In a sweet irony, given I published a post about Evaluating kernel level anti-cheats as a consumer, some aspect of VALORANT, likely Vanguard, ended up soft bricking my internet whenever I tried to play the game. While this was a soft brick - only happened when playing the game, and it would fix itself after exiting the game - it was incredibly frustrating to run into. Here is what I learned and what eventually fixed it.
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If you're interested in revisiting Minecraft from the Beta era, here are some notes. MultiMC is a third-party Minecraft launcher that allows you to have multiple separate instances of Minecraft versions, with a great interface to manage it. It isn't required, but I'd recommend using it. It is trivial to use play Minecraft 1.7.3 itself. The official launcher & MultiMC can be used to easily spin up an instance. My primary issue with playing older versions of Minecraft is the janky mouse input: it frequently skips & accelerates unnaturally, making it difficult to control.
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Cheating is an increasingly endemic problem to multiplayer video games on PCs, and as a response, we've seen the "Cambrian explosion" of anti-cheats designed to combat this situation. However, a vast majority of these products are choosing to run with the highest privileges possible on your system: the kernel-level. This choice has caused a lot of scrutiny from customers over the possible ramifications of this decision on their usage of their computer: particularly, over the privacy, security and stability of their PCs.
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Recently, CS professionals STYKO and EliGE have shared the fact that they have employed the services of aim coaches. Such moves are relatively new to Counter-Strike: while aiming is considered an important aspect to Counter-Strike, professionals usually improve their skill in this venture with deathmatching, or training with Counter-Strike maps such as "aimbotz", or full bespoke suites such as Refrag (EliGE partly owns Refrag, after acquiring it from ESEA). CS, as is typical, is late to the party.
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The mundanity of seeing online CS during the pandemic has electrified a transition that was already happening - the end of tier 1 online events. The leagues were the last victims, with FLASHPOINT's last event setting the framework for future online events. But the pandemic also unearthed a deeper scar tissue within the scene - the economics stopped making sense a long time ago. The industry has tried to paper over this with agreements such as the Louvre Agreement - tournament organisers would sell a fixed number of slots, which would guarantee you access to tier 1 offline events.
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North American Counter-Strike is dead, or in the middle of dying. Team Liquid, the prototypical NA team, now fields a primarily European roster, while Cloud9's roster is Russian. The remaining stalwarts in Complexity and EG are not competitive internationally. This death of the national team is framed as a problem endemic to North America. But one only needs to look in Europe to see that the concept as a whole, is withering away.
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CS:GO Majors are supposed to be a raucous celebration of the game. The place where the best teams duke it out, in a desperate bid to establish themselves as the apex predator. There is no such as a free round within this theatre. Yet Boston 2018 was the last CS:GO major final to ever reach 3 maps. 7 consecutive major finals, where the loser could not muster one map. What is going on?
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Counter-Strike events seem to have less energy than ever. There are no concrete statistics to back this up, but the symphonies of Counter-Strike sound more like a small chorale. The crowds have gone from ecstasy, to gentle applause. If this is the case, pointing to a single cause is difficult. To list a few changes: - The makeup of teams has changed, with fan favourites such as NiP, SK and fnatic having all disappeared from the high levels of the scene.
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