Rainbow Six Vegas, SWAT 4 unplayable due to disabled ad server

https://twitter.com/_eezstreet_/status/1437652748179234819

by danso • 5 years ago

293 117 5 years ago

twitter.com

marcodiego2• 5 years ago

Thanks for increasing my list of examples why this is so bad.

falcolas8• 5 years ago

Ads in full priced videogames. Lawful evil in its simplest form.

noasaservice• 5 years ago

You are the product. Just because you paid is no consolation.

sk2020• 5 years ago

If memory serves, the nominal price of most video games has not changed in about 30 years. US dollars are, at least officially, worth 2.5x less now than when Mario came with Duck Hunt. I’m not that shocked that alternative monetization strategies are employed (micropayments are a big one).

Seems like there could be a demand for an independent standards committee that certifies games as shenanigan-free. My children are starting to play games themselves, so I’d like a service like that. I would pay a premium to know my kids aren’t going to be prompted to put in my credit card information and won’t be assailed with toxic marketing ploys.

skymt• 5 years ago

This clip from the latest (full-priced) entry in the NBA 2K series has been going around the last few days. Truly pushing boundaries in in-game advertising. You can visit a State Farm retail outlet and talk to an employee who says what a big fan he is and gives you a State Farm employee uniform you can wear in the off-court parts of the game.

https://twitter.com/capybaroness/status/1436475796357582876

void_mint• 5 years ago

Full priced non-IAP games do not make as much as F2P, corporate overlords demand games make up the difference somehow.

officeplant2• 5 years ago

Ads in full priced Operating Systems as well. I hate modern times.

dharmab11• 5 years ago

Tangent: SWAT 4 still has an active community including actively developed mods. It's arguably the peak of the tactical shooter genre (at the very least for indoor urban combat). It's also still for sale on GOG.com.

mzs• 5 years ago

MS fixed this. Also in the meantime the community created a DLL that changed the server to localhost.

ddek• 5 years ago

Which I’m sure many players will forget to remove.

nivenkos• 5 years ago

I played through Elite Force a few months ago, it was great.

dharmab11• 5 years ago

I'm actually glad this came up into my feed, because I see Elite Force had a new release this summer. My tactical gaming group would love to do another playthrough.

smoldesu2• 5 years ago

Ubisoft has been really, really bad about game preservation. They're up there with Activision/Blizzard with complete indifference to their core audience. The 'right' thing to do would be to open-source this game like iD did with the Quake series: nobody is actually buying this game anymore, and if you really wanted to be a frugal bastard you could make the asset/map files proprietary while releasing the engine to the community. The current state is that nobody can really play this though, so nobody wins.

Side note: is it possible to fix this by routing through a custom DNS and spoofing the ad server? This seems like a pretty rudimentary issue, and could probably be solved with the technological equivalent of Krazy Glue and duct tape.

falcolas8• 5 years ago

I read elsewhere that they have fixed it: blocking connections succeeds where blackholing connections failed.

aequitas• 5 years ago

nobody is actually buying this game anymore

I think there are more than enough people who would pay a few euro for the convenience of installing an old game on their phone, console or modern OS straight from an App store or website instead of going through instruction on Github for free.

smoldesu2• 5 years ago

That's why I suggested they go the Quake route, forcing you to own a copy of the game legally for you to dissect the map/asset files, but also not blocking you from performing rudimentary research on the engine if you so desire. They didn't release the source so that other people could compile their own versions (although ostensibly you could), but moreso to encourage people to read the code and learn how such a large, interconnected system functions. You can still buy Quake 1 and 2 on Steam, and they'll probably run just fine (Windows support is shaky these days). They're the same as they were 20 years ago, so nobody is really getting gypped when they pay for it. I personally think it's the best way to distribute game source.

MaxBarraclough2• 5 years ago

Haven't you just described GoG? They're taking preservation seriously, and as far as I know they're able to make a profit doing so.

Would be great if they started pushing to release the source-code of more games, but they're still much better than nothing.

post_break• 5 years ago

To this day I still can't play far cry 4 that I paid for on windows 10.

addingnumbers• 5 years ago

is it possible to fix this by routing through a custom DNS and spoofing the ad server?

It says in the thread, they already fixed it by having the madserver.net server reject connections.

Previously Microsoft parked it by having it handshake and send empty replies, which worked for other madserver-seeking games but choked these two.

Since switching to TCP rejects cleared the issue, a custom DNS entry was probably a viable workaround before the upstream fix.

lovich2• 5 years ago

Even if no one is buying the game anymore, if they are playing it that means they are filling their gaming “need” already and are less likely to buy the new products being sold.

I don’t agree with it, but I can’t think of a single game company that is not incentivized to obsolete their games much the same way phone manufacturers are incentivized to obsolete their phones

jon-wood• 5 years ago

While I agree with you in principle, its often not as easy as just releasing the code. Modern games are built upon many different third party libraries handling anything from the user interface through to physics, and I can see it not being worth the legal wrangling to get licenses for those that allow republishing.

Doom/Quake are a bit of an exception because iD have always implemented basically everything themselves, dramatically limiting how many third parties they'd have to negotiate licenses with.

zerocrates2• 5 years ago

And that exception doesn't really apply anymore: I'm pretty sure the new Dooms have commercial middleware like anything else, and they're no longer open-sourcing them. They haven't even commercially licensed out the engine to anybody in forever.

dharmab11• 5 years ago

Replace "id" with "Carmack". This is discussed in Masters of Doom; Carmack's programming was so far ahead of their competition and he was willing to live at the office nearly 24/7.

dharmab11• 5 years ago

I've been trying to replay Ghost Recon Future Soldier recently and strongly agree. The hoops you have to jump through to get co-op to work are ridiculous, including removing all but one network interface (virtual or physical).

franknine• 5 years ago

Reminds me of the great video from Nick Robinson talking about Ubisoft pulled Driver: San Francisco from all digital storefronts:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTkxzQDo0ng

sleibrock• 5 years ago

I find this funny when just a short while ago, Microsoft was having issues loading ads into Windows 11[1].

[1] https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/windows11-empty-taskbar.html

dmix• 5 years ago

Note: the last tweet in the thread said they emailed Microsoft and they fixed it. So the games work again.

daveevad• 5 years ago

In September of 2021, the content server for Massive Ads (http://madserver.net) started delivering blank content to anyone that requested it. Presumably, Microsoft shut down the service. Of course, this had the effect of knocking a few games offline that couldn’t understand the responses they were getting. I sent a few emails to Microsoft and they were helpful enough to refuse connections to the address. So as of now, you should be able to play SWAT 4 again.

Neat fix - presumably an empty response blew up the XML parser but ECONNREFUSED escapes to safer code?

kevingadd• 5 years ago

It would have to handle ECONNREFUSED etc to work in offline scenarios or on firewalled networks, I suppose?

dncornholio• 5 years ago

Neat fix for a solution that was flawed to begin with. Sending blank 200 response is a bad idea. If your service stops, stop sending 200 status responses to any client.

onkoe• 5 years ago

Bit unrelated, but I really like that domain name. Looks like "mad"

throwaway59553• 5 years ago

Shouldn't there be some fallback in place when the game can't fetch the add from the server? I mean, it's one basic test scenario they should have thought of.

wayoutthere• 5 years ago

This is something they want to explicitly stop when they can show ads to a user base, so why make a fallback that allows users to pihole the ads?

ziml77• 5 years ago

You're assuming their motivations. As stated in the Twitter posts, the issue only occurred when a connection to the server was established, but the server returned an empty response. Microsoft fixed the issue after being contacted about it by making the servers completely refuse connections.

moviuro• 5 years ago

Can't connect != Receives junk from the legitimate server. In that case, "junk" was an empty response.

They did test the game with an unavailable ad server, but it was still brittle (as in: not tested with badly formatted ads)

bserge• 5 years ago

Imagine not being able to rewatch movies from the 50s-80s because "the servers were shutdown".

This is what's gonna happen to a whole lot of modern games. What a waste.

Only pirates can help them.

dharmab11• 5 years ago

Pirates, modders and reverse engineering tools.

ajsnigrutin2• 5 years ago

When piracy is more user friendly than a paid service, the service owners should take a step back and rethink what they're doing.

javajosh2• 5 years ago

OTOH these innovations in creating artificial scarcity is what enabled the games to be funded in the first place. At least this way they exist, and can (and will!) be rescued by the hackers of the world.

EDIT: it's impossible to make money off of digital goods without artificial scarcity. This is because data is naturally not scarce. In the beginning, physical media allowed data goods to piggy-back on the retail structures already in place. Personal computing and the internet has mostly eliminated that form of scarcity. New forms of scarcity have been invented, some better than others (from the end-user perspective). Note that this truth applies to FAANG as well. Facebook and Google's fortunes have been built on the scarcity of ad space. Gaming companies have invented ways to create scarcity ranging from account-bound DRM (Steam, Battle.net), dongles, and always-on phone-home requirement for the runtime. And more. All of these technologies exist to extract money from something that is naturally not scarce. And rather than hate that fact, consider that without the ability to extract monetary value, these projects would not have been executed in the first place. So what's worse: a world in which we have excellent games hobbled by money extraction mechanisms, or a world in which we don't have excellent games? I know which one I prefer.

pavel_lishin3• 5 years ago

OTOH these innovations in creating artificial scarcity is what enabled the games to be funded in the first place.

Maybe I haven't had enough coffee, but I don't think I understand.

nightski3• 5 years ago

Yeah you'd need data to back that up. Game conglomerates are making bad decisions left and right and yet are swimming in profit.

philipov• 5 years ago

That view of things denies the possibility that people would have found alternative solutions to problems if the abusive solution didn't exist. In a word, it's short-sighted. Competition tends to drive otherwise viable strategies to extinction if a much easier one exists, and getting rid of that dominant strategy can allow alternative strategies to thrive.

smichel17• 5 years ago

The production costs of digital goods are naturally scarce. We "just" haven't (yet) figured out a good way to compensate people for those, so we turn to artificial scarcity.

moron4hire• 5 years ago

The games industry is more profitable than the movie industry. I think they can figure out how to make games that don't rot on people.

munk-a• 5 years ago

A lot of really old games were unplayable without the manuals - most of these have gotten fan-patches to disable the security checks. I imagine we'll see something similar with more modern games but for the always online features.

Usually with enough dedication you can track down and hack out the activated code - and if an old DRM system falls into disuse a lot of companies will just release the details on it making it even easier to patch out.

dmos62• 5 years ago

An example I ran into recently is Far Cry 3. It's not that old either. It has a coop campaign that's now unplayable due to server disrepair. Invitations to lobby do not work.

hsbauauvhabzb• 5 years ago

How many games didn’t get these patches? Let’s not forget cracking an 80s game is significantly easier than a modern title, too.

exporectomy• 5 years ago

But there are movies that you can't rewatch because the company didn't release them and isn't playing the film anymore.

TheSkyHasEyes• 5 years ago

Neither of you are wrong. But this isn't good context since the game was in their hands. Your example means the movie isn't in your hands.

lavabiopsy• 5 years ago

Does it matter? The game developers I've talked to are well aware that they're trading some aspect of long-term historical significance for short term gain, and it doesn't seem to bother them.

To use a sports analogy here, do you think it really matters to football coaches that the players can't go back in time and play the game exactly as it was played 100 years ago, for various reasons? The equipment and safety practices have changed, the old fields have been rebuilt or destroyed, the minutiae of the rules have changed quite a bit over time, etc. People could try to do a historical re-enactment of sorts, it wouldn't be the same, but that's okay because the game would still be fun if it was done the right way.

type0• 5 years ago

This might happen, the technology to put ads in old and new movies already exist.

matheusmoreira• 5 years ago

Only pirates can help them.

I remember the Battlefield 2 community tried to revive the multiplayer servers after GameSpy shut down.

EA sent them a C&D.

nitwit0052• 5 years ago

At least the games didn't blame the customer. I've hit several websites that instructed me to disable my ad blocker, because the ads they tried to serve failed to load.

bjoli• 5 years ago

Louis Rossmann talked about a similar thing in a recent video: https://youtu.be/DEP_7_gx6M8

Rainbow Six Vegas, SWAT 4 unplayable due to disabled ad server

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