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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
by pyrophane 6y ago
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.
- agd 6y agoYep, the way we fix this is to avoid Occulus products for now.
- ryandrake 6y agoCan’t this user return the item as defective? You paid for a VR headset and it doesn’t perform its primary function.
- numpad0 6y agobut you existed and broke our ToS in the first place! /s
- kube-system 6y agoYes, and if you have trouble getting a refund for your defective device, there’s a bunch of state attorneys general who are interested in anything Facebook right now.
- returningfory2 6y agoAlso if you buy it on a credit card, the CC company is usually your friend.
- MrApathy 6y agoBut the issue is that in having his account terminated, he's also losing access to all historical purchases made over the years. The CC company may be willing to accept a charge-back on recent purchases, but what about the application/game purchased four years ago that's tied to the account. It's no longer accessible, but is the CC willing to refund for a purchase made that far back? I honestly don't know, but if I had to guess it would be no.
- cesarb 6y agoIt seem that it is exactly what this user is going to do (https://old.reddit.com/r/OculusQuest/comments/japo1j/facebook_account_banned_within_10_minutes/g8r1i6k/?context=3 https://old.reddit.com/r/OculusQuest/comments/japo1j/faceboo...): "No need for chargebacks, I purchased it from John Lewis in the UK so they wont have any issues refunding me. All my previous Oculus purchases on their store are now unplayable on my CV1 though so I might have to pursue a small claims court claim to get any money back on those."
- pjc50 6y agoIt's a shame that John Lewis are probably going to have to eat the loss on this; it would be interesting to see what the effect of suing Facebook in the UK small claims court will be.
- TheTruth321 6y ago100% 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).
- qwerty456127 6y agoA 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.
- AlchemistCamp 6y agoI 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.
- falcolas 6y agoThat's pretty fucky, especially since their 2FA doesn't go through SMS for me (it's a system popup). FWIW, there are (or were) other apps which provided similar functionality without going through Apple's hoops.
- qwerty456127 6y agoMan, I really hope this is just a temporary peak of insanity in the industry history and a total change is going to happen soon. You know, there were times in history when horrible, bizarre things were norms, and somehow the societies overcame those. This is our only hope. > 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 believe they just want to make you get used to that so one day you would't even think about using any of your devices/apps without iCloud. Their vision probably is to make all the devices merely interfaces to iCloud and to make "offline usage" sound as ridiculous as using a toaster without electricity.
- nicky0 6y agoYou can put in the number of any cell phone you have access to, and get the code form the screen.
- greenpizza13 6y agoTotally 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.
- silicon2401 6y agoFB 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?
- q3k 6y agoI can confirm that, uh, the Index exists and is good. Not sure what else you want to know.
- kaibee 6y agoHP 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.
- capableweb 6y agoI'm playing tons of simulation games with my Oculus Rift and starting some weeks ago looking around for an upgrade. HP Reverb 2 is certainly an alternative, anything else I should check out? Playing mostly flying simulators, but also racing and space. I was thinking of maybe upgrading to the new Oculus' but after announcing it will require a Facebook account I started to rethink that. This submission really hit the nail in the coffin and will absolutely not get another Oculus now.
- numpad0 6y agoI wonder how good Pimax 5K/8K actually is, selling point is super wide FOV but seems a bit finicky to use or something.
- Sohcahtoa82 6y agoAccording to another user [0]... > All the extra angles of FOV are very distorted, and there is a red static constantly fuzzing away in the display. > Plus, you have to deal with the Pimax company, which has to be one of the most incompetent companies I've ever met when it comes to taking money and delivering product without stepping into the realm of actual fraud. When I bought mine, it was 3 false "it's shipped" announcements, 2 months, and a threat to reverse my credit card charge before I finally received it. [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24496969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24496969
- numpad0 6y ago> 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.
- djsumdog 6y agoHTC Vive?
- grimjack00 6y agoNot standalone. Last I recall, they _do_ have one, but it's much more expensive than Quest, and didn't have very good reviews.
- pyrophane 6y agoNo, that requires a PC. There isn't much in the all-in-one space other than the Quest.
- chaostheory 6y agoIt needs a PC in addition to spending another $500 - 600 for the headset.
- ekianjo 6y agoMore like 900 USD if you want to use it the way it was meant to be used with the peripherals.
- chaostheory 6y agoWhat do you mean? The HTC Vive, non-pro version only costs $599 with base stations. Where are you getting $900 from? I agree with the high total cost though. Most people pushing PC VR, will forget about how much a real VR ready PC will cost. It's easy to spend close to $3000 even when people loathed to admit it.
- zamalek 6y agoI 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.
- chaostheory 6y agoYeah, 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.
- chris11 6y agoThere'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.
- mtmail 6y agoThat might already be the reason why the Oculus is not available in Germany and Belgium https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24375652 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24375652
- tomc1985 6y agoHow about, no authentication to use the device and an open platform of app stores and/or sideloading?
- swiley 6y agoWhy do "apps" even need to be installed on it. Isn't it just a sensor array and a couple of displays? I used to think everyone should learn a programming language just so they can experience its expressive power but more and more I wish they would so they wouldn't get duped by really dumb marketing.
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- balls187 6y agoI 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.
- xwdv 6y agoDo 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.
- jdusisn 6y agoMate, 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.
- davidkuhta 6y agoA 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.
- xwdv 6y agoOther VR headsets are far more expensive and some require tethering to expensive gaming computers. Oculus Quest 2 has no true competitor at its price point, and some might say any price point.
- AlexandrB 6y ago> 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.
- Sohcahtoa82 6y agoAre 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.
- devwastaken 6y agoThe 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.
- fortyseven 6y agoHey, 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.
- codebook 6y agoI 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.)
- dfxm12 6y agoBlizzard 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.
- munk-a 6y agoIf only we had some sort of bureau of protecting consumers - the tech companies are bad but the people I really want to see fines for bad UI are credit companies. Trying to un-enrolled from once free-of-charge credit reporting is insanely difficult.
- pmontra 6y agoProbably their threat model is black hats hacking into an account and requesting a delete.
- munk-a 6y agoOnce upon a time this issue was resolved by not really ever actually deleting anything - just soft-deleting it and moving it off into an archive somewhere from whence it could be restored... unfortunately not-really-deleted stuff was insanely abused by marketing so that consumers no longer trust it and it's become illegal to retain this information after an account closure in some jurisdictions - so now we can't have nice things.
- dfxm12 6y agoI don't have any addresses, pictures or names associated with my account that my ID can verify. Plus, if someone deletes my account at this point, they'd be doing me a favor :)
- sam0x17 6y agoI 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.
- munk-a 6y agoYea - 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.
- karmakaze 6y agoI thought about using a fake, Oculus-only account but that's a false sense of separation as FB would see connections from my accounts coming from the same source IP unless I was going to separate them via anonymizing proxy.
- withinboredom 6y agoHow is that different from roommates/family that share a computer?
- munk-a 6y agoWe have smartphones now with a pretty wide rollout - I wouldn't be surprised if people that legitimately all share the same computer do have problems getting flags on their account from facebook. Honestly though, the real answer is who knows - it's entirely proprietary information and all we can do on the outside is observe the fact that is does seem to be a pretty flawed detection system and guess at why that is. Does facebook use sentiment analysis of posts or post frequency to ban users they think are fake? Do they look for similar content of posts from different users to try and detect troll farms? I don't know and FB really doesn't want to talk about it.
- fomine3 6y ago
- cpuguy83 6y agoWhile 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.
- djitz 6y agoThat’s what I did. Haven’t had any issues.
- 14 6y agoI 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.
- abacadaba 6y agoThe shrill of millions of nerds realizing they have to choose between the best easiest VR tech and facebook knowing what porn they watch.
- lmm 6y agoRealistically 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.