Seriously, stay away from Oculus. I know they currently have the most versatile/best value headset in the Quest 2, but needing to have a FB account linked to it should be a deal-breaker for anyone who doesn't already have an active FB account (and perhaps even those who do). It isn't just an auth system shared by multiple products. It's Facebook, and the ban-hammer can come down swiftly, especially if, like the author, you are just creating an account to link to your Quest. I'm also not confident, as of right now, that FB is gonna fix this in a meaningful way.
There's been a lot of talk about antitrust investigations and regulating big tech. I think one really useful step would be to require multiple methods of authentication with devices like this. Oculus shouldn't require a Facebook account to use.
It seems like they're pushing FB as an authentication method for everything. Try and comment on a local news article (yeah, I know) and it wants to authenticate you with your FB account. Same thing with trying to buy something from a small independent web vendor. "Log in with your Facebook account" is becoming the default everywhere and it sucks.
I think we need full separation of hardware and software. One company makes the hardware, others make the software. And let's not forget that it was like this for a long time (IBM+clones vs Microsoft, OS/2, Linux).
FB ownership is definitely an instant deal-breaker regarding the Oculus for me. I've heard that the Valve Index is a good alternative. Does anybody with VR experience have any input on that?
I have owned about a dozen VR headsets at this point, including the Quest (not the Quest 2) and the Vive Index. The Index is fantastic, but it's difficult to compare to the Quest which is truly in a category of its own.
For headsets, there are several properties that segment the market:
1. Tracking: outside cameras/emitters vs inside-out tracking
2. Tethered vs wireless (including PC powered, but using wireless transmission)
3. PC powered vs standalone device
For each of these, there are multiple vendors to choose from, except for standalone devices. In this case, the Oculus Quest is unique. There's no other competition.
Moreover, the Quest is the only device that can be run without a corresponding high end PC. If you don't have a PC like that, then the cost is prohibitive. There's also the space factor. VR needs space, which is already an issue. With the PC powered headsets, you also need that PC to be close enough to your open VR space. Otherwise, you need to rearrange your living space or invest in a VR dedicated PC.
In summary, the Vive Index is fantastic and arguably the best headset in the market right now, but the Oculus Quest fills a different niche of that market.
(And as to the topic of the article: I'm done with Oculus based on Facebook's policies).
> I've heard that the Valve Index is a good alternative
They're not even comparable. The Quest is a headset and two controllers you put it on and pick the controllers up, draw a room boundary and you're in. Works in any room in your house, completely stand alone.
Index requires you to install multiple sensors in a specific room in your house, and requires a connection to a desktop PC tower and fiddling around with Steam to play.
I think the FB account requirement is incredibly dumb from Oculus (Don't understand why it couldn't just be a shadow account like Insta/Whatsapp which everyone seems fine with weirdly) but really the product their offering is entirely in a class of it's own for a fraction of the price a normal VR setup costs and a fraction of the hassle.
I think if the market was different and what they were offering wasn't unique I think far fewer people would care and we'd all just buy different headsets.
I have experience with the original pc tethered oculus, the htc vive and the valve index.
The valve index is a very nice upgrade over the original htc vive and the original oculus. The 'screen door' effect is all but gone the new controllers are very comfortable and the tracking is stellar. The index is heavier than the original oculus but the way the weight is distributed and the way the strapping works makes it a non issue. My only complaint is also a problem in the 'gen 1' headsets. Reflection off the fresnel lenses can cause some banded 'flare', especially noticeable when most of the screen is very dark but there is some portion of very bright light.
Sadly I have no experience with the 'upstart' headsets from Microsoft, HP, etc.
Index is awesome but you also need a well spec'd PC, have $999 on hand, and wait a few months for one. I believe the waiting list is 2-3 months now. I missed my reservation the first time, so if you really want one be vigilant in checking your email and Steam account.
Pros
- Knuckles controllers, still nothing like them
- External base station tracking, the only option that opens up full body tracking and makes it easy to do feet based movement
- High Refresh rate
- Good FOV
Cons
- Knuckles still isn't universally supported
- LCD screen and no OLED
- Reverb G2 has a much better screen
- Wires
I would recommend the G2 but its tracking and controllers just aren't as good as the Index, unless you're just going to use it for driving and flying games.
But it's also $999, requires a beefy gaming PC, and the setup is slightly more involved. But if you already have a beefy gaming PC (I'm a PC gamer, so I already did), don't mind spending 10 minutes attaching the lighthouses to the corners of your room, and of course have the $999 to buy the full kit, it's worth it.
HP Reverb 2 is coming soon with much higher resolution, though lower refresh rate. Whats better depends on if you're planning on playing sims or action games really.
Confirming the confirmation that the Index is a good collection of hardware. I don't have experience with an Occulus or Vibe, but the Index fell squarely into the "works out of the box" territory.
The only thing I really did to improve it was to 3d print a stand for the hand controllers. More an aesthetic choice than anything.
It's not really an alternative in that sense since it's tethered, needs a computer and a completely different ballpark price wise. If you have the money, a good gaming PC and the possibility to set up a dedicated VR space I would definitely buy an Index or HTC Reverb 2 though.
I have an Index. As long as you have a solid PC, the experience is great—it single-handedly convinced me VR was more than a gimmick. Great quality picture + audio, reasonably ergonomic and I love the controls. Overall, I've been super happy with it.
Downsides to consider:
• You need a solid gaming PC (with a 2070 or better).
• Expensive ($1000 for the kit)
• Connected to the computer by a wire, awkward for "room-scale" VR
• Base stations provide great tracking but require setup (mounting high up in your room) and mean that the setup isn't very portable.
• Limited/janky access to exclusive titles. (You can hack around to get Oculus-only titles to work, but it seems rough and I haven't tried it myself.)
If you're not budget-constrained, I believe the Index will give you the best overall experience.
I've had a Rift for 3 years (not a Rift-S). I've used a Quest. I bought an Index in August because of this FB account crap but ending up selling it 2 days later.
I'm not a fan of the Index. First problem, it has horrible black levels. Everything looks like you're in a layer of fog compared to the Rift. Maybe if you've never used a Rift before you won't notice but it was shockingly bad for me.
The headphones are utter crap. I don't get whoever thought headphones that hover 1/2 inch away from your ears would work. Take whatever headphones you have now that you're listening to music on and pull them 1/2 inch away for each ear. The sound goes down, it sounds tinny, less full, bases are missing, etc. The Index sounded exactly like that. Some friends said you have to get them perfectly lined up but if that's true the moment you move your head suddenly in some game they're no longer going to be aligned.
This also means the sound leaks into the room far more than it would with on ear headphones. It's not going to be loud but it is going to be annoying for anyone within a room if they aren't making some louder noise.
Next up, Steam VR is just not as good as Oculus Connect (or whatever Oculus's home screen system is called). In part because Oculus has built in "pull up your desktop and/or multiple windows" at anytime in anytime game and pin them to say up. Apparently there's a 3rd party app that will provide this for Index/Vive but I use that feature all the time. Inside a game want to look up a walkthru just pin in there in my view.
Now for some things that no one will admit to but I will...
The Index Controllers didn't feel as good to me as Rift Controllers. I get they have fanciers sensors. I get they grip your hands. But, probably the #1 use for VR is porn. Controllers that require 2 hands to put on are not good for things that require one had to be free.
I have lots of friends in the industry, I see none of them using an Index and plenty of complaints.
As for Quest/Quest 2, even if there wasn't the FB issue it's like choosing an iPhone instead of a PS5. iPhone has tons of great games but it doesn't have PS5 level games. Similarly Quest has tons of great games, but it doesn't have PC level VR games and it will never have any porn games being locked up by Facebook. (and even if it did, do you really want FB knowing which porn games you're playing?)
I'm praying the HP Reverb G2 gets good reviews and solves most of those issues. It's apparently a month or 2 from shipping so I'm crossing my fingers I can get rid of this Rift.
> for anyone who doesn't already have an active FB account (and perhaps even those who do).
This. Unless you have built up sufficiently high profile Facebook fame known inside and out of it, beyond just having a moderately active account, I wouldn’t consider it safe to spend a penny on this.
Really unfortunate that virtually no competitor exists in mobile VR segment.
I recently made the mistake of buying an iPad because I was excited to use Side Car with the Apple Pencil to draw in Mac apps.
It turns out I can't use the advertised features of the Apple devices I bought because Side Car requires 2FA with a phone number and my phone service is data only.
Given that I connect the iPad to the Mac via a USB-C cable, it's not clear why iCloud is required at all. They're just intentionally crippling their expensive devices.
I was so excited for the CV1 after I loved my DK2, but I now own a Vive. The Facebook acquisition was a deal-breaker, for privacy reasons and it bring patently obvious it would eventually result in this type of garbage.
I am sick of verifying my FB account periodically after deleting the account and re-create with same email. Then, the weirdness came up, such as timeline only shows a couple of posts or nothing even I visited friends page and showed recent posts. And first a few months, FB asked me to upload the verifiable ID to unblock my FB account. (What the hell they need my ID ? I already enabled 2FA but kept complaining suspicious activity.)
Blizzard is asking me for government ID before they'll DELETE my account. It makes no sense. I feel like there should be some government agency that is interested in this misuse of their ID's/info, but I haven't found it.
I couldn’t agree more. I had the fun of a 30 day ban on PlayStation because my kid sent something inappropriate to his friend. Now I imagine a scenario like this happening but the consequences are my Facebook account shut down permanently. Definitely a huge turn off.
While I agree doing anything with a Facebook account is gross, it seems rather, err, trusting to think that Facebook wasn't already linking accounts anyway and are essentially not just getting rid of the system that does that and forcing users to do it for them.
I have an active FB account, but I would never use it to log in to anything other than FB via a sandboxed browser profile, and if I had to, I wouldn't use that service.
Yea - I'd be unwilling to use Oculus unless I could specifically tie it to a fake FB account (or no account at all). I barely use my FB account but I never want gaming integrated with social media in a manner I can't control simply due to personal preference and privacy.
Realistically if you don't want to manage hundreds of separate logins then what are your options? On the whole it still seems much easier to get reasonable behaviour and human involvement out of Facebook than out of Google.
The quest two barely counts as VR. You will only have mobile titles, which are terrible compared to PC. to run quest with PC you need to have a VR ready PC in the first place.
The content on the Quest may not be "desktop fidelity", but my time with the Quest 1 was VERY much enjoyable (especially compared to the Oculus Go), and often preferred over my desktop VR HMD simply for the convenience. And the content was quite good.
By this same metric, the Switch is also plagued with "mobile titles" given it's Android base and Tegra X1 mobile GPU. But most folks DON'T think of it like that, and for good reason: the Switch can keep up just fine in it's own market.
And if the Quest 2 has improved specs in every area over the Quest 1, then it's completely FINE for what it is.
It's just the company behind it fucked up a good thing.
You'd have thought FB learned from the whole bolting on Google+ to Youtube fiasco.
I won't even start on Facebook in terms of just not wanting to be associated with every other scum-sucker thing that company does ... (Hi Facebook employee, I don't mean you personally, but you know I'm right).
The Quest 2 is amazing and an important leap for VR. If you care about the state of VR, it must sell well.
Frankly, this is not the hill to die on. If you plan to own a smartphone or really use any kind of service or internet browsing in the modern world going forward you’re going to be faced with these kind of privacy dilemmas. Better to just accept it and move on with your life than to basically live like a Luddite for the rest of your life. Facebook will not be the first or last corporation to ask you to relax your absolute anonymity.
This is absolutely the hill to die on. Oculus has competitors. The answer to save VR isn't to buy Oculus, it's to buy other headsets and hope Oculus dies unless they reverse their decision to require a Facebook account.
Mate, if Facebook actually cared about the VR scene they wouldn’t have broken the best VR headset to date by _requiring_ a fb login. Without a fb login the device is broken. If _they_ wanted VR to succeed they wouldn’t have done this. Take it up with them.
If only there were other companies with competing products which would assuage one’s concerns regarding privacy and/or anonymity and guard against Luddite lifestyles.
“Must sell well...hill to die on” feel a bit extreme, particularly given everything that has transpired in 2020.
> Ethically challenged software engineer working for a major tech company
Well, at least you know yourself, but I don't appreciate this attempt to normalize your moral bankruptcy and ridicule others who haven't sold and don't want to sell their soul.
Maybe one day you'll be forced to confront the consequences of this lack of ethics. Until then, kindly fuck right off.
I have a Gear VR and I've been on the fence about upgrading to a real proper mobile VR setup but thankfully Oculus required this Facebook integration and made this decision a lot easier.
Yeah, I think part of the problem is that Facebook has never had an actual product which people pay for and expect to work. Their whole culture and set of priorities are counter to this.
Unfortunately I get the impression that this is how you get proper support from Facebook or Google. Make a Reddit or Hacker News post, get a few upvotes, and someone with influence inside the company files an "Oops Help My Friend" support ticket or contacts another person with the right authority to take a look.
In the Catholic theology, there's a concept of Saints, who are basically humans that intercede with God on the behalf of ordinary mortals. People will sometimes address prayers to saints in the hope that the prayer will be more effective. Probably similar in other religions too but I'm pulling from memories of catholic school
I wonder if there is a way to incentivize the behavior of "I work at a big company and have the ability to help out a stranger with a problem"? Perhaps people who help others with these issues (which are public by nature of being discussed on reddit/twitter/etc) can put it as an item on their resume when looking to switch jobs - something like "I care about the community and people who use the products I help build. I advocated for [this person (with link to public forum)] which ultimately resulted in [this solution (with link to release note if possible)]."
Of course there is a discussion to have about incentivizing the _wrong_ behavior (the need to create publicity around issues that shouldn't exist in the first place / only people with "clout" become the ones who get their issues resolved).
This has happened with me re: Intuit, Microsoft and Adobe as well - all companies with proper support channels - issue resolution/escalation for people with the "right contacts" goes about 100x faster.
What about the 99.9% of the rest who don't have those contacts?
Anecdotal, but.. I got dicked around by Wayfair for almost two months (stalled order, various excuses, well meaning but essentially powerless customer support). In the end all it took to resolve was one tweet at their account. Next day the order cleared.
That is a fantastic comment. I was reading through Google SRE stuff. Lots of good info. Lots of very, very bad ideas too. Lots of it is "at scale, you can't make everyone happy, so don't try." You end up with SLOs and SLIs based on percentages of availability, errors, etc. If 99.99% of requests are good, don't worry about the rest. However, at scale, 0.01 can be literally millions of real, breathing people with feeling and priorities and things to do. When you give away your product for free, these are good trade offs. When you sell your product, the same assumptions may not apply.
I cannot afford to ignore 0.01% of incoming requests because we charge per request. At a certain point, yes, money and pros and cons yadda yadda yadda. It just feels that, once again, people are saying, "but Google does it!" -- and that does not mean you should.
100% is unachievable, especially at Google scale. Your car or coffee shop or whatever also fails 0.0x% of the time. Heck the energy net in western countries doesn't reach 99.999% uptime and I would call it very dependable.
I'd say the biggest problem it the non-existent support. It's fine if 0.01% fails, as long as there is human troubleshooting or help available if necessary.
I think you are very confused about how availability is tracked. If a class of users is always getting an error this would be investigated. There is literally no way, at any scale, to guarantee 100% availability.
I'm very excited about VR. I bought the GearVR, then the first Oculus Rift, and most recently the Quest 1.
Now, instead of buying the Quest 2 (which is unquestionably the best-value headset available today) I'm waiting for a competitor to enter the space.
Imagine if your desktop monitor would only turn on when synced to an active account on a social media platform. If you decide to leave that platform, or if that platform decides you aren't providing enough invasive information about yourself and decides to leave you, you've got an expensive paperweight. No warning or recourse. No thank you.
The devs working on this are generally not the devs who are decrying the harmful effects. In reality, when you work on such projects you tend to isolate yourself from criticism.
To be clear, I think the FB/Oculus devs are doing impressive work. I get value out of FB (that's why I still have an account) and Oculus is the primary driver of progress in VR today.
However, I don't believe it's a user-friendly product decision to tightly couple FB's VR hardware to its social media platform. It's yet another push towards a walled garden, much like Google's AMP and Apple's app store.
"Imagine if your desktop monitor would only turn on when synced to an active account on a social media platform...or if that platform decides you aren't providing enough invasive information about yourself"
Yep, they managed to convince me not to order Quest 2. And I already own Quest 1 and Index. Hope Valve is going to ship stand-alone headset, at least their incentives are aligned.
Hardware requiring an online account to work must be outlawed.
As well as the "We have already reviewed this decision and it can't be reversed" bullshit. For every ban they should be required to issue a very specific clarification on why exactly were you banned and let you to speak to a real person.
That would probably a step too far. But also unnecessary.
Make a law that requires them to give you a full refund for all hardware that you can’t use and all software purchased over the lifetime of the account.
That will make them incur a cost that makes it worthwhile for them to be more careful.
Edit: Downstream commenters make a good point. You'd have to put in a formula for "depreciation" of the refund, so you can't just get a refund years later.
On the surface, this seems like an elegant solution. However, it also seems to me like it would need exceptions.
Since we are talking about online games, the topic of how to deal with people caught cheating (as in using third party cheating tools) comes to mind. It is typical to ban those people. If a ban was synonymous with a refund, there is little incentive to not cheat.
If the law allowed for exceptions like this (e.g. banned with cause), then it'd be pretty hollow as the company is also the final arbiter of what cause is.
It is possible I am missing something though as this is not something I have put a lot of thought into.
Presumably the payment method will be banned and getting banned in a old game purposely to get a refund sounds like a lot of work for 60$. I can't imagine that would be significantly abuse.
Sellers should not be able to take away goods after the sell; that's pretty much universally understood as theft.
The EU actually has such a "conformity" law for goods[0], however I don't see how it would apply in this case. It also takes into account the point raised by the other commenters: "the seller can only refuse if this causes disproportionate costs on him in comparison with the alternative remedy, taking into account the value of the goods or the significance of the lack of conformity"
"We have already reviewed this decision and it can't be reversed" is how the Internet has always worked.
The dirty secret of the Internet - going back decades - is that it's concept of moderation mostly relies upon unstated or understated rules half-enforced and adjudicated by volunteers or underpaid contractors with the power of judge, jury, and executioner. This is arguably by design: the vast majority of what moderators are dealing with is spam, which has the properties of being cheap to execute and difficult to filter for. Hence, anti-spam efforts are swift and merciless. More modern efforts to deal with things like foreign election interference and fake news are arguably extensions of this same ongoing effort to summarily hang and execute spammers.
Facebook is not alone in this either: Google's done it from the very beginning and their death penalty stings far harder. There's a few exceptions to this, such as Wikipedia's ArbCom or other collaborative Free Software projects with code-of-conduct rules and moderator transparency. However, even those platforms will summarily execute spammers.
This may be the only way to scale a service that is free to users. But once you are selling a product to paying customers, those customers need to be at a different tier with real customer support.
Those paying customers are already incredibly unlikely to be spammers. They cannot be handled the same way free accounts are.
Strongly disagree. Using the law in this strong arm manner stiffles innovation.
Yes, the current Oculus / Facebook situation sucks.
However, blanket statements like "Hardware requiring an online account to work must be outlawed." Would ban very legitimate products such as Amazon's physical buttons for restocking supplies.
Sure the Dash buttons are discontinued, but there's definitely an interesting area of products that might be developed in the coming years for other products in this wide domain.
> However, blanket statements like "Hardware requiring an online account to work must be outlawed." Would ban very legitimate products such as Amazon's physical buttons for restocking supplies.
OK, rephrase it slightly and say that it must not require an online account from a specific provider. If I can come up with an API endpoint that I want to use instead of Amazon, and I want to reconfigure my Dash button to use it, I should be legally and technically allowed to do so.
The regulation doesn't need to ban any categories of products, or mandate any features. It just needs to say that if your product depends on online connectivity for a significant part of its functionality, then it must not employ technical measures to prevent interoperability. Hardware that's sold to consumers already needs to meet various compliance standards, such as RF emissions testing; this doesn't seem like a heavy burden in comparison.
Of course, such a policy is very unlikely to be enacted in the US any time soon, but hey, I can dream.
Those weren't innovations, those were solutions in search of a problem. Probably contributed to their discontinuation. Also, what "innovation" of the past 20 years has been truly innovative, life-changing, and a net positive for humanity? Pretty much everything that has come out of Silicon Valley has been at best neutral for society (creating new markets and revenue for businesses aren't a positive in my eyes).
We need to stop pulling the "stifling innovation" card. Not stifling innovation has led us to society's cancerous relationship with technology.
I once had a Logitech universal remote control that required opening an account to use it. Sent it back, bought an AllInOne, and never since considered purchasing any products from Logitech. Unfortunately most people don't give a shit and just do what the companies tell them.
No account would mean anonymous access, wouldn't it? That's fine, but I don't think many people would frequent anonymous communities since moderation would become extremely difficult, unless the presence was tied with the hardware. Tying an an involuntary account to hardware would probably destroy the second hand market.
I would have the law along the lines that Hardware should not be limited or curtailed in usage via any optional on-line related identification.
That way for things that may well suit having linked account - fine, but not curtailing that avenue. Basicly making having it linked to an on line account - optional via consumer choice, as it should always be.
> Hardware requiring an online account to work must be outlawed.
You have just outlawed Roku. An online account is required to make it work, because that's how it was designed to work. It's a rather useless device without the online account.
Well, you could design an open API that others can use, too (server-side, not client side!). So the device can work with competitors, too, meaning it won't require an account at only one company. That would be a compromise - at least in theory others could replace the server parts.
As well as the "We have already reviewed this decision and it can't be reversed" bullshit. For every ban they should be required to issue a very specific clarification on why exactly were you banned and let you to speak to a real person.
GDPR requires that algorithmic decisions get this kind of oversight. GDPR is the way to get redress here.
Folks often overestimate the power consumers have in meaningfully shaping a market. Consumer protections are rarely gained by simply refusing to do business with market leaders who behave in consumer hostile ways. Regulation really seems to be our best shot at reversing course on what is nothing short of the theft of digital goods from consumers.
Many people still will buy. There is a reason we use representative democracy rather than direct democracy - qualified people should outlaw some bad things the crowd can't resist itself.
Wow, thought I'd be one of the few struggling with this.
Bought the device with the hope that I could register an account for the first time in years, but similar to others, my account was instantly banned with no explanation other than "violating community guidelines."
One of Facebook's arguments against anti-trust accusations has been to point to the lack of consumer harm. This is fairly obvious evidence of material harm to consumers who just bought $500 paperweights.
Yeah, it's extremely hard to open an FB account anymore, which is why aged accounts sell for thousands of dollars on the <mumble mumble mumble> <cough>. Won't put that info here.
I'm frankly surprised FB would go this route then, are they assuming only existing FB users will buy? They have to know they've basically killed the ability to create new accounts.
Facebook bans accounts fairly regularly for hate speech, which pretty much means whatever they want. It seems ludicrous to me that an edgy teenager can have their headset bricked because they posted some spicy political memes.
This also happened to me, had an account 5 years ago, stopped using it, deleted the account on their website. Last week decided to create it again to prepare to eventually link to Oculus.. Instantly banned. Literally on the "Confirm Your Email" page got redirected to violated the community guidelines. And I'm not even from the US..
There are similar stories on reddit, with people speculating that the old account actually still existed and the ban was because the new account was imitating an existing account. The idea that they would keep a "deleted" account around seems highly plausible given Facebook's hunger for data.
It sometimes happens if you create account from a suspicious IP address, such as VPN or shared computer at school or cafe. They are trying to prevent account takeovers and fake accounts when some dormant users left weak passwords and got in a leak somewhere. But Facebook is also sometimes a bit too proactive in banning new accounts, because they use this as an opportunity to extract more information from you - you can only unban the account by providing phone number, scan of your ID card etc.. That suits them so they like banning more.
Facebook, their "real name" policy, and their ban policy when combined with hardware like Oculus seem like a series of really bad product decisions. Like with combining messengers between Instagram and Facebook, the business reason is probably to make Oculus harder to split off in the event of anti-trust action. Pretty gross.
I recently discovered a similar thing with Twitter: when you sign up with e-mail, they block your account and will unblock it only if you give them your phone number.
I had a post taken down for posting a link to a local gay event. Their algorithm cant figure out pro vs hate speech.
So I started migrating the few apps I used FB logins from, (spotify), then stopped using google login because of facebook. Taught me, not to trust these companies with my 3rd party accounts THAT I PAY FOR.
- Political memes in the masses are making fact-based and rational political conversation difficult to impossible.
- Teenagers should not be on social networks.
- Teenagers who aren't old enough to vote who want to post political memes - that's like 10x me less caring whether they're banned from Facebook.
I have no problem with the ban.
However, Facebook should separate out its identity service from its social networking service. It might make more money doing this because more people would stick to its services. There's no reason why I shouldn't be able to authenticate with a Facebook account even though Facebook deems me unworthy of participating in its social network.
Hard thing is that even legit political opinion will be banned if there is enough people that is not in line with your vision. Or like in Ukraine where Facebook moderation team is very very pro government with very narrow vision.
Imagine USA moderation of Facebook consists only of pro Trump's fans with power instant ban Your account.
The reason they put is 'hate speech' but I'm basically convinced it's a single, stock error message they show regardless of the reason. How can an account be banned for hate speech 7 minutes after it was created?
I think the bigger problem is Facebook's policing of bots, especially since this is a big election year. I'm going to guess this was the reason for OP's ban
It seems like unfortunate timing - Facebook's cracking down on fake accounts before the election right as the Quest 2 launches. I'd guess that a lot of the people signing up for Facebook just for the Quest don't follow the same patterns as a typical user, so the algorithm flags them and removes them. I'm sure they'll get reinstated once Facebook manually reviews, but it's definitely a major annoyance.
Sidenote, I got my quest 2 yesterday and from a hardware standpoint, it's blown me away coming from PSVR. Too bad the Facebook nonsense keeps it from being a must have product.
> It seems like unfortunate timing - Facebook's cracking down on fake accounts before the election right as the Quest 2 launches.
No, this isn't new, more people are just seeing it now since they just expanded the market of users.
It has been like this for years: If you go out of your way to create an account disconnected from a social graph so that it doesn't creepily alert people that would have saved your number/email and uploaded all their contacts in the past, Facebook will ban the account within 10 minutes.
Somebody's inevitable rebuttal: "Yeah but my grandma just made an account and didn't get banned"
Okay, good for you. The described reality here is also valid.
To make it not ban the account you can upload a contact photo and try to friend request multiple people in a social graph. The time limit is very short and you will otherwise very quickly get instabanned or stuck in a security verification loop where the verification never comes.
This is just creepy Facebook behavior for their data mining operation, now masquaraded as "ensuring quality of accounts". This is the same behavior as when they use insecure SMS one time passwords instead of client side code generation, and then use that phone number to add it to the social graph.
Their behavior is very consistent and there is no one individual there responsible for it and even understands the use case.
In this case, this is just another byproduct of Facebook employees living in the warped reality where everyone loves the Facebook product and has it. They honestly believe it there and you should see how confused and affronted they will act when you tell them you don't have an account.
This description makes alot of sense and further convinces me that Facebook especially needs some steep regulation to curb that behavior... or disappear.
My Facebook account was banned multiple times during an 8-year period when it was 100% inactive. Each time they demanded more invasive forms of verification. First, verify a phone number. Then, upload a picture of my driver's license. Finally, I had to upload a picture of my driver's license AND a secondary photo of myself that was supposed to be taken right then for that purpose.
I will never consider using any service that requires a Facebook account, nor should anyone else.
It seems to me that the U.S. is ripe for an updating of its consumer protection laws. Particularly w.r.t. shrink-wrap license and other attempts to impose unwelcome terms that the buyer didn't know about at the time of the sale.
I imagine our existing consumer-protection laws were passed over the opposition of monied interests. If so, I wonder how close we are to having the political will do to do that again.
At a minimum, a "ban" of the Oculus account should also include an immediate refund of any and all purchases. It's absolutely ridiculously to think they can just keep all that money while depriving a customer of software licenses they paid for!
heck I don't understand why Facebook doesn't exclude accounts linked to a headset from bot bans, max 1 per headset of course. If fake new Facebook accounts are worth $400+ to bad actors we are in bad shape.
Indeed, and it would force Facebook have some skin in the game because banning would cost them real money. I'm betting once each ban starts to cost them hundreds of $ they will start to at least put some human eyes in front of it before the ban hammer comes down.
Not even that is good enough, a ban on an account should have a VERY high bar, and that bar needs to be highly regulated. Right now it's just games, maybe movies, but it could apply to all kinds of software and apps... and this stuff is important. You can't cut a person off from being able to purchase and use their puchased software. It's too important.
I agree, and I think there's kind of an elephant in the room with respect to all Terms of Service Agreements.
Anybody with a mobile phone (as well as a plethora of other products) has inevitably agreed to dozens of pages of legal doctrine which they don't understand, any probably wouldn't without a competent lawyer on hand. But nevertheless, every minor service update, we all hit "I Accept", despite having no understanding of what we've agreed to.
Is this not massively problematic? What happens if a company actually tries to draw significant action against consumers using the terms of service as their contract?
My guess re. 'how close': approximately 48 quintillion light years away. The US has been corporatist for a long while and is blatantly so since Citizens United - the idea that a consumer protection law would pass in this environment is as 'possible' as the world taking climate change seriously at any point before we are all boiled alive.
Today my OQ2 arrived. I created an account just for the purpose of pairing the device. I used my real credentials and a gmail email address. I got banned immediately by FB, and cannot init the device. FU FB.
I already filed a ticket. I was told that if I followed community guidelines I wouldn’t get banned. Thanks, “Jessica”. Many of the oculus support pages use Facebook, and I’m banned from reaching them, which is pure irony in this case.
I had a similar experience with Facebook and a business-related thing last summer.
The company I'm working for has a Facebook account that is more or less "broken" — managed by email addresses that no longer work for the company, unmanaged profile page, etc. I also don’t have a personal Facebook account, so I went ahead and created one and then started to clean up the mess.
Immediately my account was deactivated. I went through a process of offering a phone number and countless CAPTCHA's, which would result in my account being reactivated but then deactivated again upon the next login. Eventually I got the "We have already reviewed this decision and it can't be reversed" ban-hammer.
I'm sort of beyond outrage or even annoyance at this point… it's all just kind of funny and stupid. When I try to figure out a way out of this pickle, the best idea I can come up with is making a bot that logs in to Facebook, wanders around "Liking" q-anon posts, and then I'd have an account that Facebook would accept as a real human being for when I need to get actual work done with their platform.
The idea that I could have an account with hundreds of games I purchased be taken away from me without reason, or without recourse is absurd. Facebook, or really anything holding licensed content needs to be regulated.
If you get banned from the Steam community for spamming/harassing/being awful your game library is still there. Even if you get banned for cheating in a game, you only lose access to that game and not the rest of your library.
As @asymptotically3 said, community banning doesn't take away your games, and in-game banning only blocks you from that specific game's multiplayer. In the past you could risk account suspension if you chargebacked purchases or redeemed stolen keys, but even that got changed years ago to just remove the specific game/license from your account instead.
Only large-scale fraud would get you banned, and even then I doubt they would disable your account entirely and not just disable future purchasing.
Much of the backlash regarding the acquisition has centered on Facebook's business model — data mining and advertising. This isn't a concern for Carmack, who says he "just can't get very worked up about it ." While he appreciates the need for privacy, "the idea that companies are supposed to interact with you and not pay attention has never seemed sane to me ... I rather like the recommendations that Amazon gives me on each visit. Educate me. What terrible outcome is expected from this?"
So actually he was fine with this from the start? And while he is moving on to AI and whatnot, he is still currently employed by Oculus, which leads me to believe this is his stance today.
I don't know how to feel about it. Even if you look past the privacy issues, he has engineered a product with hardware DRM! It just a shit product.
It’s VIP tunnel vision. Rich people with celebrity status never suffer the negative effects of those systems. In fact, it actually benefits them because the system knows they’re rich and actively favours them because they’re considered more valuable than the rest of us.
Of course he doesn’t get worked up because if his assistant calls for support on anything they get routed to the VIP support system and a team of people spring into action to solve the problem for him.
People like Carmack don’t have to use the shitty systems they’re building, so they don’t care. He’s just another rich asshole IMO.
As much as I love VR (I even backed the Oculus kickstarter at the time), I can't justify spending money developing for a system that can brick the devices of my users on a whim.
They shot themselves in the foot by having this FB account requirement.
I too have the Quest 1, absolutely love it, and would have immediately purchased the Quest 2 if FB had not gone back on their explicit promise to never require an FB account.
Someone PLEASE make a privacy-first (i.e. "NORMAL") headset with similar specs to the Quest 2 - you can charge more for all I care.
This is what scares me most about google products. If I lost my gmail account, I would be totally screwed. More surface area across google products just gives me more of a chance to get banned by some false positive somewhere, with no recourse because none of these big companies seem to care about the human. So I try to avoid google products.
There parallels with any of these giant single user account companies.
The big difference here is that Google, for now, doesn't care if you create multiple accounts while Facebook requires one and only one account that is tied to your real life identity.
If I could create a fake FB account and not be banned, this wouldn't be an issue at all.
Although I also have various concerns with Google, I feel like lumping them in here is a bit counterproductive. Facebook is on a whole other level to Google in many of these respects.
I think this business model where someone buying purchasing a physical product must register their data with manufacturer or 3rd party service and be constantly online should be made illegal. There is no business need for this apart from spying on people and gathering data to improve manipulation of messages to trick people into buying more into the manufacturer ecosystem. We need to stop this.
I don't think we should ban the whole class of online connected products. Just insist they publish a public API under terms that allow competitors to implement it and configure it on the device. Then anybody can create an alternative ecosystem for the device.
What could you do with a Google Home or Amazon Echo without connectivity? The physical product is premised on being able to search the web and stream music.
It should have self-hosted voice recognition software and be able plug to your own music collection on your NAS. If you wanted features like weather forecast, then these should be opt in and only send anonymous data related to weather forecast request. It should be illegal to use even those anonymised requests to do commercial research without paying the customer.
So you think if someone is selling a physical product and they require registration that it's reasonable to force them to stop requiring it with the threat of physical violence from the government?
I just don't see how that is justified. The seller isn't defrauding anyone and isn't using violence themselves. It's so much more easy and ethical to just not buy the product. All you can do is take personal responsibility. Calling for violent coercion like you've done is wrong.
One change I implore Facebook/Oculus to make in light of the Facebook account requirement for these devices: Allow enabling of dev mode and APK sideloading, offline, from within the device settings without the dev account requirement. That way these devices can be more than just bricks for people who get locked out by the system.
I wonder if there are any statistics around e-waste for devices that are "bricked" due to an account lockout.
To play devil's advocate: historically, VR apps like VRChat have had an absolutely massive "4chan" problem. Harassment, bullying, vulgarity, NSFW/NSFL content, viral memes, brigading, etc. The gender disparity is also alarming (like 90%+ men!). Many feel unwelcome.
I think Facebook wants to make VR fun and appropriate for everyone. One way to do that is to tie in people's real identities. Facebook threads aren't great, but they are better than twitter threads, and A LOT better than interactions in VRChat.
Jonanin, what is your name? Where do you live? What is your current street address? Where do your parents live, and what is their phone number? How about your kids?
I’m asking rhetorically. All this info and more is available to anyone with a full name and photograph via people-finder sites like Spokeo and SocialCatfish, which is exactly what Facebook accounts with a “real name policy” expose to the world. Using this info, any anonymous troll who you tick off in a VR game can send a SWAT team to your house, or tie up your phone lines, or harass your family and employer, or attempt to do you real physical harm. The Internet creates an extreme asymmetry of power between the abuser and the abused, and there are lots of unstable abusers out there with nothing more exciting to do than make your life hell.
The Mark Zuckerbergs and Larry Pages of the world live in gated communities with many layers of people between them and the world, so they don’t care about any of this.
I think this is a reasonable argument for requiring accounts / checks for specific social apps in VR.
But a VR headset is not a chat device any more than a keyboard is a chat device. It's a general I/O device that can be used for all sorts of experiences, including single-user ones.
Isn't that better solved by individual accounts for each game and some moderation? I've never had problems in VRChat, though I didn't find it much fun either.
FWIW, I have a few fakebook accounts, with names like Nopey Nofookinwae, and they're still active... Never bought anything from Oculus Store, though.
Facebook is really shooting themselves in the foot here, imo.
And to think Facebook wants to get into cryptocurrency and payments/wallets. You'd have to be really stupid to trust them with that especially after this fine demonstration.
Facebook is easily the worst company in big tech, with zero regard whatsoever for privacy or consumers. I can no longer support Oculus since it requires FB authentication.
I recommend creating a separate account if you have no other options.
Seems most likely that they're trying to flag "suspicious" account creations in the run-up to the US election, and that the left hand that implemented this algorithm didn't speak to the right hand that was launching a new product that required an FB account.
Don’t keep anything on social media you can’t lose. Assume the account can get deleted at anytime.
Maintain your own private site of family and friends pictures that you own and share around with people you care about. It’s not that hard and replicates most of the real value of a social network for most people.
Anyone know what Facebook’s benefit is from the mandatory linking? At this point pretty much anyone who wants a facebook account, has one. And the quest is niche. They don’t need it to drive facebook usage.
Is it data? If so what’s the expected value of data they’d get from quest linkage?
This is by no means an exhaustive list nor 100% accurate but yes data, likely to go in to the social profile they build of you to sell/use in advertisements.
Data such as; information provided at sign up, web/links to other users based on sign up info, inferred location information, purchases, interests, visited products, used products, active hours, usage hours, general use metrics... etc
I had the same problem. Created new fb account, linked to Oculus, bought couple of things, got banned. Asked for review, solved within 2 working days. Not even my real name.
Good thing, it's a "soft" ban. They do not allow to log in, but if you are logged in, it's fine. So i could use my bought items even though I could not log in in browser. But if I would have logged out from Oculus, I wouldn't be able to use them.
I tried to do the math on the Quest 2 hardware, and they definitely cut corners to bring the cost down, but not to the point where I think they have an attractive margin. (On the $300 headset, but the accessories/storage increase definitely have a decent margin). They’ll also get some margin on software sales presumably.
That’s important because I believe the revenue generating model is entirely from data. Even if I’m wrong, it’s Facebook, so we know they’re after data for profit.
And consider the kind of data that VR is capable of collecting. It’s biometric data at its core. If you take the data involved in VR, tie it to a person under the real-name policy, and give it to some crafty software engineers, you can get some crazy intimate results.
Was looking at buying the quest 2 today and decided to wait until the weekend to see how the launch would go and then I saw this. I won't buy a quest 2 unless the account requirement is removed
I’ve absolutely stopped recommending it. I won’t link my Facebook account so will use it until it’s disabled.
Looking forward to supporting their competitors. It’s a shame, I enjoy the device.
Unpopular opinion: although I hate how oculus sold out to Facebook (possibly backstab of the decade, after the initial crowdfunding), and although I’m a strong advocate of leaving Facebook regardless of their VR BS, there’s really nothing wrong with them requiring a Facebook account to use it. I have no idea how much the manufacturing/R&D costs of Quest are, but I doubt it makes sense for Facebook to sell it this cheap without requiring users to link/create a Facebook account. Don’t expect stuff to be free/cheap for no reason.
My point is that regulating this space of tech will only lead to less innovation. There’s an extremely easy solution that every single one of us can do: don’t buy it, don’t be tempted by the cheap price Facebook is offering. I closed my Fb account ~5 years ago now (after being on it for about 10 years) and I’m very tempted to buy Quest 2, but I won’t. If enough people do this, what ever scummy plan Facebook is weaving will fail, but even if it doesn’t, you’d be out of it.
> regulating this space of tech will only lead to less innovation
You might be ultimately right about this, but you certainly haven't proved it. A common theme is a large company will use its leverage to make a product that is better and cheaper than the alternatives, demolish their competition, and the sit on their laurels for the next decade, with the exception of a few updates that provide vendor specific features to encourage vendor lock-in.
I wasn’t really trying to prove that point, I also didn’t think it needs proving. But your point somewhat does it I think. There are many examples in tech specifically over the last couple of decades on how free unregulated competition was the reason why we had accelerated development, lower cost, and “democratizations” of tools and information. As long as there’s no regulation preventing others from coming up with a better solution (however “better” is defined), there’s no reason why others can’t come up with a viable alternative. Friendster -> MySpace -> Facebag. IE -> FF and Chrome. Nokias -> iPhone and co, and so on.
Alright, so he bought it 4 years ago. Bu in the EU you have 2 years to start an RMA if a product is not working as expected under normal use. I reckon one would be able to turn it in to their retailer to get a new Oculus.
I believe this is an urban myth. Can you cite the appropriate EU regulation or directive that makes this true? If a directive what about the implementation in the UK?
However I see no reason that you couldn't sue the manufacturer if they arrange to break your product even after six years. That would be a tort (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tort) and unrelated to your rights under your contract of sale.
I got so excited by the news about Quest 2, I was certain would by it, until I learned that "Quest headsets best accommodate IPDs between 56 and 70 mm, or about 95% of adults". My IPD is 74 - no luck this time.
For PC VR you can find used VIVE sets cheap, and remember that with steamVR you can mix and match hardware. The full Valve index kits are on delay but individual parts are faster.
The day I read the news about Oculus requiring a FB account in the future, that sucker fell right off my shopping list. It's sad because it seems like a really solid piece of hardware.
A bit out of the loop on this, anyone know Carmack's stance on this? Seems like a huge step in the direction of what we afraid of when Fb acquired Oculus.
Most of the people on reddit reporting bans are saying that they made a FB account that they don't actively use. That seems to make the bans more likely. The best way to prevent them is to use your FB account for organic activities
Don't worry, you will get bored with your Oculus Quest after a month anyways. Me and my kids were using our Oculus a lot at the beginning, having great fun. Now it just sits there, although we could use it any time and even have a few great games on it.
Anyways, this has nothing to do with your issue. Facebook should be ashamed for treating paying customers like this.
I bought a Go years ago and recently I got a screen locking the entire device until I logged into Oculus. I selected the option to not connect my Facebook account, but continue to use my Oculus account. There was a sunset date on this option.
I've never bought anything from the Oculus store. I honestly only use VR for Skybox and movies I download to a file server.
Are there any alternative OSes for the GO? Honestly I'd rather just get off the stock OS if I just had a way to play my movies.
Facebook is evil, plain and simple. They hurt societies, democracies, and individuals alike. Nothing good there. Fuck Facebook! They need to vanish, hopefully soon.
Yeah... People act upset because they spend money on a product they cannot use. It's not for me to discuss if it's even legal, but if it is, then the only thing to discuss is if it's fair, which is a philosophical question. I, on the other hand, wouldn't buy this stuff anyway, I don't want to do anything with Facebook, I don't want to have an account. The problem is, it's a fucking monopoly, so not wanting to do stuff is Facebook doesn't align well with living normal life. Gyms, clubs and hobbyist communities don't even bother making websites anymore. All news and meetup days will be on Facebook. But if I'm not a registered user, I cannot see them. Now, is this fair? This is just as philosophical question, as with not being able to use stuff you paid for.
So, of course I wish for Facebook to die. But it's not very realistic to hope it actually will.
The days are gone where every Gym and Club were setting up their „website“ on FB. Setting up a website these days is a non-issue with offers from wix.com etc. And local groups are moving to WhatsApp (I know it‘s owned by FB, but it doesn‘t do harm, it‘s a good product) or to Instagram (also owned by FB). There are way too many alternatives. Many people realized that it‘s boring or harming to consume „news“ pushed to a newsfeed that is manipulated. Either they get jealous, or sick of their echo-chamber or they are overwhelmed by the amount of input that they constantly receive. FB is fighting for a very very valuable asset: Your attention.
Practical: Mostly, particularly if you already have a gaming computer. It's easy to spend more money on a good quality monitor. Enjoyable: Abso-effing-lutely
I agree. It's still a gimmick. It's like the WII basically. Hardcore types chant it's praises and families love to play it for a party game once a year.
Other than that, it collects dust compared to your other better mediums that exist.
Eh, gimmick for some, sure. For others it's a whole new world that they won't leave. For example, got an Oculus for the gimmick and didn't think I'd be so attached to it, but I cannot go back to playing any flight or racing simulator without it again, it's simply not the same. I tried the new FS2020 briefly on launch, but had to go back to X-Plane as FS2020 still doesn't support VR headsets.
I've been around long enough to see previous attempts at 'VR' and those definitely were gimmicks. However, I think calling even the first generation of contemporary VR a gimmick is an exageration.
There are some legitimately good experiences to be had in VR right now. Beat Saber is fun as hell, and SUPERHOT VR is great, from personal experience. However, the hardware is still a bit clunky and asks a lot of the user, and developers are still working out what how to design for it. Unfortunately that means a lot of titles are, in fact, pretty damned gimmicky.
At worst, it's a low key, more immersive Peloton but really it's a new medium. It feels like when the internet and iPhone first came out. Sure it's not perfect and it's easy for pundits to nitpick, but it's definitely a new world changing paradigm for those who can afford it. I feel that affordability is VR's main weakness.
I think VR shows promise as a way to make cardio exercise fun among other things. It's also one of the only cutting edge areas of gaming design where everyone else is just upping resolutions and frame rate.
That's unlucky, I'm guessing you haven't played much of it?
Just playing the GTAV VR mod (https://github.com/LukeRoss00/gta5-real-mod) is just something else, whilst not perfect (hell it's a mod on an old game!) it's so fucking sick being in a car chase at 160mph weaving through traffic in VR.
Can VR get a lot better in 5 - 10 years, hell yea, but that's like saying you weren't going to buy an Xbox360 because the Xbox OneX will be out in 10 years.
That looks interesting, I may try it. Got GTA V and an Oculus Go, both of which are collecting dust.
I played NFS The Run just in big screen mode (with a PS4 controller) and it was pretty nice. But other than VRChat and the occasional movie (3D is nice), I don't use the headset at all.
You can say it about anything, in 5-10 years it'll be better. But in 5-10 years you'll be old and won't be able to fully enjoy. Things are never ideal.
I don't get it. He contacted Oculus support, Oculus support asked if he had followed these 4 steps for reactivating his account, and then... what? At that point gave up and posted on Reddit to complain?
Yeah, this sucks. But mistaken account deactivations probably happen a lot - how to handle them is one of the FAQ questions on Oculus. It happened to me with my PlayStation 4 account too; someone in Germany mistakenly signed up using my email address somehow and in the resulting confusion I got locked out of my PlayStation games for a bit. It sucks but support will eventually fix it.
Seriously, stay away from Oculus. I know they currently have the most versatile/best value headset in the Quest 2, but needing to have a FB account linked to it should be a deal-breaker for anyone who doesn't already have an active FB account (and perhaps even those who do). It isn't just an auth system shared by multiple products. It's Facebook, and the ban-hammer can come down swiftly, especially if, like the author, you are just creating an account to link to your Quest. I'm also not confident, as of right now, that FB is gonna fix this in a meaningful way.
There's been a lot of talk about antitrust investigations and regulating big tech. I think one really useful step would be to require multiple methods of authentication with devices like this. Oculus shouldn't require a Facebook account to use.
How about, no authentication to use the device and an open platform of app stores and/or sideloading?
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That might already be the reason why the Oculus is not available in Germany and Belgium https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24375652
It seems like they're pushing FB as an authentication method for everything. Try and comment on a local news article (yeah, I know) and it wants to authenticate you with your FB account. Same thing with trying to buy something from a small independent web vendor. "Log in with your Facebook account" is becoming the default everywhere and it sucks.
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I think we need full separation of hardware and software. One company makes the hardware, others make the software. And let's not forget that it was like this for a long time (IBM+clones vs Microsoft, OS/2, Linux).
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FB ownership is definitely an instant deal-breaker regarding the Oculus for me. I've heard that the Valve Index is a good alternative. Does anybody with VR experience have any input on that?
I have owned about a dozen VR headsets at this point, including the Quest (not the Quest 2) and the Vive Index. The Index is fantastic, but it's difficult to compare to the Quest which is truly in a category of its own.
For headsets, there are several properties that segment the market:
1. Tracking: outside cameras/emitters vs inside-out tracking
2. Tethered vs wireless (including PC powered, but using wireless transmission)
3. PC powered vs standalone device
For each of these, there are multiple vendors to choose from, except for standalone devices. In this case, the Oculus Quest is unique. There's no other competition.
Moreover, the Quest is the only device that can be run without a corresponding high end PC. If you don't have a PC like that, then the cost is prohibitive. There's also the space factor. VR needs space, which is already an issue. With the PC powered headsets, you also need that PC to be close enough to your open VR space. Otherwise, you need to rearrange your living space or invest in a VR dedicated PC.
In summary, the Vive Index is fantastic and arguably the best headset in the market right now, but the Oculus Quest fills a different niche of that market.
(And as to the topic of the article: I'm done with Oculus based on Facebook's policies).
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> I've heard that the Valve Index is a good alternative
They're not even comparable. The Quest is a headset and two controllers you put it on and pick the controllers up, draw a room boundary and you're in. Works in any room in your house, completely stand alone.
Index requires you to install multiple sensors in a specific room in your house, and requires a connection to a desktop PC tower and fiddling around with Steam to play.
I think the FB account requirement is incredibly dumb from Oculus (Don't understand why it couldn't just be a shadow account like Insta/Whatsapp which everyone seems fine with weirdly) but really the product their offering is entirely in a class of it's own for a fraction of the price a normal VR setup costs and a fraction of the hassle.
I think if the market was different and what they were offering wasn't unique I think far fewer people would care and we'd all just buy different headsets.
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I have experience with the original pc tethered oculus, the htc vive and the valve index.
The valve index is a very nice upgrade over the original htc vive and the original oculus. The 'screen door' effect is all but gone the new controllers are very comfortable and the tracking is stellar. The index is heavier than the original oculus but the way the weight is distributed and the way the strapping works makes it a non issue. My only complaint is also a problem in the 'gen 1' headsets. Reflection off the fresnel lenses can cause some banded 'flare', especially noticeable when most of the screen is very dark but there is some portion of very bright light.
Sadly I have no experience with the 'upstart' headsets from Microsoft, HP, etc.
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Index is awesome but you also need a well spec'd PC, have $999 on hand, and wait a few months for one. I believe the waiting list is 2-3 months now. I missed my reservation the first time, so if you really want one be vigilant in checking your email and Steam account.
Pros
- Knuckles controllers, still nothing like them
- External base station tracking, the only option that opens up full body tracking and makes it easy to do feet based movement
- High Refresh rate
- Good FOV
Cons
- Knuckles still isn't universally supported
- LCD screen and no OLED
- Reverb G2 has a much better screen
- Wires
I would recommend the G2 but its tracking and controllers just aren't as good as the Index, unless you're just going to use it for driving and flying games.
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The Valve Index is hands-down the best headset.
But it's also $999, requires a beefy gaming PC, and the setup is slightly more involved. But if you already have a beefy gaming PC (I'm a PC gamer, so I already did), don't mind spending 10 minutes attaching the lighthouses to the corners of your room, and of course have the $999 to buy the full kit, it's worth it.
HP Reverb 2 is coming soon with much higher resolution, though lower refresh rate. Whats better depends on if you're planning on playing sims or action games really.
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Confirming the confirmation that the Index is a good collection of hardware. I don't have experience with an Occulus or Vibe, but the Index fell squarely into the "works out of the box" territory.
The only thing I really did to improve it was to 3d print a stand for the hand controllers. More an aesthetic choice than anything.
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It's not really an alternative in that sense since it's tethered, needs a computer and a completely different ballpark price wise. If you have the money, a good gaming PC and the possibility to set up a dedicated VR space I would definitely buy an Index or HTC Reverb 2 though.
I have an Index. As long as you have a solid PC, the experience is great—it single-handedly convinced me VR was more than a gimmick. Great quality picture + audio, reasonably ergonomic and I love the controls. Overall, I've been super happy with it.
Downsides to consider:
• You need a solid gaming PC (with a 2070 or better).
• Expensive ($1000 for the kit)
• Connected to the computer by a wire, awkward for "room-scale" VR
• Base stations provide great tracking but require setup (mounting high up in your room) and mean that the setup isn't very portable.
• Limited/janky access to exclusive titles. (You can hack around to get Oculus-only titles to work, but it seems rough and I haven't tried it myself.)
If you're not budget-constrained, I believe the Index will give you the best overall experience.
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I've had a Rift for 3 years (not a Rift-S). I've used a Quest. I bought an Index in August because of this FB account crap but ending up selling it 2 days later.
I'm not a fan of the Index. First problem, it has horrible black levels. Everything looks like you're in a layer of fog compared to the Rift. Maybe if you've never used a Rift before you won't notice but it was shockingly bad for me.
The headphones are utter crap. I don't get whoever thought headphones that hover 1/2 inch away from your ears would work. Take whatever headphones you have now that you're listening to music on and pull them 1/2 inch away for each ear. The sound goes down, it sounds tinny, less full, bases are missing, etc. The Index sounded exactly like that. Some friends said you have to get them perfectly lined up but if that's true the moment you move your head suddenly in some game they're no longer going to be aligned.
This also means the sound leaks into the room far more than it would with on ear headphones. It's not going to be loud but it is going to be annoying for anyone within a room if they aren't making some louder noise.
Next up, Steam VR is just not as good as Oculus Connect (or whatever Oculus's home screen system is called). In part because Oculus has built in "pull up your desktop and/or multiple windows" at anytime in anytime game and pin them to say up. Apparently there's a 3rd party app that will provide this for Index/Vive but I use that feature all the time. Inside a game want to look up a walkthru just pin in there in my view.
Now for some things that no one will admit to but I will...
The Index Controllers didn't feel as good to me as Rift Controllers. I get they have fanciers sensors. I get they grip your hands. But, probably the #1 use for VR is porn. Controllers that require 2 hands to put on are not good for things that require one had to be free.
I have lots of friends in the industry, I see none of them using an Index and plenty of complaints.
As for Quest/Quest 2, even if there wasn't the FB issue it's like choosing an iPhone instead of a PS5. iPhone has tons of great games but it doesn't have PS5 level games. Similarly Quest has tons of great games, but it doesn't have PC level VR games and it will never have any porn games being locked up by Facebook. (and even if it did, do you really want FB knowing which porn games you're playing?)
I'm praying the HP Reverb G2 gets good reviews and solves most of those issues. It's apparently a month or 2 from shipping so I'm crossing my fingers I can get rid of this Rift.
I can confirm that, uh, the Index exists and is good. Not sure what else you want to know.
How could anyone expect anything they use the device for to be private when it is owned and serviced by Facebook?
Apple’s investment in Privacy is going to pay off so big.
I wonder if Facebook can spin off a company that includes Oculus and competes with Apple on Privacy.
I’d guess no.
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This is why I went Vive back when there were only two options for desktop VR
> for anyone who doesn't already have an active FB account (and perhaps even those who do).
This. Unless you have built up sufficiently high profile Facebook fame known inside and out of it, beyond just having a moderately active account, I wouldn’t consider it safe to spend a penny on this.
Really unfortunate that virtually no competitor exists in mobile VR segment.
HTC Vive?
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A deal-breaker indeed. I am not buying any device I can't use to reasonably full extent without an online account and a cloud connection.
I recently made the mistake of buying an iPad because I was excited to use Side Car with the Apple Pencil to draw in Mac apps.
It turns out I can't use the advertised features of the Apple devices I bought because Side Car requires 2FA with a phone number and my phone service is data only.
Given that I connect the iPad to the Mac via a USB-C cable, it's not clear why iCloud is required at all. They're just intentionally crippling their expensive devices.
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I was so excited for the CV1 after I loved my DK2, but I now own a Vive. The Facebook acquisition was a deal-breaker, for privacy reasons and it bring patently obvious it would eventually result in this type of garbage.
Yep, the way we fix this is to avoid Occulus products for now.
Can’t this user return the item as defective? You paid for a VR headset and it doesn’t perform its primary function.
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I am sick of verifying my FB account periodically after deleting the account and re-create with same email. Then, the weirdness came up, such as timeline only shows a couple of posts or nothing even I visited friends page and showed recent posts. And first a few months, FB asked me to upload the verifiable ID to unblock my FB account. (What the hell they need my ID ? I already enabled 2FA but kept complaining suspicious activity.)
Blizzard is asking me for government ID before they'll DELETE my account. It makes no sense. I feel like there should be some government agency that is interested in this misuse of their ID's/info, but I haven't found it.
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I got a quest 2 (yesterday), and I did not have to use a Facebook account to login. I was able to use my Oculus account.
I did receive a notice that in 2023 the Oculus Account would be deprecated however.
Totally agree. I have a Quest 1, before the forced FB integration. I'll be waiting until something better comes along before upgrading my VR setup.
I couldn’t agree more. I had the fun of a 30 day ban on PlayStation because my kid sent something inappropriate to his friend. Now I imagine a scenario like this happening but the consequences are my Facebook account shut down permanently. Definitely a huge turn off.
While I agree doing anything with a Facebook account is gross, it seems rather, err, trusting to think that Facebook wasn't already linking accounts anyway and are essentially not just getting rid of the system that does that and forcing users to do it for them.
I have an active FB account, but I would never use it to log in to anything other than FB via a sandboxed browser profile, and if I had to, I wouldn't use that service.
Yea - I'd be unwilling to use Oculus unless I could specifically tie it to a fake FB account (or no account at all). I barely use my FB account but I never want gaming integrated with social media in a manner I can't control simply due to personal preference and privacy.
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Realistically if you don't want to manage hundreds of separate logins then what are your options? On the whole it still seems much easier to get reasonable behaviour and human involvement out of Facebook than out of Google.
Yeah, I feel that it's easy for the majority of HN to stay away. I do feel bad for people who can't afford anything else at the moment.
The quest two barely counts as VR. You will only have mobile titles, which are terrible compared to PC. to run quest with PC you need to have a VR ready PC in the first place.
Hey, let's not get stupid here.
The content on the Quest may not be "desktop fidelity", but my time with the Quest 1 was VERY much enjoyable (especially compared to the Oculus Go), and often preferred over my desktop VR HMD simply for the convenience. And the content was quite good.
By this same metric, the Switch is also plagued with "mobile titles" given it's Android base and Tegra X1 mobile GPU. But most folks DON'T think of it like that, and for good reason: the Switch can keep up just fine in it's own market.
And if the Quest 2 has improved specs in every area over the Quest 1, then it's completely FINE for what it is.
It's just the company behind it fucked up a good thing.
That’s what I did. Haven’t had any issues.
100% this.
You'd have thought FB learned from the whole bolting on Google+ to Youtube fiasco.
I won't even start on Facebook in terms of just not wanting to be associated with every other scum-sucker thing that company does ... (Hi Facebook employee, I don't mean you personally, but you know I'm right).
The shrill of millions of nerds realizing they have to choose between the best easiest VR tech and facebook knowing what porn they watch.
Do not stay away from Oculus.
The Quest 2 is amazing and an important leap for VR. If you care about the state of VR, it must sell well.
Frankly, this is not the hill to die on. If you plan to own a smartphone or really use any kind of service or internet browsing in the modern world going forward you’re going to be faced with these kind of privacy dilemmas. Better to just accept it and move on with your life than to basically live like a Luddite for the rest of your life. Facebook will not be the first or last corporation to ask you to relax your absolute anonymity.
Are you a Facebook employee or something?
This is absolutely the hill to die on. Oculus has competitors. The answer to save VR isn't to buy Oculus, it's to buy other headsets and hope Oculus dies unless they reverse their decision to require a Facebook account.
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Mate, if Facebook actually cared about the VR scene they wouldn’t have broken the best VR headset to date by _requiring_ a fb login. Without a fb login the device is broken. If _they_ wanted VR to succeed they wouldn’t have done this. Take it up with them.
A wild false dichotomy has appeared !
If only there were other companies with competing products which would assuage one’s concerns regarding privacy and/or anonymity and guard against Luddite lifestyles.
“Must sell well...hill to die on” feel a bit extreme, particularly given everything that has transpired in 2020.
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> Ethically challenged software engineer working for a major tech company
Well, at least you know yourself, but I don't appreciate this attempt to normalize your moral bankruptcy and ridicule others who haven't sold and don't want to sell their soul.
Maybe one day you'll be forced to confront the consequences of this lack of ethics. Until then, kindly fuck right off.
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> If you care about the state of VR, it must sell well.
Isn't the opposite true? If I care about the state of VR as a product free of social media lock-in, I want Oculus to fail hard.
Getting locked out of your brand new device worth several hundred dollars is not a "privacy dilemma".
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I have a Gear VR and I've been on the fence about upgrading to a real proper mobile VR setup but thankfully Oculus required this Facebook integration and made this decision a lot easier.
I will put my money somewhere else.
It's funny that you are talking about Luddites because those were basically beaten into submission by police.
I sense a shill.
Insightful comment from the thread:
Yeah, I think part of the problem is that Facebook has never had an actual product which people pay for and expect to work. Their whole culture and set of priorities are counter to this.
Unfortunately I get the impression that this is how you get proper support from Facebook or Google. Make a Reddit or Hacker News post, get a few upvotes, and someone with influence inside the company files an "Oops Help My Friend" support ticket or contacts another person with the right authority to take a look.
In the Catholic theology, there's a concept of Saints, who are basically humans that intercede with God on the behalf of ordinary mortals. People will sometimes address prayers to saints in the hope that the prayer will be more effective. Probably similar in other religions too but I'm pulling from memories of catholic school
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I wonder if there is a way to incentivize the behavior of "I work at a big company and have the ability to help out a stranger with a problem"? Perhaps people who help others with these issues (which are public by nature of being discussed on reddit/twitter/etc) can put it as an item on their resume when looking to switch jobs - something like "I care about the community and people who use the products I help build. I advocated for [this person (with link to public forum)] which ultimately resulted in [this solution (with link to release note if possible)]."
Of course there is a discussion to have about incentivizing the _wrong_ behavior (the need to create publicity around issues that shouldn't exist in the first place / only people with "clout" become the ones who get their issues resolved).
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Unfortunately for each of these cases going public there will be about a hundred poor souls being unnoticed.
This has happened with me re: Intuit, Microsoft and Adobe as well - all companies with proper support channels - issue resolution/escalation for people with the "right contacts" goes about 100x faster.
What about the 99.9% of the rest who don't have those contacts?
Anecdotal, but.. I got dicked around by Wayfair for almost two months (stalled order, various excuses, well meaning but essentially powerless customer support). In the end all it took to resolve was one tweet at their account. Next day the order cleared.
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That is a fantastic comment. I was reading through Google SRE stuff. Lots of good info. Lots of very, very bad ideas too. Lots of it is "at scale, you can't make everyone happy, so don't try." You end up with SLOs and SLIs based on percentages of availability, errors, etc. If 99.99% of requests are good, don't worry about the rest. However, at scale, 0.01 can be literally millions of real, breathing people with feeling and priorities and things to do. When you give away your product for free, these are good trade offs. When you sell your product, the same assumptions may not apply.
I cannot afford to ignore 0.01% of incoming requests because we charge per request. At a certain point, yes, money and pros and cons yadda yadda yadda. It just feels that, once again, people are saying, "but Google does it!" -- and that does not mean you should.
100% is unachievable, especially at Google scale. Your car or coffee shop or whatever also fails 0.0x% of the time. Heck the energy net in western countries doesn't reach 99.999% uptime and I would call it very dependable.
I'd say the biggest problem it the non-existent support. It's fine if 0.01% fails, as long as there is human troubleshooting or help available if necessary.
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I think you are very confused about how availability is tracked. If a class of users is always getting an error this would be investigated. There is literally no way, at any scale, to guarantee 100% availability.
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They do. They've had digital photo frames for years now. I just don't think anyone bought it.
Facebook Ads is their product.
I'm very excited about VR. I bought the GearVR, then the first Oculus Rift, and most recently the Quest 1.
Now, instead of buying the Quest 2 (which is unquestionably the best-value headset available today) I'm waiting for a competitor to enter the space.
Imagine if your desktop monitor would only turn on when synced to an active account on a social media platform. If you decide to leave that platform, or if that platform decides you aren't providing enough invasive information about yourself and decides to leave you, you've got an expensive paperweight. No warning or recourse. No thank you.
> Imagine if your desktop monitor would only turn on when synced to an active account on a social media platform.
We are rapidly heading towards this future and SV devs are decrying it on HN while helping implement it in the background to pad their wallets.
The devs working on this are generally not the devs who are decrying the harmful effects. In reality, when you work on such projects you tend to isolate yourself from criticism.
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To be clear, I think the FB/Oculus devs are doing impressive work. I get value out of FB (that's why I still have an account) and Oculus is the primary driver of progress in VR today.
However, I don't believe it's a user-friendly product decision to tightly couple FB's VR hardware to its social media platform. It's yet another push towards a walled garden, much like Google's AMP and Apple's app store.
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"Imagine if your desktop monitor would only turn on when synced to an active account on a social media platform...or if that platform decides you aren't providing enough invasive information about yourself"
Welcome to your new Samsung SmartTV.
Yep, they managed to convince me not to order Quest 2. And I already own Quest 1 and Index. Hope Valve is going to ship stand-alone headset, at least their incentives are aligned.
it's not on the level of the Q2, but Varjo makes a really good high end headset, probably comparable to the Valve Index
good for you. Vote with your wallet.
Hardware requiring an online account to work must be outlawed.
As well as the "We have already reviewed this decision and it can't be reversed" bullshit. For every ban they should be required to issue a very specific clarification on why exactly were you banned and let you to speak to a real person.
That would probably a step too far. But also unnecessary.
Make a law that requires them to give you a full refund for all hardware that you can’t use and all software purchased over the lifetime of the account.
That will make them incur a cost that makes it worthwhile for them to be more careful.
Edit: Downstream commenters make a good point. You'd have to put in a formula for "depreciation" of the refund, so you can't just get a refund years later.
On the surface, this seems like an elegant solution. However, it also seems to me like it would need exceptions.
Since we are talking about online games, the topic of how to deal with people caught cheating (as in using third party cheating tools) comes to mind. It is typical to ban those people. If a ban was synonymous with a refund, there is little incentive to not cheat.
If the law allowed for exceptions like this (e.g. banned with cause), then it'd be pretty hollow as the company is also the final arbiter of what cause is.
It is possible I am missing something though as this is not something I have put a lot of thought into.
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Presumably the payment method will be banned and getting banned in a old game purposely to get a refund sounds like a lot of work for 60$. I can't imagine that would be significantly abuse.
Sellers should not be able to take away goods after the sell; that's pretty much universally understood as theft.
The EU actually has such a "conformity" law for goods[0], however I don't see how it would apply in this case. It also takes into account the point raised by the other commenters: "the seller can only refuse if this causes disproportionate costs on him in comparison with the alternative remedy, taking into account the value of the goods or the significance of the lack of conformity"
[0] https://www.europe-consommateurs.eu/en/consumer-topics/buyin...
So, after 5 years you can just do something stupid to get banned and get a full refund? Sweet.
Ensuring it can be used without an online account is actually reasonable.
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Pointing out to sibling comments that the actual law would be more complex than the specific wording here and that courts exist for a reason.
The bigger problem is that no individual would have any realistic hope of successfully suing facebook to prove unjust account termination.
A step in the right direction, but it wouldn't help with the other problem of device-as-a-service, which is the company going bankrupt.
"We have already reviewed this decision and it can't be reversed" is how the Internet has always worked.
The dirty secret of the Internet - going back decades - is that it's concept of moderation mostly relies upon unstated or understated rules half-enforced and adjudicated by volunteers or underpaid contractors with the power of judge, jury, and executioner. This is arguably by design: the vast majority of what moderators are dealing with is spam, which has the properties of being cheap to execute and difficult to filter for. Hence, anti-spam efforts are swift and merciless. More modern efforts to deal with things like foreign election interference and fake news are arguably extensions of this same ongoing effort to summarily hang and execute spammers.
Facebook is not alone in this either: Google's done it from the very beginning and their death penalty stings far harder. There's a few exceptions to this, such as Wikipedia's ArbCom or other collaborative Free Software projects with code-of-conduct rules and moderator transparency. However, even those platforms will summarily execute spammers.
This may be the only way to scale a service that is free to users. But once you are selling a product to paying customers, those customers need to be at a different tier with real customer support.
Those paying customers are already incredibly unlikely to be spammers. They cannot be handled the same way free accounts are.
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Strongly disagree. Using the law in this strong arm manner stiffles innovation.
Yes, the current Oculus / Facebook situation sucks.
However, blanket statements like "Hardware requiring an online account to work must be outlawed." Would ban very legitimate products such as Amazon's physical buttons for restocking supplies.
Sure the Dash buttons are discontinued, but there's definitely an interesting area of products that might be developed in the coming years for other products in this wide domain.
> However, blanket statements like "Hardware requiring an online account to work must be outlawed." Would ban very legitimate products such as Amazon's physical buttons for restocking supplies.
OK, rephrase it slightly and say that it must not require an online account from a specific provider. If I can come up with an API endpoint that I want to use instead of Amazon, and I want to reconfigure my Dash button to use it, I should be legally and technically allowed to do so.
The regulation doesn't need to ban any categories of products, or mandate any features. It just needs to say that if your product depends on online connectivity for a significant part of its functionality, then it must not employ technical measures to prevent interoperability. Hardware that's sold to consumers already needs to meet various compliance standards, such as RF emissions testing; this doesn't seem like a heavy burden in comparison.
Of course, such a policy is very unlikely to be enacted in the US any time soon, but hey, I can dream.
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>Dash buttons
Those weren't innovations, those were solutions in search of a problem. Probably contributed to their discontinuation. Also, what "innovation" of the past 20 years has been truly innovative, life-changing, and a net positive for humanity? Pretty much everything that has come out of Silicon Valley has been at best neutral for society (creating new markets and revenue for businesses aren't a positive in my eyes).
We need to stop pulling the "stifling innovation" card. Not stifling innovation has led us to society's cancerous relationship with technology.
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Why couldn't dash buttons work on the LAN for whatever use-case you want it to?
Wouldn't impact its intended use case at all. Other than the fact that it could now be used for something useful I guess...
I agree with you.
But if you can ban me from using a piece of hardware that I bought then you should be required to refund me and pay shipping for the return.
I once had a Logitech universal remote control that required opening an account to use it. Sent it back, bought an AllInOne, and never since considered purchasing any products from Logitech. Unfortunately most people don't give a shit and just do what the companies tell them.
You do have that right, small claims court
No account would mean anonymous access, wouldn't it? That's fine, but I don't think many people would frequent anonymous communities since moderation would become extremely difficult, unless the presence was tied with the hardware. Tying an an involuntary account to hardware would probably destroy the second hand market.
I would have the law along the lines that Hardware should not be limited or curtailed in usage via any optional on-line related identification.
That way for things that may well suit having linked account - fine, but not curtailing that avenue. Basicly making having it linked to an on line account - optional via consumer choice, as it should always be.
> Hardware requiring an online account to work must be outlawed.
You have just outlawed Roku. An online account is required to make it work, because that's how it was designed to work. It's a rather useless device without the online account.
Well, you could design an open API that others can use, too (server-side, not client side!). So the device can work with competitors, too, meaning it won't require an account at only one company. That would be a compromise - at least in theory others could replace the server parts.
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For some features, you can't get around not having an online account. I feel it's better to vote with our wallets.
As well as the "We have already reviewed this decision and it can't be reversed" bullshit. For every ban they should be required to issue a very specific clarification on why exactly were you banned and let you to speak to a real person.
GDPR requires that algorithmic decisions get this kind of oversight. GDPR is the way to get redress here.
Only for consequential decisions, but yes, a GDPR complaint from someone who purchased the Quest 2 is the right approach here.
Or maybe just don't buy or use products and services like this?
Folks often overestimate the power consumers have in meaningfully shaping a market. Consumer protections are rarely gained by simply refusing to do business with market leaders who behave in consumer hostile ways. Regulation really seems to be our best shot at reversing course on what is nothing short of the theft of digital goods from consumers.
Except that one day you suddenly have employers that require you to personally own this hardware, or government portals, and then what?
Oh, your driver's license is only available as an app for a device you just got permabanned from. I guess you're not a citizen anymore.
My health care provider is now asking users to move away from physical credentials to use an app. I am livid.
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Many people still will buy. There is a reason we use representative democracy rather than direct democracy - qualified people should outlaw some bad things the crowd can't resist itself.
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Wow, thought I'd be one of the few struggling with this.
Bought the device with the hope that I could register an account for the first time in years, but similar to others, my account was instantly banned with no explanation other than "violating community guidelines."
One of Facebook's arguments against anti-trust accusations has been to point to the lack of consumer harm. This is fairly obvious evidence of material harm to consumers who just bought $500 paperweights.
Yeah, it's extremely hard to open an FB account anymore, which is why aged accounts sell for thousands of dollars on the <mumble mumble mumble> <cough>. Won't put that info here.
I'm frankly surprised FB would go this route then, are they assuming only existing FB users will buy? They have to know they've basically killed the ability to create new accounts.
Thousands? Quick googling suggests it's only dozens of dollars. Unless there's a better place to offload them than those top results.
Facebook bans accounts fairly regularly for hate speech, which pretty much means whatever they want. It seems ludicrous to me that an edgy teenager can have their headset bricked because they posted some spicy political memes.
If only the reason was hate speech!
This also happened to me, had an account 5 years ago, stopped using it, deleted the account on their website. Last week decided to create it again to prepare to eventually link to Oculus.. Instantly banned. Literally on the "Confirm Your Email" page got redirected to violated the community guidelines. And I'm not even from the US..
There are similar stories on reddit, with people speculating that the old account actually still existed and the ban was because the new account was imitating an existing account. The idea that they would keep a "deleted" account around seems highly plausible given Facebook's hunger for data.
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It sometimes happens if you create account from a suspicious IP address, such as VPN or shared computer at school or cafe. They are trying to prevent account takeovers and fake accounts when some dormant users left weak passwords and got in a leak somewhere. But Facebook is also sometimes a bit too proactive in banning new accounts, because they use this as an opportunity to extract more information from you - you can only unban the account by providing phone number, scan of your ID card etc.. That suits them so they like banning more.
> And I'm not even from the US..
Accessing Facebook from outside the US is likely, through a combination of bad signals, why you tripped the ban hammer. Unfortunately.
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This is not about hate speech... Creating new accounts with Facebook often leads to instaban.
Facebook, their "real name" policy, and their ban policy when combined with hardware like Oculus seem like a series of really bad product decisions. Like with combining messengers between Instagram and Facebook, the business reason is probably to make Oculus harder to split off in the event of anti-trust action. Pretty gross.
I recently discovered a similar thing with Twitter: when you sign up with e-mail, they block your account and will unblock it only if you give them your phone number.
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I had a post taken down for posting a link to a local gay event. Their algorithm cant figure out pro vs hate speech.
So I started migrating the few apps I used FB logins from, (spotify), then stopped using google login because of facebook. Taught me, not to trust these companies with my 3rd party accounts THAT I PAY FOR.
- Political memes in the masses are making fact-based and rational political conversation difficult to impossible.
- Teenagers should not be on social networks.
- Teenagers who aren't old enough to vote who want to post political memes - that's like 10x me less caring whether they're banned from Facebook.
I have no problem with the ban.
However, Facebook should separate out its identity service from its social networking service. It might make more money doing this because more people would stick to its services. There's no reason why I shouldn't be able to authenticate with a Facebook account even though Facebook deems me unworthy of participating in its social network.
Hard thing is that even legit political opinion will be banned if there is enough people that is not in line with your vision. Or like in Ukraine where Facebook moderation team is very very pro government with very narrow vision.
Imagine USA moderation of Facebook consists only of pro Trump's fans with power instant ban Your account.
I for one think it's hilarious that future gamergate situations might have real world consequences for the participants.
The reason they put is 'hate speech' but I'm basically convinced it's a single, stock error message they show regardless of the reason. How can an account be banned for hate speech 7 minutes after it was created?
I think the bigger problem is Facebook's policing of bots, especially since this is a big election year. I'm going to guess this was the reason for OP's ban
Even if that was true in the needlessly inflammatory way you stated it, it has nothing to do with this.
Facebook doesn't need me to be kind.
It seems like unfortunate timing - Facebook's cracking down on fake accounts before the election right as the Quest 2 launches. I'd guess that a lot of the people signing up for Facebook just for the Quest don't follow the same patterns as a typical user, so the algorithm flags them and removes them. I'm sure they'll get reinstated once Facebook manually reviews, but it's definitely a major annoyance.
Sidenote, I got my quest 2 yesterday and from a hardware standpoint, it's blown me away coming from PSVR. Too bad the Facebook nonsense keeps it from being a must have product.
> It seems like unfortunate timing - Facebook's cracking down on fake accounts before the election right as the Quest 2 launches.
No, this isn't new, more people are just seeing it now since they just expanded the market of users.
It has been like this for years: If you go out of your way to create an account disconnected from a social graph so that it doesn't creepily alert people that would have saved your number/email and uploaded all their contacts in the past, Facebook will ban the account within 10 minutes.
Somebody's inevitable rebuttal: "Yeah but my grandma just made an account and didn't get banned"
Okay, good for you. The described reality here is also valid.
To make it not ban the account you can upload a contact photo and try to friend request multiple people in a social graph. The time limit is very short and you will otherwise very quickly get instabanned or stuck in a security verification loop where the verification never comes.
This is just creepy Facebook behavior for their data mining operation, now masquaraded as "ensuring quality of accounts". This is the same behavior as when they use insecure SMS one time passwords instead of client side code generation, and then use that phone number to add it to the social graph.
Their behavior is very consistent and there is no one individual there responsible for it and even understands the use case.
In this case, this is just another byproduct of Facebook employees living in the warped reality where everyone loves the Facebook product and has it. They honestly believe it there and you should see how confused and affronted they will act when you tell them you don't have an account.
This is just a byproduct of that sentiment.
This description makes alot of sense and further convinces me that Facebook especially needs some steep regulation to curb that behavior... or disappear.
My Facebook account was banned multiple times during an 8-year period when it was 100% inactive. Each time they demanded more invasive forms of verification. First, verify a phone number. Then, upload a picture of my driver's license. Finally, I had to upload a picture of my driver's license AND a secondary photo of myself that was supposed to be taken right then for that purpose.
I will never consider using any service that requires a Facebook account, nor should anyone else.
It seems to me that the U.S. is ripe for an updating of its consumer protection laws. Particularly w.r.t. shrink-wrap license and other attempts to impose unwelcome terms that the buyer didn't know about at the time of the sale.
I imagine our existing consumer-protection laws were passed over the opposition of monied interests. If so, I wonder how close we are to having the political will do to do that again.
At a minimum, a "ban" of the Oculus account should also include an immediate refund of any and all purchases. It's absolutely ridiculously to think they can just keep all that money while depriving a customer of software licenses they paid for!
heck I don't understand why Facebook doesn't exclude accounts linked to a headset from bot bans, max 1 per headset of course. If fake new Facebook accounts are worth $400+ to bad actors we are in bad shape.
Indeed, and it would force Facebook have some skin in the game because banning would cost them real money. I'm betting once each ban starts to cost them hundreds of $ they will start to at least put some human eyes in front of it before the ban hammer comes down.
Not even that is good enough, a ban on an account should have a VERY high bar, and that bar needs to be highly regulated. Right now it's just games, maybe movies, but it could apply to all kinds of software and apps... and this stuff is important. You can't cut a person off from being able to purchase and use their puchased software. It's too important.
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I agree, and I think there's kind of an elephant in the room with respect to all Terms of Service Agreements.
Anybody with a mobile phone (as well as a plethora of other products) has inevitably agreed to dozens of pages of legal doctrine which they don't understand, any probably wouldn't without a competent lawyer on hand. But nevertheless, every minor service update, we all hit "I Accept", despite having no understanding of what we've agreed to.
Is this not massively problematic? What happens if a company actually tries to draw significant action against consumers using the terms of service as their contract?
My guess re. 'how close': approximately 48 quintillion light years away. The US has been corporatist for a long while and is blatantly so since Citizens United - the idea that a consumer protection law would pass in this environment is as 'possible' as the world taking climate change seriously at any point before we are all boiled alive.
Today my OQ2 arrived. I created an account just for the purpose of pairing the device. I used my real credentials and a gmail email address. I got banned immediately by FB, and cannot init the device. FU FB.
Return the device as defective?
I already filed a ticket. I was told that if I followed community guidelines I wouldn’t get banned. Thanks, “Jessica”. Many of the oculus support pages use Facebook, and I’m banned from reaching them, which is pure irony in this case.
the device is not defective. don’t misuse words.
I had a similar experience with Facebook and a business-related thing last summer.
The company I'm working for has a Facebook account that is more or less "broken" — managed by email addresses that no longer work for the company, unmanaged profile page, etc. I also don’t have a personal Facebook account, so I went ahead and created one and then started to clean up the mess.
Immediately my account was deactivated. I went through a process of offering a phone number and countless CAPTCHA's, which would result in my account being reactivated but then deactivated again upon the next login. Eventually I got the "We have already reviewed this decision and it can't be reversed" ban-hammer.
I'm sort of beyond outrage or even annoyance at this point… it's all just kind of funny and stupid. When I try to figure out a way out of this pickle, the best idea I can come up with is making a bot that logs in to Facebook, wanders around "Liking" q-anon posts, and then I'd have an account that Facebook would accept as a real human being for when I need to get actual work done with their platform.
The idea that I could have an account with hundreds of games I purchased be taken away from me without reason, or without recourse is absurd. Facebook, or really anything holding licensed content needs to be regulated.
On a related note, Steam has been getting away with this for well over a decade.
If you get banned from the Steam community for spamming/harassing/being awful your game library is still there. Even if you get banned for cheating in a game, you only lose access to that game and not the rest of your library.
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As @asymptotically3 said, community banning doesn't take away your games, and in-game banning only blocks you from that specific game's multiplayer. In the past you could risk account suspension if you chargebacked purchases or redeemed stolen keys, but even that got changed years ago to just remove the specific game/license from your account instead.
Only large-scale fraud would get you banned, and even then I doubt they would disable your account entirely and not just disable future purchasing.
I feel incredible dissonance about John Carmack working for Oculus and by extension, Facebook. Especially when things like this come to light.
I tried to look for some kind of statement from him, I found this verge article from 2014
https://www.theverge.com/2014/3/30/5563440/john-carmack-face...
Much of the backlash regarding the acquisition has centered on Facebook's business model — data mining and advertising. This isn't a concern for Carmack, who says he "just can't get very worked up about it ." While he appreciates the need for privacy, "the idea that companies are supposed to interact with you and not pay attention has never seemed sane to me ... I rather like the recommendations that Amazon gives me on each visit. Educate me. What terrible outcome is expected from this?"
So actually he was fine with this from the start? And while he is moving on to AI and whatnot, he is still currently employed by Oculus, which leads me to believe this is his stance today.
I don't know how to feel about it. Even if you look past the privacy issues, he has engineered a product with hardware DRM! It just a shit product.
It’s VIP tunnel vision. Rich people with celebrity status never suffer the negative effects of those systems. In fact, it actually benefits them because the system knows they’re rich and actively favours them because they’re considered more valuable than the rest of us.
Of course he doesn’t get worked up because if his assistant calls for support on anything they get routed to the VIP support system and a team of people spring into action to solve the problem for him.
People like Carmack don’t have to use the shitty systems they’re building, so they don’t care. He’s just another rich asshole IMO.
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Oculus founder Palmer Lucky promised you would never need an FB account to use Oculus. He said FB promised him the same at the time and seems to regret his naiveté. https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/ic4ye1/new_oculus_u...
Luckey was at least already out of Oculus by the time Facebook altered the deal, right?
Never meet your heroes.
As much as I love VR (I even backed the Oculus kickstarter at the time), I can't justify spending money developing for a system that can brick the devices of my users on a whim.
They shot themselves in the foot by having this FB account requirement.
I too have the Quest 1, absolutely love it, and would have immediately purchased the Quest 2 if FB had not gone back on their explicit promise to never require an FB account.
Someone PLEASE make a privacy-first (i.e. "NORMAL") headset with similar specs to the Quest 2 - you can charge more for all I care.
Better yet.. SideQuest?! (Just got funding) please remove the login requirement as a mod.. or make another OS for it (like Lineage).
This would work really well for SideQuest, since that would give them greater control over new features they can ship.
IIRC, FB is adding new restrictions in 2021 to decrease competition from sidequest/sideloading in general
This is what scares me most about google products. If I lost my gmail account, I would be totally screwed. More surface area across google products just gives me more of a chance to get banned by some false positive somewhere, with no recourse because none of these big companies seem to care about the human. So I try to avoid google products.
There parallels with any of these giant single user account companies.
The big difference here is that Google, for now, doesn't care if you create multiple accounts while Facebook requires one and only one account that is tied to your real life identity.
If I could create a fake FB account and not be banned, this wouldn't be an issue at all.
Although I also have various concerns with Google, I feel like lumping them in here is a bit counterproductive. Facebook is on a whole other level to Google in many of these respects.
I think this business model where someone buying purchasing a physical product must register their data with manufacturer or 3rd party service and be constantly online should be made illegal. There is no business need for this apart from spying on people and gathering data to improve manipulation of messages to trick people into buying more into the manufacturer ecosystem. We need to stop this.
I don't think we should ban the whole class of online connected products. Just insist they publish a public API under terms that allow competitors to implement it and configure it on the device. Then anybody can create an alternative ecosystem for the device.
What could you do with a Google Home or Amazon Echo without connectivity? The physical product is premised on being able to search the web and stream music.
It should have self-hosted voice recognition software and be able plug to your own music collection on your NAS. If you wanted features like weather forecast, then these should be opt in and only send anonymous data related to weather forecast request. It should be illegal to use even those anonymised requests to do commercial research without paying the customer.
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So you think if someone is selling a physical product and they require registration that it's reasonable to force them to stop requiring it with the threat of physical violence from the government?
I just don't see how that is justified. The seller isn't defrauding anyone and isn't using violence themselves. It's so much more easy and ethical to just not buy the product. All you can do is take personal responsibility. Calling for violent coercion like you've done is wrong.
Why would they require registration? They should have customer data on the invoice. There is no need for anything else.
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One change I implore Facebook/Oculus to make in light of the Facebook account requirement for these devices: Allow enabling of dev mode and APK sideloading, offline, from within the device settings without the dev account requirement. That way these devices can be more than just bricks for people who get locked out by the system.
I wonder if there are any statistics around e-waste for devices that are "bricked" due to an account lockout.
To play devil's advocate: historically, VR apps like VRChat have had an absolutely massive "4chan" problem. Harassment, bullying, vulgarity, NSFW/NSFL content, viral memes, brigading, etc. The gender disparity is also alarming (like 90%+ men!). Many feel unwelcome.
I think Facebook wants to make VR fun and appropriate for everyone. One way to do that is to tie in people's real identities. Facebook threads aren't great, but they are better than twitter threads, and A LOT better than interactions in VRChat.
Jonanin, what is your name? Where do you live? What is your current street address? Where do your parents live, and what is their phone number? How about your kids?
I’m asking rhetorically. All this info and more is available to anyone with a full name and photograph via people-finder sites like Spokeo and SocialCatfish, which is exactly what Facebook accounts with a “real name policy” expose to the world. Using this info, any anonymous troll who you tick off in a VR game can send a SWAT team to your house, or tie up your phone lines, or harass your family and employer, or attempt to do you real physical harm. The Internet creates an extreme asymmetry of power between the abuser and the abused, and there are lots of unstable abusers out there with nothing more exciting to do than make your life hell.
The Mark Zuckerbergs and Larry Pages of the world live in gated communities with many layers of people between them and the world, so they don’t care about any of this.
I think this is a reasonable argument for requiring accounts / checks for specific social apps in VR.
But a VR headset is not a chat device any more than a keyboard is a chat device. It's a general I/O device that can be used for all sorts of experiences, including single-user ones.
Isn't that better solved by individual accounts for each game and some moderation? I've never had problems in VRChat, though I didn't find it much fun either.
FWIW, I have a few fakebook accounts, with names like Nopey Nofookinwae, and they're still active... Never bought anything from Oculus Store, though.
Facebook is really shooting themselves in the foot here, imo.
Honestly I'd rather everybody got used to rude people on the internet
And to think Facebook wants to get into cryptocurrency and payments/wallets. You'd have to be really stupid to trust them with that especially after this fine demonstration.
Many Quest buyers reporting similar problems:
https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/jb5z4i/i_dont_under... https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/jb86d1/facebook_del... https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/jb701s/guys_i_reall... https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/jb5wrs/my_facebook_... https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/jannlj/facebook_req... https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/jaq477/facebook_scr... https://www.reddit.com/r/OculusQuest/comments/jawv6g/how_sho...
Fyi your links don't work.
Thanks, copy-pasted them from elsewhere and didn't notice that they'd been clipped. Fixed now.
Facebook is easily the worst company in big tech, with zero regard whatsoever for privacy or consumers. I can no longer support Oculus since it requires FB authentication.
I recommend creating a separate account if you have no other options.
This seems to be an algorithmic implementation of cancel culture. Due to human nature, it can't be not buggy.
Seems most likely that they're trying to flag "suspicious" account creations in the run-up to the US election, and that the left hand that implemented this algorithm didn't speak to the right hand that was launching a new product that required an FB account.
Don’t keep anything on social media you can’t lose. Assume the account can get deleted at anytime.
Maintain your own private site of family and friends pictures that you own and share around with people you care about. It’s not that hard and replicates most of the real value of a social network for most people.
Anyone know what Facebook’s benefit is from the mandatory linking? At this point pretty much anyone who wants a facebook account, has one. And the quest is niche. They don’t need it to drive facebook usage.
Is it data? If so what’s the expected value of data they’d get from quest linkage?
This is by no means an exhaustive list nor 100% accurate but yes data, likely to go in to the social profile they build of you to sell/use in advertisements.
Data such as; information provided at sign up, web/links to other users based on sign up info, inferred location information, purchases, interests, visited products, used products, active hours, usage hours, general use metrics... etc
I had the same problem. Created new fb account, linked to Oculus, bought couple of things, got banned. Asked for review, solved within 2 working days. Not even my real name.
Good thing, it's a "soft" ban. They do not allow to log in, but if you are logged in, it's fine. So i could use my bought items even though I could not log in in browser. But if I would have logged out from Oculus, I wouldn't be able to use them.
So another example of "if this gets big, suddenly facebook will care, and it'll become quiet."
Staying away from anything facebook related.
Pardon my ignorance, what did he do wrong to provoke the ban-hammer? Is is prohibited to mix products across Facebook properties?
facebook doesn't like shell/side accounts without anything on them
Best quest 2 alternatives ?
Not being able to create a burner account is a deal breaker
At the moment:
For mobile VR? Quest one, that's it.
For wireless? Index/Vive with wireless attachment. That'll be 2-3 times the cost though, and you'll need a PC and router to drive that.
There isn't a wireless attachment for the Index.
Guess I'll do without.
I even have a Facebook, but I don't get why they need this information.
Sue in Small Claims Court. The Oculus terms of service permit that. Your problem will be resolved, one way or another.
Are there any alternative OS options brewing? Its mostly just an Android device. It can't be that hard to root.
I hope someone roots it. I'm offering a $5k bounty https://twitter.com/arobertlong/status/1316177057085177857
I tried to do the math on the Quest 2 hardware, and they definitely cut corners to bring the cost down, but not to the point where I think they have an attractive margin. (On the $300 headset, but the accessories/storage increase definitely have a decent margin). They’ll also get some margin on software sales presumably.
That’s important because I believe the revenue generating model is entirely from data. Even if I’m wrong, it’s Facebook, so we know they’re after data for profit.
And consider the kind of data that VR is capable of collecting. It’s biometric data at its core. If you take the data involved in VR, tie it to a person under the real-name policy, and give it to some crafty software engineers, you can get some crazy intimate results.
I would think the margin comes from their cut of software sales. Seems to work well for Apple.
The headset is the razor and the games are the blades.
Was looking at buying the quest 2 today and decided to wait until the weekend to see how the launch would go and then I saw this. I won't buy a quest 2 unless the account requirement is removed
I’ve absolutely stopped recommending it. I won’t link my Facebook account so will use it until it’s disabled. Looking forward to supporting their competitors. It’s a shame, I enjoy the device.
Lmao thats fucking hilarious. Facebook is one of the worst companies there is and you have to be stupid to buy anything from them
Unpopular opinion: although I hate how oculus sold out to Facebook (possibly backstab of the decade, after the initial crowdfunding), and although I’m a strong advocate of leaving Facebook regardless of their VR BS, there’s really nothing wrong with them requiring a Facebook account to use it. I have no idea how much the manufacturing/R&D costs of Quest are, but I doubt it makes sense for Facebook to sell it this cheap without requiring users to link/create a Facebook account. Don’t expect stuff to be free/cheap for no reason.
My point is that regulating this space of tech will only lead to less innovation. There’s an extremely easy solution that every single one of us can do: don’t buy it, don’t be tempted by the cheap price Facebook is offering. I closed my Fb account ~5 years ago now (after being on it for about 10 years) and I’m very tempted to buy Quest 2, but I won’t. If enough people do this, what ever scummy plan Facebook is weaving will fail, but even if it doesn’t, you’d be out of it.
> regulating this space of tech will only lead to less innovation
You might be ultimately right about this, but you certainly haven't proved it. A common theme is a large company will use its leverage to make a product that is better and cheaper than the alternatives, demolish their competition, and the sit on their laurels for the next decade, with the exception of a few updates that provide vendor specific features to encourage vendor lock-in.
In short, Occulus could become the new IE 5/6.
I wasn’t really trying to prove that point, I also didn’t think it needs proving. But your point somewhat does it I think. There are many examples in tech specifically over the last couple of decades on how free unregulated competition was the reason why we had accelerated development, lower cost, and “democratizations” of tools and information. As long as there’s no regulation preventing others from coming up with a better solution (however “better” is defined), there’s no reason why others can’t come up with a viable alternative. Friendster -> MySpace -> Facebag. IE -> FF and Chrome. Nokias -> iPhone and co, and so on.
Oculus rift is Westworld for facebook
Alright, so he bought it 4 years ago. Bu in the EU you have 2 years to start an RMA if a product is not working as expected under normal use. I reckon one would be able to turn it in to their retailer to get a new Oculus.
I believe this is an urban myth. Can you cite the appropriate EU regulation or directive that makes this true? If a directive what about the implementation in the UK?
https://www.gov.uk/accepting-returns-and-giving-refunds for example says (from a seller's point of view) that "Customers have up to 6 years to make a claim for an item they’ve bought from you (5 years in Scotland)."
However I see no reason that you couldn't sue the manufacturer if they arrange to break your product even after six years. That would be a tort (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tort) and unrelated to your rights under your contract of sale.
I am referring this: https://europa.eu/youreuright/your-rights_en#node-5
I am not sure about the UK and how they implement the directives. But in Denmark it is most definitely not an urban myth.
I got so excited by the news about Quest 2, I was certain would by it, until I learned that "Quest headsets best accommodate IPDs between 56 and 70 mm, or about 95% of adults". My IPD is 74 - no luck this time.
For PC VR you can find used VIVE sets cheap, and remember that with steamVR you can mix and match hardware. The full Valve index kits are on delay but individual parts are faster.
VIVE Cosmos Valve Index HP Reverb G2
The day I read the news about Oculus requiring a FB account in the future, that sucker fell right off my shopping list. It's sad because it seems like a really solid piece of hardware.
A bit out of the loop on this, anyone know Carmack's stance on this? Seems like a huge step in the direction of what we afraid of when Fb acquired Oculus.
We now live in world where if Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t like your Facebook posts, he (or some nameless flunky) will delete all your video games.
If I need to create a FB account to use an Oculus, I'm not using it. They are not the only option and I'm not bending.
I guess that old saying has now turned into "even if you are paying for it, you are still the product being sold."
I bought an oculus go for my son 2 Christmases ago - he has no Facebook, I have no Facebook - what to do what to do
Sign up to Facebook?
Just don't use the account for anything else.
Most of the people on reddit reporting bans are saying that they made a FB account that they don't actively use. That seems to make the bans more likely. The best way to prevent them is to use your FB account for organic activities
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Don't worry, you will get bored with your Oculus Quest after a month anyways. Me and my kids were using our Oculus a lot at the beginning, having great fun. Now it just sits there, although we could use it any time and even have a few great games on it.
Anyways, this has nothing to do with your issue. Facebook should be ashamed for treating paying customers like this.
They should contact their congress person and/or Senators.
I bought a Go years ago and recently I got a screen locking the entire device until I logged into Oculus. I selected the option to not connect my Facebook account, but continue to use my Oculus account. There was a sunset date on this option.
I've never bought anything from the Oculus store. I honestly only use VR for Skybox and movies I download to a file server.
Are there any alternative OSes for the GO? Honestly I'd rather just get off the stock OS if I just had a way to play my movies.
The only way this set of rules should be legal is if Facebook is required to refund the money for the headset if they decide to ban you.
Facebook is evil, plain and simple. They hurt societies, democracies, and individuals alike. Nothing good there. Fuck Facebook! They need to vanish, hopefully soon.
Yeah... People act upset because they spend money on a product they cannot use. It's not for me to discuss if it's even legal, but if it is, then the only thing to discuss is if it's fair, which is a philosophical question. I, on the other hand, wouldn't buy this stuff anyway, I don't want to do anything with Facebook, I don't want to have an account. The problem is, it's a fucking monopoly, so not wanting to do stuff is Facebook doesn't align well with living normal life. Gyms, clubs and hobbyist communities don't even bother making websites anymore. All news and meetup days will be on Facebook. But if I'm not a registered user, I cannot see them. Now, is this fair? This is just as philosophical question, as with not being able to use stuff you paid for.
So, of course I wish for Facebook to die. But it's not very realistic to hope it actually will.
The days are gone where every Gym and Club were setting up their „website“ on FB. Setting up a website these days is a non-issue with offers from wix.com etc. And local groups are moving to WhatsApp (I know it‘s owned by FB, but it doesn‘t do harm, it‘s a good product) or to Instagram (also owned by FB). There are way too many alternatives. Many people realized that it‘s boring or harming to consume „news“ pushed to a newsfeed that is manipulated. Either they get jealous, or sick of their echo-chamber or they are overwhelmed by the amount of input that they constantly receive. FB is fighting for a very very valuable asset: Your attention.
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VR sucks. The end. See you in 5-10 years when its practical and enjoyable.
Beat Saber, Half Life Alyx, Boneworks...
Practical: Mostly, particularly if you already have a gaming computer. It's easy to spend more money on a good quality monitor. Enjoyable: Abso-effing-lutely
I agree. It's still a gimmick. It's like the WII basically. Hardcore types chant it's praises and families love to play it for a party game once a year.
Other than that, it collects dust compared to your other better mediums that exist.
Eh, gimmick for some, sure. For others it's a whole new world that they won't leave. For example, got an Oculus for the gimmick and didn't think I'd be so attached to it, but I cannot go back to playing any flight or racing simulator without it again, it's simply not the same. I tried the new FS2020 briefly on launch, but had to go back to X-Plane as FS2020 still doesn't support VR headsets.
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I've been around long enough to see previous attempts at 'VR' and those definitely were gimmicks. However, I think calling even the first generation of contemporary VR a gimmick is an exageration.
There are some legitimately good experiences to be had in VR right now. Beat Saber is fun as hell, and SUPERHOT VR is great, from personal experience. However, the hardware is still a bit clunky and asks a lot of the user, and developers are still working out what how to design for it. Unfortunately that means a lot of titles are, in fact, pretty damned gimmicky.
At worst, it's a low key, more immersive Peloton but really it's a new medium. It feels like when the internet and iPhone first came out. Sure it's not perfect and it's easy for pundits to nitpick, but it's definitely a new world changing paradigm for those who can afford it. I feel that affordability is VR's main weakness.
I think VR shows promise as a way to make cardio exercise fun among other things. It's also one of the only cutting edge areas of gaming design where everyone else is just upping resolutions and frame rate.
Have you played Alyx or something like that on VR? It's absolutely not a gimmic. It's pretty freakin' amazing.
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That's unlucky, I'm guessing you haven't played much of it?
Just playing the GTAV VR mod (https://github.com/LukeRoss00/gta5-real-mod) is just something else, whilst not perfect (hell it's a mod on an old game!) it's so fucking sick being in a car chase at 160mph weaving through traffic in VR.
Can VR get a lot better in 5 - 10 years, hell yea, but that's like saying you weren't going to buy an Xbox360 because the Xbox OneX will be out in 10 years.
That looks interesting, I may try it. Got GTA V and an Oculus Go, both of which are collecting dust.
I played NFS The Run just in big screen mode (with a PS4 controller) and it was pretty nice. But other than VRChat and the occasional movie (3D is nice), I don't use the headset at all.
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You can say it about anything, in 5-10 years it'll be better. But in 5-10 years you'll be old and won't be able to fully enjoy. Things are never ideal.
I've enjoyed Alyx a lot.
I don't get it. He contacted Oculus support, Oculus support asked if he had followed these 4 steps for reactivating his account, and then... what? At that point gave up and posted on Reddit to complain?
Yeah, this sucks. But mistaken account deactivations probably happen a lot - how to handle them is one of the FAQ questions on Oculus. It happened to me with my PlayStation 4 account too; someone in Germany mistakenly signed up using my email address somehow and in the resulting confusion I got locked out of my PlayStation games for a bit. It sucks but support will eventually fix it.