One Twenty Eight Blog

I was playing Team Fortress Two when I thought of Overwatch, its nearest competitor, and then I thought about Counter Strike. I noticed that, even though they are all objective bases first person shooters, they are all different in a certain way: character customization. There’s a certain spectrum that I have come up with a spectrum of character customization, with Overwatch on one side, Counter Strike on the other, and TF2 in the middle of them. On one side of the spectrum there is class-only customization. Class-only customization is where there are multiple characters, each with unchangeable weapons and abilities. I’ll call this (these are completely synonymous with politics) the left side. The game closest to this is Overwatch. On the other side of the spectrum, there is weapon-only customization, where everyone’s character has the same stats, just different weapons. I’ll call this the right side. The game closest to this is Counter Strike. Downsides To The Left Side In fi...

I was thinking about a video I saw the other day; it was about 30 seconds long, and it showed an uncommentated clip of GTA V gameplay. The player was flying a fighter jet over the military base, destroying everything in its sight; normal GTA things. Halfway through the video, a notification appeared on the left side of the screen saying that the player had been gifted $10,000,000. Less than a second later, the player was banned for cheating. A not at all scary cover picture for GTA V The anti-cheat indeed “did what it was supposed to do”; it saw something that wasn’t supposed to be there, and punished “accordingly”. Normally, the anti-cheat would detect something wrong when the cheating player spawned in the money, but it couldn’t; most cheat-clients come with a feature that keeps the anti-cheat from noticing something wrong. Only the cheater is punished. In this case, the anti-cheat wasn’t designed against the censorship, and only knows that the innocent player got money he sh...