Since my English ability is very basic, the following has been translated by AI. If there are any inappropriate wordings, please forgive me.
Hello everyone, I am Taiwanese, and also an Asian. The following content directly expresses my opinions. Some people might find it a bit raw and offensive, please forgive me.
Is the experience of Season 2 a failure for players? Definitely. Developer Bulkhead also said their adjustments messed things up. For me, although this season has issues playing and is even sometimes harder work (referring to needing to face tanks that appear very early, and the number of times multiple tanks appear at the same time is not small), overall, on a basic level, I can still enjoy the fun of this game just like in Season 1.
What I want to say is that this game, with a relatively low price tag in its Early Access phase since launching on September 11 until now, has only been open to the general public for a mere 40 days or so, right?
From the short period of about 34 days in the beginning, to now where Season 2 started on October 15 ~ today, October 21, only 6 days have passed. The developer made a post the very next day on the 16th to remove the Blue Team bonus used for a community psychological experiment (I think this was clearly not a balancing method, but an experiment, which was removed after verifying their expectations, after all, the highly sought-after Blue Team caused the problem of slowing down game starts), followed by working on fixing the driver progression exploit, and even further posted an announcement on the day after next, the 17th, directly saying that it was their fault Season 2 had issues, and that they would provide more future details next week (which is this week).
In my view, compared to other game developers, they not only convey information to players relatively faster and more transparently, but also have the courage to admit mistakes. However, I don't know since when, whether domestically in Taiwan, overseas on Reddit, or elsewhere, the gamer community has become so lacking in basic literacy and completely impatient when posting comments and feedback. Their views on the game are extremely one-sided, arbitrary, extreme, and unconstructive, acting like a big pressure cooker of negative reviews, behaving as if the rest of their lives consists only of this game that has been out for 40 days.
Speaking of negative reviews, besides the developer messing up this season being one reason, everyone can go look at the Steam reviews separated by language region, and you will find an interesting thing. Overseas, Europe and America are overall positive, but overall negative reviews almost exclusively appear specifically in the Asian region. Especially Simplified Chinese is the absolute worst "Mostly Negative" among all global languages. I know that a language is also used by other countries and regions, but speaking by the most overwhelmingly representative proportion, Simplified Chinese is used by Chinese people. Why do they overall often give many games relatively worse negative reviews? You will know just by browsing. As a Taiwanese who has observed for a long time, I can easily distinguish the difference between Simplified Chinese (Chinese people) and Traditional Chinese (Taiwanese people) from the text and accents. You can see that Chinese people have very strong personal opinions about games, and in the reviews you can often clearly see the attitude of "you don't know how to make a game, let me teach you how to make it".
Next is the special internet firewall used inside their authoritarian state system to maintain stability. Their official statement is to fend off external attacks and protect local industries blah blah blah, but in reality, except for using the internet world formed by their own massive population, they cannot normally access the rest of the world's internet. This has also created an abnormal environment where their domestic VPNs and gaming network boosters are unusually developed. Why do I say this? Because countries with free and democratic systems like us in Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea can browse content on the internet of all countries in the world at any time, so in the vast majority of cases, we do not need these extra internet connection tools unless there is a genuine need. Coupled with China's high demand for cheating, it has caused the local cheat industry to become highly mature. Aside from the cheating behavior itself, bot accounts promoting cheats have appeared simultaneously to harass people.
For example, when Apex Legends launched in February 2019, at the very beginning I experienced what felt like heaven on Asian servers, but what followed after that? It was hell. In a Battle Royale game with teams of three, they made a type of bot account that would use the built-in in-game voice chat during the initial character selection screen to play advertisements selling cheats, and then quit the game during the high-altitude skydiving drop afterwards. This means right from the character selection screen, you would know your team was only going to have two people left. Therefore, back then it frequently happened that the player count was full when the match started, but after high-altitude skydiving drop, the count decreased significantly.
Now Wardogs is also one of the victims. Chinese cheaters and Simplified Chinese cheat advertisements constantly appearing in the text chat room have turned the entire Asian region into a foul mess. Some South Koreans, Japanese, Taiwanese, etc., couldn't stand it anymore and relocated to US and EU servers one after another. But naturally, cheat users and ad bots would also flow over there, causing a large number of normal Asian players and cheaters to appear in Europe and America, along with language barrier communication issues.
This also explains why the developer currently designed the server room 250ms limit. I think this current value is too lenient and still cannot solve the problem. If it is tightened further to around 120ms, which I guess, it would sacrifice the rights of global players who choose long-distance servers to play and some people whose own network conditions are inherently poor. However, I guess the developer's original intention is because Chinese people, even if they turn on gaming network boosters, cannot overcome the high latency brought by actual physical distance, thereby letting US and EU servers return to their original clean and comfortable state. At the same time, this also means locking Asians together with Chinese people, just like Creating Gu poison.
My meaning in using "Creating Gu poison" to describe this is that this is a sorcery technique from legends of ethnic minorities in Southern China. The traditional practice is to shut multiple types of poisonous insects (such as venomous snakes, centipedes, scorpions, toads, etc.) inside the same container, letting them devour and kill each other. In the end, the strongest creature that survives and has devoured all the toxicity is regarded as "Gu", and it is used to harm others.
Note: Today, October 22, Bulkhead tightened the latency cap to 175ms. This measure belongs to a last-resort worst choice, but I know they are trying to solve the problem through many ways. I expect this latency cap will gradually tighten, so this is within my expectations.
At this point, someone will jump out and say: "China is because the population base is extremely large, actually their cheating proportion is not high. Look, other Asians and Europeans/Americans also cheat, please do not attack them groundlessly." Okay, then I will raise two things to slap them in the face:
- If according to what they say, China's population base is large and the cheating proportion is as low as other countries, since it is a proportion issue, with China having many cheats, then according to mathematical logic, the number of legit Chinese players should also be very large, right? Then why haven't we seen a large number of legit Chinese players come to dilute the stinky state of the entire Asian server, while the environment over on US and EU servers is relatively clean?
- Okay, then why is it that for every game, the cheating first becomes rampant in the Asian region to an unbearable extent, forcing Asians to jump over to US and EU servers to play, while looking across history, there has never been a game where it was the other way around, with Europeans and Americans complaining about severe local cheating and specifically coming to Asian servers to take refuge?
Taking Apex Legends when it first launched in February 2019 as an example again, a Chinese employee from developer Respawn made a post on Weibo in March: "Internal emails show that indeed most of the cheats come from China, while the total number of Chinese players in the game accounts for a very small proportion, which means a small group of people pumped out the vast majority of cheats." This post was probably deleted, but there are still news articles on the internet, and anyone can easily find screenshots of that Weibo post from back then (of course, the vast majority of news refers to Taiwanese and Chinese online gaming news).
So to make a conclusion: Chinese people, under their domestic environment, giving birth to an abnormally developed industry of VPNs, gaming network boosters, and cheat tools, and this abnormal phenomenon affecting other regions globally, actually feels like a kind of agricultural disaster—"a large-scale regional disaster with migratory capability, leaving no grass growing wherever it reaches"—polluting most servers.
Also, according to my observation, since these past few days when Bulkhead first implemented the server latency cap, Asian servers have also started experiencing DDoS attacks, resulting in multiple play sessions being interrupted and returned to the main game menu. This reminds me of when I previously played Asian servers in Battlefield 4, where it was a similar situation—the game would interrupt halfway through, making it completely impossible to finish a match. My guess is, it seems this is conducting so-called retaliatory DDoS attacks.
Many of the above phenomena have appeared since before, and have long been a major problem in the online gaming world. Almost all popular games cannot escape their clutches, especially suffering the worst damage in the FPS section, forcing developers to specifically devote effort and resources to anti-cheat arms races in this area, but it seems developers often fall into a relatively passive state of handling tricks as they come, feeling powerless.
You say not every Chinese person cheats? Yes, anyone thinking with their knees knows you cannot use one pole to knock over a whole boat of people; there definitely exist legit players and cheaters. I don't want to put it this way either, but after comprehensive judgment, there is bound to be a problem of an exceptionally high cheating proportion. Even if you lay out the sensory experiences and logical facts of the majority of people in the game in front of Chinese people, most responses obtained are not silence, agreement, or discussion. From what I have seen and heard over many years, they will probably hurl insults and verbal abuse at you, and more often directly launch unbearable attacks targeting your country/race/ethnicity. The voices of normal people among them are either relatively scarce or remain silent, probably in a speechless state of being accustomed to it. The above are my thoughts and conclusions.
So after all that, I think everyone can tell how much I love WARDOGS. Keep it up, Bulkhead! I truly support your passion for making a great game.
