140 replies to this topic

[Anjian]

17,000 players is not considered a viable financial model by any means.

[FRAGTAST1C]

Anjian, on 10 September 2019 - 09:11 PM, said:

17,000 players is not considered a viable financial model by any means.

Yeah, especially when there are alt accounts to consider.

[Anjian]

I can see why they have to go to Epic for some financing. You can have a hard time getting bank loan or venture capital for game development if your current cash cow and finished project only has 17,000 active accounts.

Edited by Anjian, 10 September 2019 - 10:38 PM.

[Dar1ng One]

Anjian, on 10 September 2019 - 10:34 PM, said:

and finished project only has 17,000 active accounts.

Is MWO a "finished" product?

[Anjian]

Dar1ng One, on 10 September 2019 - 11:28 PM, said:

Is MWO a "finished" product?

Finished as in the minimal specification.

Or do you mean "finished" as in "done for"?

Edited by Anjian, 11 September 2019 - 12:13 AM.

[Shrike777]

maybe don't lie to your player base, screw over customers, and kill any goodwill you've made, and that STEAM HAS MADE FOR YOU, you mighta kept some players in, I've been playing five years, screw pgi and f u c k

the epic store, or better known as CHINA'S DATA COLLECTION/THIEVERY

[Asym]

Bombast, on 09 September 2019 - 08:27 AM, said:

Your teams seem to disappear with alarming regularity. Do you find that conversations at parties die shortly after you jump in?

You are so funny,,,,!

Ah, my first team was my actual regimental affiliation...... We're all retired professional soldiers and had a reason to be playing MWO.... Of course they left because the game was positioning itself to fail and we were looking for a stable land warfare game to use for gathering and playing.... I am the Scout and volunteered to stay till the game shuts down (because I've played all of the MW games since inception...)

The second team were all civilians I ran into and really enjoyed their commitment to many games.....not, just MWO.... They were fun to be around.... I don't have a problem with "people" ? I have strong opinions and look at things from "different angles" than many other so......... But, I keep it civil and I am concerned that some of the "old guard" just can't see that as a golden rule.....

Have fun ! It's just a dying game and enjoy it while you can !!!!

[CFC Conky]

Well I’m still having fun, being a crummy player helps.

Good hunting,
CFC Conky

Edited by CFC Conky, 11 September 2019 - 09:15 AM.

[JediPanther]

Use whatever and do whatever. Burn the pt if you got it. Best advice now is minimal 82kph speed to keep up with the nascar.

[Mystere]

Appogee, on 10 September 2019 - 07:32 PM, said:

No.

LOL! That's exactly what you meant.

Otherwise you would have presented something that clearly shows PGI built (or tried to build, anyway) something else.

The PSR system is probably one of the very rare things that is actually working as intended (). People placing more meaning/value into it is not PGI's fault. It's quite hilarious, actually.

Edited by Mystere, 11 September 2019 - 07:52 PM.

[Mystere]

Shrike777, on 11 September 2019 - 01:06 AM, said:

maybe don't lie to your player base, screw over customers, and kill any goodwill you've made, and that STEAM HAS MADE FOR YOU, you mighta kept some players in, I've been playing five years, screw pgi and f u c k

the epic store, or better known as CHINA'S DATA COLLECTION/THIEVERY

As opposed to Mark Zuckerberg's personal data collection/thievery?

Edited by Mystere, 11 September 2019 - 07:35 PM.

[FRAGTAST1C]

Shrike777, on 11 September 2019 - 01:06 AM, said:

maybe don't lie to your player base, screw over customers, and kill any goodwill you've made, and that STEAM HAS MADE FOR YOU, you mighta kept some players in, I've been playing five years, screw pgi and f u c k

the epic store, or better known as CHINA'S DATA COLLECTION/THIEVERY

Just what do you do on your PC everyday to be so ashamed of sharing your browsing history with some thieves?

[Appogee]

Mystere, on 11 September 2019 - 07:15 PM, said:

LOL! That's exactly what you meant.

Sure, you know what I meant, even though I didn't say anything like that, and even though I explicitly told you exactly what I did mean.

Mystere, on 11 September 2019 - 07:15 PM, said:

The PSR system is probably one of the very rare things that is actually working as intended (). People placing more meaning/value into it is not PGI's fault. It's quite hilarious, actually.

I have a bridge I'd like to sell you.

[CMDR Sunset Shimmer]

Shrike777, on 11 September 2019 - 01:06 AM, said:

the epic store, or better known as CHINA'S DATA COLLECTION/THIEVERY

Look man, I don't like epic either, but that's misinformation.

[Accused]

CMDR Sunset Shimmer, on 12 September 2019 - 05:14 AM, said:

Look man, I don't like epic either, but that's misinformation.

So I've been poking at the Epic Game Store for a little while now. I'd first urge anyone seeing this to check out this excellent little post to see how things go titsup when tencent gets involved. Of course, it shouldn't even need to be stated that they have very heavy ties to the Chinese government, who do all sorts of wonderful things for their people, like building hard labor camps creating employment opportunities for minorities and Muslims, and harvesting organs from political prisoners for profit redistributing biomatter to help those less fortunate.

But this isn't about that, this is about what I've found after poking the Epic Game Store client for a bit. Keep in mind that I am a rank amateur - if any actual experts here want to look at what I've scraped and found, shoot me a DM and I can send you what I've got.

One of the first things I noticed is that EGS likes to enumerate running processes on your computer. As you can see, there aren't many in my case; I set up a fresh laptop for this. This is a tad worrying - what do they need that information for? And why is it trying to access DLLs in the directories of some of my applications?
More worrying is that it really likes reading about your root certificates. Like, a lot.

In fact, there's a fair bit of odd registry stuff going on period. Like I said, I'm an amateur, so if there are any non-amateur people out there who would be able to explain why it's poking at keys that are apparently associated with internet explorer, I'd appreciate it. It seems to like my IE cookies, too.
In my totally professional opinion, the EGS client appears to have a severe mental disorder, as it loves talking to itself.

I'm sure that this hardware survey information it's apparently storing in the registry won't be used for anything nefarious or identifiable at all. Steam is at least nice enough to ask you to partake in their hardware surveys.
Now that's just what it's doing locally on the computer. Let's look at traffic briefly. Fiddler will, if you let it, install dank new root certs and sniff out/decrypt SSL traffic for you. Using it and actually reading through results is a right pain though, and gives me a headache - and I only let the Epic client run long enough to log in, download slime rancher, click a few things, and then I terminated the process. Even that gave me an absolute shitload of traffic to look through, despite filtering out the actual download traffic. The big concern that everyone has is tracking, right? Well, Epic does that in SPADES. Look at all those requests. Look at the delicious "tracking.js". Mmm, I'm sure Xi Jinping is going to love it. Here's a copy of that script, I couldn't make heads or tails of it, but I'm also unfamiliar with JS. It looks less readable than PERL, though.
I didn't see any massive red flags in the traffic. I didn't see any root certs being created. But I also had 279 logged connections to look at by hand, on an old laptop, and simply couldn't view it all, there's an absolute fuckload of noise to go through, and I didn't leave the client running for very long. It already took me hours to sort through the traffic, not to mention several hundred thousand entries in ProcMon.
If you want to replicate this, it's pretty easy. Grab Fiddler and set it up, enable SSL decryption (DON'T FORGET TO REMOVE THE CERTS AFTERWARDS), start up Epic, and watch the packets flow, like a tranquil brook, all the way to Tim Sweeney's gaping datacenters. Use ProcMon if you want an extremely detailed, verbose of absolutely everything that the client does to your computer, you'll need to play with filters for a while to get it right. And I'm sure there are better ways to view what's going on inside of network traffic - but I am merely a rank amateur.

I give this game storefront a final rating of: PRETTY SKETCHY / 10, with an additional award for association with Tencent. As we all know, they have no links to the Chinese government whatsoever, and even if they did, the Chinese government would NEVER spy on a foreign nation's citizens, any more than they would on their own.
I also welcome attempts from people who do this professionally to take a crack at figuring out what sorts of questionable things the Epic client does. Seriously, I'd love to know what you find.
NB: CreateFile in ProcMon can actually indicate that a file is being opened, not necessarily created.
edit: oh yeah it also does a bunch of weird multicast stuff that'll mess with any TVs on your network. Good job, Epic.

-It's not misinformation, it's out of date information. These have since been patched out to the best of my knowledge. But yeah it was real.

Edited by Accused, 12 September 2019 - 03:32 PM.

[Mystere]

Accused, on 12 September 2019 - 03:31 PM, said:

<Epic Game Store> … <Tencent> … <Chinese Government> … <Spying>

Can you see what Google and Facebook do to any and all of your devices … and in collaboration with, well, anyone and everyone with a major presence on the web?

Edited by Mystere, 12 September 2019 - 05:10 PM.

[Karamarka]

Dar1ng One, on 10 September 2019 - 11:28 PM, said:

Is MWO a "finished" product?

Basically.

[L057FUNC710N]

Asym, on 11 September 2019 - 05:43 AM, said:

You are so funny,,,,!

Ah, my first team was my actual regimental affiliation...... We're all retired professional soldiers and had a reason to be playing MWO.... Of course they left because the game was positioning itself to fail and we were looking for a stable land warfare game to use for gathering and playing.... I am the Scout and volunteered to stay till the game shuts down (because I've played all of the MW games since inception...)

The second team were all civilians I ran into and really enjoyed their commitment to many games.....not, just MWO.... They were fun to be around.... I don't have a problem with "people" ? I have strong opinions and look at things from "different angles" than many other so......... But, I keep it civil and I am concerned that some of the "old guard" just can't see that as a golden rule.....

Have fun ! It's just a dying game and enjoy it while you can !!!!

The official scout huh? That sounds really silly.

Sorry your units failed, but for a long time many others thrived. Sure the game is dying, it's old and run its coarse.

Seems funny that you are almost gloating it is nearing it's end as though it validates what you say...it really doesn't.

[L057FUNC710N]

Mystere, on 11 September 2019 - 07:15 PM, said:

The PSR system is probably one of the very rare things that is actually working as intended (). People placing more meaning/value into it is not PGI's fault. It's quite hilarious, actually.

I find it more amusing that you actually put stock into what PGI claims.

The working as intended that Paul proclaimed in a podcast with Phil a couple of years back sounded way more like PGI's usual cop out and programming hard that we've heard for many years now.

[PhoenixFire55]

Dar1ng One, on 10 September 2019 - 11:28 PM, said:

Is MWO a "finished" product?

Minimally Viable Product^TM.