Video game companies have gotten very creative when it comes to punishing cheaters, from cutting their parachutes’ strings in Call of Duty to blowing them up in Grand Theft Auto Online. But Valve just set a new benchmark for trolling players: sending them permabans wrapped up like Christmas presents.
The video of the loser opening the ‘gift’ made me laugh harder than I have in forever.
This is some epic level trolling.
Anyways. Just wanted to share the holiday cheer.
According to the video it’s not a permaban, he’s just banned until January 18th.
Not sure where you saw that, but the video where the gift is opened says permanently banned.
The guy says in the video: “What? I got banned? 'Til 1/18? What?”
Maybe that’s Jan. 2118.
If you watch in full screen, the red text at the bottom says banned until 1/18/2038
I like mine better.
Which is of course the year 2038 problem when Unix runs out of numbers to measure time. A little like the y2k thing.
Why do videos of this exist? For what reason was anyone recording from the start?
This smells like a set-up.
Streamer on Twitch. There’s programs that let you snip the last X minutes of a Twitch stream as an uploadable clip, so someone watching thought it was funny and snipped it.
Okay. I see it now. Jan 18, 2038. So 14-ish years which is effectively the lifetime of the game.
More than that. It’s also the last day of the universe, according to the 32-bit Unix time epoch. The calendar inside many computers rolls back over to 1907 when this value is exceeded.
So, this may be Steam’s way of saying “to the last day that can possibly be stored in our systems.”
I was unaware of that interesting bit of trivia. So the Y2K bug, but with actual teeth. I have no doubt there are plenty of legacy systems out there still running 32-bit nix kernels.
Ignorance fought in a lighthearted thread!
Correction: 1901, not 1907. Trying to multitask, which I am not nearly as good at as Unix is. Although my internal calendar won’t overflow in less than two decades.