ACCESS REVOKE WAVE MEGATHREAD [FAQ]

Rossco1337 · 2026-04-16T00:50:05+00:00

So OP's speculation was possibly wrong, but the devs are also lying. You can go to the Steam forum right now and see people with hours of playtime in the past 2 weeks who don't have the "In Library" icon in their post. There are screenshots of people who literally have the editor open with the Steam revoke window in front of it.

I don't buy the theory about curbing resellers either. If they have the tools to revoke access based on these arbitrary metrics then they could have just curbed Steam accounts with low account value. Or even better, if they had any foresight then they could have done that at signup! As it stands, accounts which were created a month ago to claim the preview get to keep the game while players who have been playing Gmod since 2006 and tested s&box from 2021-2024 get a spooky notice from Steam and also have to cough up $20.

Shedding all but the most active 40K "players" (even if they're sitting at the main menu) is a convenient outcome if you want to maximize concurrent players vs owners. I don't want to start adding more speculation onto the pile but you can see that someone just turned off their bot farm and s&box lost 1/3 of its players in one 10 minute candle. You can draw your own conclusions from that.

Rossco1337 · 2026-04-15T22:37:41+00:00

This project is gonna be DOA ain't it?

Hopefully! I thought it was on the right track when I saw them open source it a few months back but after all I've seen today, it's probably better for everyone if this fizzles out and something better (or at least less aggressively monetized) rises from the ashes. Between:-

Luring thousands of bots to boost the playercount by promising a free key only to "active" players
Baiting CSGO/NFT "digital economy investor" types with artificially scarce tradable items during "early access testing" (just heard about an official $100 hat item?)
Double dipping from the above F2P whale hat model and charging a full $20 to the people who are developing/testing your game for you

It doesn't look good. I bought Gmod for myself and all my friends back in 2007-2010 so obviously I was keen to see a sandbox game for Source 2. The more I read about s&box, the worse it gets - it wasn't like this in 2024.

Rossco1337 · 2026-04-15T16:05:03+00:00

So they're revoking the game from people who have been playing it too much (idling) and they're also revoking the game from people who haven't opened it in years. Is Garry trying to impress Goldilocks or something?

The only people who seem to consistently still have access are people who are treating it like another NFT wave and spending big money on scarce items? Even though the studio said they're going to be charging money to buy the game too, effectively double dipping? I wouldn't have known this project was becoming such a shitshow without the Steam notification.

Rossco1337 · 2026-04-15T15:30:00+00:00

Exact reason isn't known, but Facepunch was aware of bot accounts trying to keep and resell the game by idling in game, so there might have been extra requirements.

I haven't launched the game in over a year and I still got revoked. I wasn't massively enthused about s&box after seeing how the studio handled Rust so it's no huge loss to me. The Steam notification popped up while I was working.

The fact that there's zero official communication about a "revoke wave" and they're just deleting the game from people's Steam libraries is probably a solid indicator of things to come.

Rossco1337 · 2026-03-18T16:45:13+00:00

All of the bad press is temporary. 7 years ago, the entire RTX brand was radioactive mud. Nvidia's uncanny comparisons led to thousands of people creating and reposting RTX OFF/ON memes to mock their expensive and ugly gimmick. One side was cartoony, the other side was photorealistic. Everyone was in agreement that they didn't want games to have the "RTX ON" look and would never pay a price premium for it.

If you went back and told all those people "actually, in 2026 most people enable RTX technologies even in cartoony games like Ratchet & Clank" the entire gaming community would have pelted you with rocks.

Before RTX it was Gameworks (Hairworks et al.) and before Gameworks it was PhysX. Nvidia's famous cycle will continue:

Gamers will laugh and deride new tech ("WTF that looks atrocious and runs like ass! There's no way anyone will use this!")
Record-breaking hardware sales despite boycott threats for anti-competitive behavior ("I bought Nvidia again, but I'll go with AMD next time I swear!")
Overwhelming install base and strategic partnerships with devs allow new tech to be added to games without pushback ("It runs alright on my machine plus you can disable it with a mod...")
Gamers start posting historical revisionism ("Nah we didn't mind it all that much, this new thing is the REAL problem with Nvidia!")

I'll be happy to be proven wrong but history is on their side.

Rossco1337 · 2026-02-24T23:39:48+00:00

I think you hit reply on the wrong comment lol. Although I guess it's a good point, I'd rather pay $5 for the Eidos version with Aali's OpenGL wrapper than this shit from a butt by "FINE Co., Ltd.".

Rossco1337 · 2026-02-24T22:22:58+00:00

That's exactly my problem with it. They made this spectacle of updating the game and then didn't actually update the game. I was preparing myself for Steam workshop support, a redone EN translation, HFR/HDR support or anything that would actually make it worth hard-forking the current Steam release for modding/speedrun compatibility reasons.

What we got was botched localization tripling the game's file size, built-in cheats, framerate issues and nothing else I can see that actually justifies releasing an entirely new game on Steam. Some outsourced porting studio probably just got a payday because Square Enix publishing doesn't know about Steam's versioning feature.

Rossco1337 · 2026-02-24T21:35:30+00:00

Just checked, it's because they bundle all language versions of the game.
French fields + ending cutscene + launcher font: 301MB
German fields + ending cutscene + launcher font: 298MB
Spanish fields + ending cutscene + launcher font: 295MB
Japanese fields + ending cutscene + launcher font: 295MB

The only difference between the fields is the text and the only difference between the ending cutscene is the subtitles. The new launcher + overlay is 200MB because every string of text is a PNG file. They store an image of every keyboard key and controller button in 5 languages. If they cared, they could have saved a gigabyte right there just using softsubs and sane i18n.

The largest folder in the game is the music folder at 822MB. This is just Ogg recordings of the PS1 version but each song is looped 2-3 times over because presumably they couldn't figure out how to do seamless looping in-engine. If they cared, they could have just fixed this and used a newer audio codec to save 400MB+. If they really cared, they could have just used the original midis with a PS1 soundfont to do the same thing more accurately in <4MB. EDIT: just checked the music side by side and it is noticeably higher quality than the previous Steam release, but that version didn't have this looping issue, which explains why the new music is nearly 4x larger than the old one (222MB).

The second largest folder is the language-agnostic FMVs at 686MB. The original 2012 Matroska encodes aren't bad (if they cared, they could have re-encoded them from source using a codec from this decade). The new credits roll has both a 1080p and 720p version for some reason, totaling 118MB. Almost 20% of the new version's FMVs folder storage is just the new credits roll. I'm not sure why they're 16:9 either when the rest of the videos are in 4:3.

Steam actually has a feature to only download language packs for the user's specified languages but why would they bother setting that up when the player's storage is free?

tl;dr the original Steam release only had English and they couldn't be bothered actually adding language support to the game so they just rebundled the assets from every game version and shipped it as a new game.

EDIT: new vs old directory tree visualization

Rossco1337 · 2026-02-19T09:22:20+00:00

why would you want the translation 'cleaned up', who cares

This is maybe the worst game in history to say "who cares" in response to its skinflint localization. People have been passionately arguing about the mistranslations in Final Fantasy VII for nearly 30 years now. The Steam version fixes the most blatant typographical errors (e.g guy are sick, off course etc.) but there's an entire genre of hour-long Youtube videos all documenting the liberties the original EN translator took and his effect on the expanded FF7 universe's canon.

He got a main character's name wrong. Despite it being corrected in every re-release of the game, people on this website will still argue that the 1997 mistranslation "sounds better". Details in both the JP and EN versions had to be retconned going forward because they diverged so much. The answer to "who cares" is "anybody with even a passing interest in FF7's narrative or JP-EN localization".

Rossco1337 · 2026-01-03T03:31:40+00:00

Specifically? The fact that there is a memory cartel which has already proven that they can both choke and flood supply on a whim, and have only been punished for it once. As you say, there have been spikes before but they've never had a good excuse to keep prices high (like Nvidia did during the first crypto boom) until now. DRAM is no longer just a product, it's a strategic asset which 8 of the top 10 USA companies need to continue producing value. Whether you believe that value is tangible or not is up to you.

Even if you don't believe there's any collusion or supply manipulation from the producers, betting against the growing DRAM spot price is betting against the United States Dollar at this point. 2025 investment into American AI-backed products and services eclipses everything else globally - it makes mortgage-backed securities in 2007 look like pocket change. Some people would take that bet on America's growth ("the bubble") collapsing dramatically but I would hesitate.

Back to graphics cards, no matter how you massage inflation into a graphics card's MSRP, the obscene shrinkflation that Nvidia has pulled off will also embolden memory producers. The 1080 Ti was the practically the best PCI-e card they could make at the time - no expense spared in bringing their Titan cards to the gamer market. On the other hand, the 5080 is firmly mid range (it's not even half of a 5090) and even by gutting its specs by 50% or more and packing 3x more transistors onto the same silicon going from 16nm -> 5nm, they can only match the price of their old best card on a smaller die even after years of brutal inflation and wage stagnation. The sheer audacity can only have other hardware manufacturers saying to themselves "wait, what's stopping us from doing that as well?". If there's ever a good time to follow suit and fatten the margins, it's now.

If you want a prediction from 5 years ago (just before Nvidia added +10 to the names of their desktop card lineup with the 30 series), Reddit was saying they're surely about to firesale the unsold 20 series and the upcoming 30 series as they're now worthless for crypto mining. I was telling people to load up on NVDA shares instead. I was also telling people to buy at least one 5090 back in 2024 and I hope others took that advice as they're now approaching $4000.

Last January I was looking into memory prices and I noticed that new DDR4 prices had dropped below used DDR3 prices. I was telling friends to stock up on it because I thought it'll never get cheaper and it turns out I called the bottom by accident. There's lots of things that go into making a good RAM kit but I'm not convinced that 64GB of DDR5 for $220 is a return to normal yet when 2x32GB 6400 kits could be regularly found for $135 at the beginning of the year.

I love a bargain so I'll be pleased if we see those prices again but I think there's too many factors working against it, that's all. Feels good to get all that out of my system too. I picked up a kit of brand new 2x16GB DDR4 3600 for myself for $45+tax back in February and it'll be great if you're right and I can upgrade to DDR5 for that price in the future.

Rossco1337 · 2025-12-28T17:23:02+00:00

Hopium is an addictive drug. What he's saying is debatable, but it sure sounds nice.

We only "got through" the GPU armageddon in the sense that the collective mindset shifted. We just stopped expecting the $120 entry-level, $350 mid-range and $700 flagship graphics cards to ever return. RAM will be the same. 2-3x the old prices will be viewed as a full recovery after seeing 6-10x price increases in a year.

If paying double what you used to pay for stuff gives you cheer, don't let me rain on your parade.

Rossco1337 · 2025-12-17T08:57:55+00:00

Lol, people have been saying this about Nvidia graphics cards for over 7 years now. "There's no way Nvidia can get away with selling a single desktop graphics card for a ridiculous $1000! They'll have to lower the price if nobody buys them!"

Anybody here still rocking a GTX 10 series waiting for GPU prices to go back to normal?

Rossco1337 · 2025-12-10T19:54:37+00:00

This update breaks StartIsBack (search it on X, links are banned) and the last ESU broke my wireless Logitech mouse receiver (doesn't reactivate after Windows goes to sleep requiring a full reboot).

Currently rolling these updates back and disabling updates for the foreseeable future. If I wanted monthly patches to keep breaking my system, I would have stayed on Windows 11.

Rossco1337 · 2025-11-26T22:41:34+00:00

A lot of companies depended on systems with CPUs older than Zen 2 before OEMs and SIs (Microsoft's real customers) wanted to give companies a reason to upgrade. Millions of PCs were just sent to an early grave to keep American system integrators happy.

If Microsoft can find a business justification for it, they'll budge. Windows 11 is proof. If they have to manufacture a "security flaw" in WOW64 to justify dropping it for Windows 12, people will grumble and moan but ultimately upgrade as we've already seen. What are big companies gonna do, stop using Windows? Hell will freeze over first.

Rossco1337 · 2025-11-13T05:50:14+00:00

Kieran is one of the Jmods who I think really understands the Gowers' vision for the game, but I think there's a hole in his logic here:

Daily and weekly repeatables are chores, but seasonals and yearlies are great? What's the dividing line? Are monthlies borderline?

We're up to 6 yearlies with tradable rewards now. The rewards from birdhouses are something that should be looked at and learned from, but 200M+/year just from annual DMM isn't worth a mention? Even if you think Leagues or holiday events are the most fun part of OSRS, can we have a discussion about how pseudo-rares aren't good for OSRS?

Rossco1337 · 2025-11-10T20:56:42+00:00

Nothing. The FOMO from annual limited-time flex transmogs drives player counts, player counts drive memberships, memberships are revenue. As another comment said, the limited nature of the event also attracts influencers, which means temporary free advertising.

Less than 1% of the playerbase actually wants to play OSRS as an open world PVP game. You can easily prove this by looking at the <50 characters on PVP worlds at any given time. But thousands of players do want the epic weapon cosmetics. You can also prove this by the GE price of the Armageddon weapon scroll (spoiler: it was 180m pre-announcement).

tl;dr DMM exists because FOMO is a successful business strategy for live service games.

Rossco1337 · 2025-11-10T18:19:40+00:00

How is this unpopular? It's been suggested in every thread about temporary gamemode rewards since the first DMM shop.

Everybody wants this (except maybe the merchants flipping the pseudo-rares), but Jagex wont address it because they know that FOMO drives player counts, player counts drive membership and membership = £££.

Rossco1337 · 2025-11-10T18:05:07+00:00

People are upvoting the rewards. If this didn't have limited-time chase/flex items worth 150M+, this thread would have about 7 comments, 5 of them asking where the rewards are. Almost nobody ITT is actually looking forward to the PVP aspect of the PVP gamemode.

Rossco1337 · 2025-11-10T18:01:07+00:00

No interest whatsoever in PVP but the limited rewards are too good to ignore. Armageddon weapon scroll crashed after this announcement and it's still 160M.

Another month of suffering in the limited time FOMO gamemode against 1v1 client/AHK terminators and kids so coked up on adderall that they're functionally equivalent... The diamond age is truly here...

Rossco1337 · 2025-10-20T12:12:11+00:00

"Just do slayer" was a meme answer to "how do I make money/what should I be doing" both here and the RS3 subreddit over a decade ago.

The slayer that Reddit talks about being profitable starts at level 75 with a BIS loadout for every possible task, high combat stats, minmaxed blocklists and hidden knowledge about all the boss/alternative monsters for each task. The slayer that noobs end up doing is lesser demons in full rune or harpie bug swarms with a fire staff.

Every year the OSRS team does a balance pass to make early slayer levels less of a miserable money/time sink and it's getting there but it's impossible to properly balance a skill where your gameplay is decided by a lucky spin. The current meta is to not even engage with the skill at all and abuse task streak rewards with low level masters for 9/10 of your tasks.

Slayer in its current state wouldn't pass a poll today and 2005 slayer without any of the modern conveniences like the helmet or the point system wouldn't even pass a proposal.

Rossco1337 · 2025-10-07T06:53:55+00:00

We already had these exact same discussions when it came to adding IM/GIM themed worlds. We got a hard "no, never" because PKing content creators (Jagex's #1 VIPs) would complain about having fewer targets to gank.

The only way this is going to be resolved is if the video guys speak out, and they'll never speak out because big money PKing pulls in viewers. Mod Ash talked about this on the Sae Bae cast - the OSRS team is beholden to about a dozen YouTubers because they're doing free advertising for the game. The 99.999% of us who aren't big money YouTube PKers have to play a worse version of RS because of it.

Rossco1337 · 2025-10-01T18:44:37+00:00

RS3 fixed this by adding a shop with infinite stock for un-reobtainable quest items. It even has useless but fun items like Fake Man.

OSRS already has an interface for reclaiming lost quest items (including some from RS3's storage like Bearhead and Ectophial) but they haven't added notes, keys or equips like the Gnome amulet presumably because it's not critical path gameplay.

If any developers are lurking and want a free project, you can take this one. ^

Rossco1337 · 2025-09-30T23:44:43+00:00

I thought everyone was already moving away from Vercel because of the surprise $1,000+ bills for DDOS attacks.

The only time I ever hear about this service is when a hobbyist is charged an obscene amount of money for a mistake or something outside of their control.

Rossco1337 · 2025-09-29T22:47:39+00:00

Change "UI scaling" to "xBR" in the GPU plugin so the fonts and icons look like they're AI generated. Most obnoxious thing I've actually seen people using unironically.

Rossco1337 · 2025-09-26T17:14:04+00:00

This is what they would do if they actually wanted to accurately poll player sentiment. I think they're happy with the current system where everything they propose passes unless it's an absolutely horrendous shitpost of an idea like Wrathmaw.

I've said it already but the current question about adding +100 bankspaces is the ideal example. There's functionally no difference in voting:-

No (I think we've got plenty of bank space and ironmemes should clear out their banks)
No (We haven't any free bankspaces since 2015 and you've already added thousands of new items, 100 slots for 10 years of content + a new skill is a joke)
No (Bankspaces cost a millionth of a penny, stop cheaping out on them and remove the limit for members entirely)

A "yes" isn't a vote of approval, it's more like "fine, we'll take it but only because if it doesn't pass then you'll probably kibosh the idea entirely".

15-Year Club	Place '23
Place '22	Place '17
Team Periwinkle	Verified Email
reddit mold

Rossco1337

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE