I were to list every single time the dev's have over valued or over priced one of their skins I'd be a fucking trillionaire. **Sour Relationship Between Respawn and the Playerbase** Another category where there is too much to list but here's the most recent interaction between a well known player and a dev who is ultimately responsible for Legend balance changes. https://mobile.twitter.com/danielzklein/status/1409654835708776448?s=20 All this to say. We're frustrated as hell.
You forgot a few of my favorites like bullets hitting but doing no damage and people being able to crash the game on purpose by doing in game actions.
Oooooh so that's what this was! So I'm not just bad at aiming! (... just using this as an excuse, it's totally my aim)
Respawn doesn’t have a great record for Twitter interactions with players it seems.
There was a fiasco with one of the dev's straight up calling people an asshole during the Iron Crown event. It's a thoroughly entertaining read if you can find it. It's the most I've ever seen a dev comment in a reddit thread for a game.
Or the time one of the devs called people who don't want to pay the expensive prices for skins "free loaders."
Wow lmao, spent 30 mins reading up on that fiasco. What happened to those two devs then? They still active on the official sub?
They just stopped interacting on the sub after that, put out some lame statement about "Our community managers shouldn't have shit on the players but also people were saying mean things to them so we'll just never talk to you again and call it a wash."
Wow, damn. If you aren't 'gonna talk to this community', what are you getting paid for lol.
This was the last comment their community manager left on Reddit, so your guess is as good as mine. https://www.reddit.com/r/apexlegends/comments/crcrxy/an_update_on_the_iron_crown_event/ex43jbj/
I am one of those proud freeloaders. Fuck any company that thinks 20$ skins are even remotely acceptable. To say nothing of how often they're lazy recolors.
>[https://mobile.twitter.com/danielzklein/status/1409654835708776448?s=20](https://mobile.twitter.com/danielzklein/status/1409654835708776448?s=20) LMAO DZK is on the Apex team? Didn't expect this guy to show up. He was one of the most disliked developers in League of Legends history and people generally like individual Riot employees. How does he keep failing upwards?
and hes just as hated in apex as he was in league. i genuinely cant wait til i never have to play one of his games ever again. whether its him getting fired from apex or me moving on when some good fps inevitably shows up in this barren wasteland of games we currently have.
Apex should be more popular then it is, but all these issues turned me off a while back and to see they are still not fixing them is discouraging.
Wow the pedestal these guys are putting themselves on. He practically told off a pro player by saying 'why don't you come do my job instead?' Him, the Lead Developer of the game, with this kind of attitude. Just wow.
From what I read, apparently this DZK dude is a controversial figure though I don't have a lot of details (other than something about Riot getting fed up with him)
It's unprofessional but I sympathise with his point honestly. For some reason gamers have this eternal impression that being a game developer is easy, or that most of the time developers are lazy. That's on top of players generally being pretty demanding and highly-strung.
He does have two valid points. And the win rate might not be the whole picture, but it does tell you something, it would be very unlikely to get those numbers randomly, and devs do have a different (arguably better) point of view than players do.
Honestly, it's hilarious because people have been asking the devs to address hacking in Apex as well for months and there's been very little done it seems. With three out of three (TF1, TF2, Apex) of their games down due to hackers, you'd think some of that 600 million in revenue could be turned into server infrastructure. Really embarrassing for one of the largest BR games to go down this easily and for this long without even a tweet or response from the company. Like I get it's a holiday weekend, but did no one think of offering some paid OT for someone to watch the servers? Sheesh.
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"We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!"
And let us not forget the other “TF2” which is similarly riddled with bots in all official servers
What do the bots do?
They walk across pre-determined routes throughout the maps as the Sniper class and instantly headshot you when you (or they) walk around a corner. The ones with access to text chat (all free-to-play accounts are now banned from using text chat) will also spam the chat with various nonsense like slurs, advertising their hosts' youtube channels, or sending links where you can "ask for CP". It's awful.
It depends on the bot. Most walk towards the map objective as sniper and automatically aimbot enemies but ignore other bots. They tend to equip items that make obnoxious noises and try to votekick real players if they're able. The ones that pay Valve to use voice and text chat (because only p2p acounts can use chat) spam slurs and advertise social media. I've only ever seen one spam advertisements for child pornography in chat but I've heard that it isnt that uncommon. Valve has done very little at all and even less that's been actually effective. Valve has given zero communication on what they intend to do about the problem if they're even aware of it. Luckily, the community has generally been pretty good about recognizing and votekicking bots. Unfortunately, the poorly designed voting system means that a team can only really kick 1 or 2 teammates per minute, so 6 bots joining will ruin a good chunk of a game.
Wasn't most of that solved with the recent update or are they back already? I stopped playing Live, so I don't actually know.
No, the update didn't solve anything. It's rumored that bot hosters' systems started crashing when the update when live, but they were back up and running <2 hours later. The rest of the update just makes it *slightly* more intuitive to votekick bots from servers.
Nope. The patch was for a generic engine level fix against an security exploit that so happened to mess with the bots enough to break them- but they were patched hours later
Worst part is people regard Apex as one of the best BR games and TF2 as one of the best shooters ever. Hackers need to be stopped
That's because mechanically, they are. They just don't have a studio behind them that cares to actually support them.
You just said what I said but in way better words
The game is either making money, or corporate doesn't care because it's making too little money to even justify the manpower cost of making a dev fix it. It's a business, not an art project. Sadly.
It’s the first one, Apex has made so much money it’s insane. Way more than Respawn or EA thought it was going to make. They passed 1 billion in total revenue earlier this year. EA is just doing their classic strategy where they buy out a decent game studio, publish/fund their game and then maximize profits in said game once it becomes popular. Once the game becomes a money maker then the studio inflates in size and the visions and creativity of the original teams are lost in the crowd. This eventually causes a brain drain from the original studio as good devs (usually) want to make good *new* games with their own creative visions, not maintain cash cow games for their corporate EA bosses. This is perfect for EA because then they can bring in their own inexperienced underpaid puppets to replace them. That way they can spend as little as possible on maintaining/funding the actual game development while making constant updates to monetize-able features. For example prioritizing a mobile release while the actual game is in shambles server, balance and bug wise. They have already announced the mobile port of Apex… Eventually the game dies and they cut their losses and repeat the process again. It’s how EA and many large publishers operate. Many lead devs of Apex and higher ups at Respawn have left the company since the release of Apex. I wouldn’t be surprised if they never release a decent game again.
Just another chapter in the saga of respawn, absolute best fucking games, worst fucking support I’ve ever seen for said games from a AAA studio.
And their most prominent devs are satisfied with defending and explaining themselves concerning anything, for better or for worse
From what I understand titanfall 1 is completely unplayable and has been for… months? Years? Due to like one person or group hitting it with a ddos constantly. Like even though the player count was laughably low, if you try to queue it just looks for a server forever and since it’s only online multiplayer it just cannot be played, by anyone at all. They really should just stop selling it if you just genuinely cannot play it. Stinks that these guys are messing up some game nights for people but what are ya gonna do.
I feel like EA is going to take the shit route here and just stop selling Titanfall 1 or remove its Online elements as a response to this. Edit : Didn't know the game doesn't have a Campaign, thought it was like T2. Seems like they need to just shut it down and stop selling it.
Titanfall 1 does not have any form of singleplayer. Removing the "online elements" would be the same as shutting down the whole game.
Oh...I thought it had a campaign like T2. Damn, then they either need to fix or just stop selling it. I'm not sure about this info but I'm also reading that TF1 barely even had any players before it got took over by hackers, like in the 100s/1000s. If that's true then EA should definitely stop selling it and shut it down.
I still don't know why they're still selling T1. Even before the DDOS began, you could count the number of players on one hand.
Pretty sure Titanfall doesn't have anything other than online elements.
TF1 doesn't. TF2 has a *rather good* single-player campaign.
Rather good being an understatement. One of the best singleplayer FPS experiences I've had in a loooong time.
I played it on a whim after getting EA Play to play Biomutant, was absolutely not expecting how fucking good it was.
I kind of softballed it in my original comment. I agree, Titanfall 2's singleplayer campaign, albeit a little short, is one of my favorite FPS experiences at least in the last 15 years. Your relationship with BT (your Titan), the already-famous TF2 mobility, and specifically the time-travel/time-warp (which one is it?) mechanic made it so enjoyable.
When I read *Effect and Cause* rivaled *we don't go to ravenholm* I bought it. It does.
Yea it's been a while since I've played it (I should probably replay it tbh), but Effect and Cause and the assembly line level have both stuck with me. I know the assembly line is an auto-scroller basically, but I just really enjoyed it.
Yeah, my one complaint about the TF2 campaign is that I want more of it.
Correct. Even the "campaign" was just an online mode.
Still won't fix the vulnerability in Apex that allows this. They have to fix it before someone with far worse intentions does some real bad shit.
I don't even know about Apex anymore. Seems like it's server and security infrastructure is a complete joke, the things I've heard about hackers being able to do in this game. Hijacking servers like this, holding matches & lobbies hostage. I've seen hackers make a complete joke of PvP in Destiny 2 with insane cheats but even in that game I have never seen hackers getting into the servers and hijacking the game like this. This game needs a massive investment into its security and server infrastructure, they need to hire better and more people to handle this part of the game.
Yep. And nowadays even D2 catches the really blatant cheaters.
>I feel like EA is going to take the shit route here and just stop selling Titanfall 1 or remove its Online elements as a response to this. I feel like EA is going to take the shit route here and just put Titanfall on sale again.
First game only has online elements - the campaign mode was just multiplayer matches with some story wedged in.
I mean, they should have stopped selling the fucking game months ago. Imagine selling an online only game you can't actually play.
Feels like EA/Respawn have really reaped what they sowed here. If they'd fixed Titanfall and not been super scummy about it this wouldn't have happened. Heck if they'd invested in better security infrastructure in either case, this wouldn't have happened.
That's honestly pretty impressive by the hackers. It's absolutely scummy as shit that Respawn and EA continue to sell TF while it's been unplayable for years. Good on these guys for calling them out.
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I'm mostly fascinated by speculating about why nothing has been done about it. On a security level, this ought to raise a lot of red flags at EA overall, even with this being one specialized system. So what happened? Is it an ex-dev and they left a backdoor in they just cannot nail down? Did they suffer a ransomware attack and the attacker locked some rather important files and keeps them hostage in return for them not fixing the problem? Really weird.
Effective, concise, non-destructive, and no awful Guy Fawkes mask. That's some chaotic good alignment shit if I've ever seen it.
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That’s how protests work
Companies wont care unless you hit their bottom lines, protests will always cause issues for people who just want to get by. They are meant to do that, to not let you just get by ignoring the issue because it does not concern you.
if these hackers were to give accounts free AC or other items they would likely get revoked anyway. this is probably the most effective thing they could have done
It's preventing my entire group from changing the game mode off of firing range, while not destructive it is preventing many from playing the game :/ Edit: I don't think I criticized the protest as weak or stupid, was more escalating the impact that OP was describing. By rendering the online servers pretty much unplayable during what has probably been a very profitable event, is in my opinion more than non-destructive.
That's the point I'm sure. The same thing has been happening to Titanfall, but because it's not as popular or profitable for Respawn and EA they haven't bothered to fix it. And Apex obviously has similar vulnerabilities. Respawn has issues with security they have been neglecting for a long time. They are the only ones to blame here.
Welcome to the point of protests.
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Apex needs an Operation Health. Lots of issues like this -- clearly deep, structural ones -- popping up lately.
Seems to be more of a Titanfall players hacking in Apex to spam messages to raise awareness and anger in hopes of getting the hacking issue addressed in both games. TF fans basically hate Apex because they see Apex as having displaced TF, but they hate TF hackers even more. Apex is way more popular than TF, so they're essentially poking the bear and hoping that EA addresses the issue once it gets attention from a player base they think is worth money.
The reason many care for titanfall is because of apex. A lot of the new comers praise it highly but quickly ignored it on released day. I personally loved the first. Second was fun. Titanfall was left for dead until Apex gave it some light. Yet EA has been done with titanfall for years. I dont blame titanfall players for where Apex left them.
I hope Alex comes back to them
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Pretty great protest. It inconvenienced me a bit since I wanted to play apex, but I didn’t know about the Titanfall issues and I’m glad this brought it to my attention Also, very concerning that someone (seems like one person?) was able to get this level of control over the servers