I used to work at Valve -- on the CS:GO team, no less -- although I left nearly a decade ago. I don't know what prompted this change but I have some suspicions. Even when I was there and the loot box system was new to CS:GO, there were concerns that a lot of trading was happening outside of the marketplace. The trading happened elsewhere because you can't have more than $300 in your Steam wallet (more than this would trigger some banking regulations that Valve wanted to avoid), so anything more valuable than that had to happen on 3rd party sites.
We didn't want this for three reasons: we'd lose out on the marketplace cut (10% of all sales I think?); we didn't want people grinding the game to earn money from rare drops; and finally because 3rd party trading ended up creating a lot of scams and therefore angry players.
At the time, we didn't see any way around it: we couldn't prevent people "gifting" items to each other, and despite omniscience and omnipotence in the game and Marketplace, we weren't confident that we could rejigger the drop rates and rarities to lower the maximum perceived value of the fanciest knife to be under the $300 limit.
I suspect that the CS:GO team finally decided to do something about it and chose this. If the team is anything like I left it, they probably modeled this extensively (we had data on nearly every game ever played in CS:GO and complete Marketplace data), and discussed the change with the TF2 and DOTA teams, who also have to deal with this, and decided that the short-term fury of a small fraction of the playerbase was worth it. I wonder if TF2 and DOTA are having similar problems and, if so, whether this change will be rolled out for those games, too.
Thank you for sharing your experience and perspective.
> we'd lose out on the marketplace cut (10% of all sales I think?); we didn't want people grinding the game to earn money from rare drops;
My naive understanding is that by having skins be worth tangible and significant value; this was the primary motivator for players to purchase keys to unbox cases, which was the dominant direct revenue generator for CS.
I would guess that the revenue generated from keys (and cases, from the market cut) eclipses the potential market cut revenue from limiting the value of items to the marketplace limit (now $2k I believe), as the consequence of that is significantly less demand in keys and skins as a whole.
Without the prospect of extremely expensive chase items, the $2.50 + ${case} slot machine pull loses its jackpot. With a knife being dropped once every 400~ unboxes, the EV of a knife would be $1000 + 400*${case}. Obviously the actual EV would be lower in practice, but the point I'm trying to understand is how the monetization model works if skins are any less expensive than they were.
> My naive understanding is that by having skins be worth tangible and significant value; this was the primary motivator for players to purchase keys to unbox cases, which was the dominant direct revenue generator for CS.
Yes. The Valve philosophy on the cosmetics marketplace (we called it "the economy") is that you distribute random rewards to players and they can trade and sell and discover the value of those goods for themselves. Obviously, this was done to make money for Valve but, in theory, it's also good for the players. It allows people who have things they don't want to sell them to people who want them. And all this buying and selling happens between Steam wallets (and there is no off-ramp) so at the end of the day, it's all just profit for Valve.
But above all we wanted people to play CS:GO because it was a fun game. We didn't want to turn it into some kind of grim pachinko parlor, with players grinding out matches just to get random loot box drops. So you have to balance the potentially real dollar random rewards so that they're a fun surprise but not economically attractive enough to become a job.
It’s just a weird side effect that’s surprisingly difficult to prevent - online games have had gold farmers for pretty much as long as there have been online games with gold.
I’ve run into idle bot accounts several times while playing and it’s infuriating. Mainly in the arms race mode.
Players can leave and join that mode at any time. So the bots will constantly be joining and leaving. if the bots manage to become 50% of the game they will vote kick all the remaining players. I’ve had several in progress matches interrupted because a few of the actual players bailed and the bots managed to take over the lobby.
Runescape tried this back in 2007 along with completely disabling PvP; it was a very unpopular change for the vast majority of players who were not buying items.
I stopped playing the game around that time, so I have to thank Jagex for getting my school grades up.
The grand exchange (auction house) and the trade restrictions that landed at the same time pretty much killed the game for me.
Prior to the G.E., RuneScape had a thriving, complex economy. Players made money transporting goods from harvesting areas, either on behalf of someone or by paying independents for their goods so the independents could avoid going back to town. Players made money buying and selling goods - geographic arbitrage was very much a thing, as well as across time, and also across servers. People made money turning cheaply available goods into more expensive goods.
When the G.E. landed, it basically killed most of the economy. Harvesting stuff could still be profitable, and players could still make money transporting goods from harvesting areas to the nearest bank so people grinding levels wouldn't have to leave, but basically everything else became irrelevant. There's no point in selling anything anywhere yourself when you could take it to the G.E. and get a sale with no effort.
Less of an issue but still sad, the trading restrictions also killed the generosity of veteran players. 'drop parties', where a rich player leads a group around town dropping valuable items, died off as valuable items would no longer appear in the ground for others. Gifting people stuff was no longer possible if it exceeded (fairly low) thresholds. Very sad.
How is that any different? It would be fine if schools banned children from bringing cash to school. If there were a multibillion dollar bullying and gambling market going on at the school, I'd demand it.
My issue with that is that the kids are losing something because someone else is doing something. Very similar to one kid being disorderly in class and everyone losing the recess.
Imagine being a kid in that room and being annoyed by the kid being disorderly, because you want to learn. Now you lost your rights because of that kid. You never did what he was doing, you never contributed to the disorder he caused, if anything you were also victimized by it. And then the power figure in this equation goes and chops away your rights along with his. First lesson in unfairness where the wet grass is burnt alongside the dry grass, because to the powers that be, the rights and allowances you had are mere acceptable collateral damage. Suppressing dissent was more important than protecting what is yours.
Are these schools in Stalin's soviet union? One kid causes disorder so all kids must be purged to make sure there won't be another naughty child in the future?
Believe it or not, teachers (your sao-called "power figures" here) are generally not a bunch of untrained dumbshits unable to think of kids with more granularity than as the entire collective group making up a class. They have the skills and training to identify the sources of disruptions along with ample resources available for correcting them without calling forth damnation and hellfire on everything in a 5 mile radius. Hammers are awesome, but it's not all that hard to grab a scalpel when a situation calls for a scalpel.
With trading. Market price is not only price. With skins there are lot of preferences. Starting for weapons they apply, not all people use same guns as much. And they might prefer one style of skin over an other skin.
If you are not in to extract most possible value, you might trade a more expensive skin for weapon you do not use in style you do not use for less expensive one for weapon you use more in style you really like.
This sounded odd to me as well. Most lootbox games today has no trading at all - you can pay to unlock items for your own account, and that's it. I suspect the more accurate way to explain it is Valve successfully prevented authority interventions than this being more consumer friendly.
One of the difficulties -- and one that is currently a big problem in LLM research -- is that comparisons with or evaluations of commercial models are very expensive. I co-wrote a paper recently and we spent more than $10,000 on various SOTA commercial models in order to evaluate our research. We could easily (an cheaply) show that we were much better than open-weight models, but we knew that reviewers would ding us if we didn't compare to "the best."
Even aside from the expense (which penalizes universities and smaller labs), I feel it's a bad idea to require academic research to compare itself to opaque commercial offerings. We have very little detail on what's really happening when OpenAI for example does inference. And their technology stack and model can change at any time, and users won't know unless they carefully re-benchmark ($$$) every time you use the model. I feel that academic journals should discourage comparisons to commercial models, unless we have very precise information about the architecture, engineering stack, and training data they use.
In your rush to condemn it, did you actually read the linked article? Let me quote:
"These tests [...] were “supposedly applicable to both white and black prospective voters who couldn’t prove a certain level of education” (typically up to the fifth grade). Yet they were “in actuality disproportionately administered to black voters.”
Additionally, many of the tests were rigged so that registrars could give potential voters an easy or a difficult version, and could score them differently as well. For example, the Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement describes a test administered in Alabama that is so entirely subjective that it measures the registrar’s shrewdness and cunning more than anything else."
The bad news is this "enlightened racism apologist" trend seems to be on the uptick. The good news is that they're so unfathomably ignorant of basic historical facts (as you demonstrate) that it's easy to prove they're actually mere average-intelligence racism apologists.
> I've never been involved in films, but from my own experience, the answer is a strong 'yes'
I worked in film visual effects for a decade and the answer is a strong 'no.'
In my case, we were in it for the enjoyment of the work and the craft. We didn't write the scripts, and the quality of the film wasn't our job. We were hired to make the best effects we could and if we delivered quality, we were happy. I'm sure a similar attitude works in other aspects of film (or any large collective enterprise, really).
Data augmentation in CPU-space is often compute-light, but requires rapid access to memory. There are libraries (like NVIDIA's Dali) that can do augmentation on the GPU, but this takes up GPU resources that could be used by training. Having a multi-core CPU with fast caches is a good compromise.
The effects of relativity cause that thought experiment to fall apart quickly. I build two clocks, and send one to alpha centauri and back in a spaceship. When the travelling clock gets back to Earth it will be showing a different time (because of time dilation during acceleration). What does "the same clock reading" mean then?
Yes of course they won't show the same time if you bring them back. But the point is to argue that it is possible for there to be a "right now," as defined by what the traveling clock shows, outside of our light cone.
I used to work in film, although not in the accountancy/deal-making aspect. Film tax breaks are direct discounts on money spent. If you make a film in Georgia, for example, you get a transferable tax credit (20-30%) on money spent in the state. It's a short term deal (productions usually only last a few months), and is immediate in effect. There's no "spend a billion of public money and maybe we'll hire some people" shenanigans like the Foxconn plant in Wisconsin.
I have friends who work in film and have heard about the way the productions play fast and loose with "local hires" that then get reported as jobs created.
The prestige of films being made in their state keep the subsidies rolling in but there are many great "bang for your buck" subsidies states could be making that just aren't sexy.
These studies seem to focus primarily on the direct economic impact of moviemaking, but seem to not deal at all with tourism effects - and these can be significant, from benign tourism like with Star Wars [1] to outright madness like with the Breaking Bad house [2].
Yea that's fair, but I would imagine the tourism effect, although real, happens for a tiny % of overall productions.
Much like incentives for NFL stadiums, it just doesn't seem like the public gets the benefit they are promised in all the glossy announcement spreads
And to be clear I support the government subsidizing the arts like film and I miss when my state had a subsidy and a lot of famous shows/movies were filmed in places I knew. I just haven't seen the data to back up the "impact" claimed.
Having worked in film in the US, I developed a deep hatred of film tax breaks because they work. "Work" in the sense that studios will chase them, and they make it harder for companies outside a tax-advantaged location to compete and make money.
We didn't want this for three reasons: we'd lose out on the marketplace cut (10% of all sales I think?); we didn't want people grinding the game to earn money from rare drops; and finally because 3rd party trading ended up creating a lot of scams and therefore angry players.
At the time, we didn't see any way around it: we couldn't prevent people "gifting" items to each other, and despite omniscience and omnipotence in the game and Marketplace, we weren't confident that we could rejigger the drop rates and rarities to lower the maximum perceived value of the fanciest knife to be under the $300 limit.
I suspect that the CS:GO team finally decided to do something about it and chose this. If the team is anything like I left it, they probably modeled this extensively (we had data on nearly every game ever played in CS:GO and complete Marketplace data), and discussed the change with the TF2 and DOTA teams, who also have to deal with this, and decided that the short-term fury of a small fraction of the playerbase was worth it. I wonder if TF2 and DOTA are having similar problems and, if so, whether this change will be rolled out for those games, too.