They've said they're going to disable FLoC. Still, this is one of the benefits of Firefox, it's not based on Chromium at all so it's out of the question.
I agree, this is essentially what I was getting at in my original comment. Counter Strike is not Valve's game. They picked it up when it got popular and since then have done less than the minimum. And despite this they generate hundreds of millions each year off of it? Perfect.
Yes, top players really are leaving CS for Valorant, though this is mainly limited to the NA scene afaik (two examples who were on top teams: Ethan[0] and nitr0[1]).
Other than that, it is mainly those washed players leaving, yes. Which still isn't healthy for the scene, and means the NA CS scene effectively doesn't exist any more (this isn't hyperbole, there are only two good NA teams right now and both were flown out to Europe by their orgs to compete there instead).
I think Valve's ineptitude in regards to CS:GO becomes easier to explain when considering their history with Counter Strike.
The game that became 1.6 wasn't even their game. It was a mod for the original Half Life and they hired the modders after it got popular.
Then CS:Source came around the same time HL2 did. That is to say it exists only because HL2 did, and Source is just HL2 with guns (lol). It was very divisive in the pro scene and the majority of professional players rejected it.
GO's history is even worse. It wasn't even meant to exist at first; Hidden Path were porting CS:Source to consoles and Valve decided that it could live as its own game. They release it in 2012 and, by all accounts, it sucks. Nobody plays it. Things begin to change when they create a virtual economy (skins) and admittedly do actually improve the game a fair bit. It's only when the game sees those improvements (2013-14?) that the pro scene finally moves from 1.6 to GO.
So the situation in 2021: The most popular game on Steam is a game which, according to Valve themselves, shares 75-85% of its code with a game released almost 20 years ago (Half Life 2), and which everybody knows is a complete and utter mess under the hood (thanks in part due to the source code getting leaked, also thanks to ex-devs sharing their stories of their time working on CS:GO). This along with Valve being notorious for just not having the internal incentive structures to get bugs fixed (hence GO's spaghetti code)... it's easier to understand (but not excuse!) Valve's attitude for serious security flaws like these.
I am similar to you in that I have about 1000 hours in CS:GO, and I've spent many 1000s of hours watching the pro scene. I love Counter Strike, but with Valve the way it is, I don't see how these fundamental flaws will ever get fixed. Look at how they're allowing Valorant to decimate the North American CS scene, just like they allowed Overwatch to take from TF2's player base back in 2016.
They have https://dendrite.matrix.org, and they use Dendrite to test new features (like Spaces). But its issue is it's not feature complete so I don't think it sees that much usage.
I'm excited for Dendrite, their new homeserver written in Go which will hopefully solve at least some of these performance issues. I've hosted a Dendrite server for a couple months now, but haven't had the chance to use it much.
With that said, it's been disappointing to see how slow development has been on it. Hopefully it picks up and they can get it out of beta this year.
The outrageous profit Valve make from skins and the like is only half the story imo, their internal structure is the rest. Some of the stories ex-devs share from that place are just... idk, they explain the company’s apparent ineptitude
Huh. I guess this'll be what pushes me to finally figure out a proper backup system for my server, so I can trust it with all my photos etc, and remove them from "The Cloud"
Their silence has been so frustrating. Not even any acknowledgment from the team -- they just keep releasing updates and posting to the forums as if nothing happened.
It would be a lot easier to believe this was due to a court order if Signal's attitude wasn't always like this. I call them "the Apple of open source" because they rarely (if ever?) accept PRs from outside Signal, don't have a public roadmap they share, and the development process is all done behind closed doors (commits are made public only when the associated build has been released). These are all unique to Signal afaik versus its competitors (Matrix and the like), and it's made me grow to hate it.
Keeping the server's source closed is probably the final straw for me, a long time Signal-apologist.
I’ve already seen websites which I (cynically) assume exploit this new-found aversion I and many others have to green buttons in cookie pop-ups by using differing colour schemes, e.g. https://hltv.org, whose “Allow all cookies” button is actually blue, whilst “Allow selection” is green.
“TrustArc” is a funny name considering it and its pals have obliterated any trust I had in this stuff.