The game that became 1.6 wasn't even their game. It was a mod for the original Half Life and they hired the modders after it got popular.
Then CS:Source came around the same time HL2 did. That is to say it exists only because HL2 did, and Source is just HL2 with guns (lol). It was very divisive in the pro scene and the majority of professional players rejected it.
GO's history is even worse. It wasn't even meant to exist at first; Hidden Path were porting CS:Source to consoles and Valve decided that it could live as its own game. They release it in 2012 and, by all accounts, it sucks. Nobody plays it. Things begin to change when they create a virtual economy (skins) and admittedly do actually improve the game a fair bit. It's only when the game sees those improvements (2013-14?) that the pro scene finally moves from 1.6 to GO.
So the situation in 2021: The most popular game on Steam is a game which, according to Valve themselves, shares 75-85% of its code with a game released almost 20 years ago (Half Life 2), and which everybody knows is a complete and utter mess under the hood (thanks in part due to the source code getting leaked, also thanks to ex-devs sharing their stories of their time working on CS:GO). This along with Valve being notorious for just not having the internal incentive structures to get bugs fixed (hence GO's spaghetti code)... it's easier to understand (but not excuse!) Valve's attitude for serious security flaws like these.
I am similar to you in that I have about 1000 hours in CS:GO, and I've spent many 1000s of hours watching the pro scene. I love Counter Strike, but with Valve the way it is, I don't see how these fundamental flaws will ever get fixed. Look at how they're allowing Valorant to decimate the North American CS scene, just like they allowed Overwatch to take from TF2's player base back in 2016.
Source hitboxes: https://youtu.be/fdRpYaQA8cU
At the time, many 1.6 players still had single/dual core CPUs and source would run at 20-80 fps, when gamers were just starting to get 100+ hz monitors. There was no mass migration of players, due to gameplay and performance issues. The game really wasn't ready for eSports level competition (and never improved to that point)
CGS failed after 2 years, and most of the pros retired afterwards.
During that time, the European 1.6 scene was flourishing. The death of the NA scene was a huge blow to international play. The compLexity roster that was drafted into CGS could have been one of the best NA teams of all time.
Fun fact, the first player drafted in CGS was a female. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Championship_Gaming_Ser...
Overwatch isn't really taking TF2's crowd though. On the surface they're similar, but mechanically they are worlds apart. Overwatch is highly polished; TF2 is downright clunky by comparison. But it allows custom servers and player scripting/mods. Blizzard is far too tight-fisted for that to realistically happen for Overwatch. TF2 also has all kinds of interesting movement mechanics due to the source engine, that overwatch just really doesn't have. Overwatch's format of merely 6-person teams means you can't really goof around like you can with TF2's 12 and 16-person teams.
I'm sure a lot of players checked out overwatch but didn't stop playing TF2 as they're simply very different games. TF2 also did release major updates albeit infrequently until the jungle inferno update back in ~2017. Now it's just radio silence apart from small seasonal updates.
I'm not as familiar with CS (only played a few dozen cs:go matches), but just from playing both that and valorant I feel like it's going to be a similar situation. Valorant is more polished but it just plays wildly different due to the player abilities.
Valve is neglectful regarding these games (look at how DotA 2 is treated by comparison), but I doubt trying to compete would've helped very much.
Overwatch got the Workshop in 2019, which, while a fairly limited visual programming thingamajig, still allows for some pretty impressive stuff.
Overwatch can be a different game now, but when it started it had a huge community that resembled TF2 at the start. It wasn’t at all about the mechanics.
The games aren't that dissimilar.
I also liked Project IGI - simple mission game. I am not into gaming really. Sniper Elite is like this by any chance?
These were the only games I liked and I'd like to try something like that again. I like normal/realistic game plays - no extra/exotic powers or sci-fi cartoonish elements to a game.
I hope Valorant kicks Valve into gear a bit. I have played many hours of both and CS:GO is a much better game (simplicity, balance, opportunity for individual skill) but we will see...
An interesting thing from an esport perspective: Riot tightly controls Valorant matches, whilst Valve will let anyone run and monetise a CS tournament. I think this will make CS a more healthy scene in the long run.
Other than that, it is mainly those washed players leaving, yes. Which still isn't healthy for the scene, and means the NA CS scene effectively doesn't exist any more (this isn't hyperbole, there are only two good NA teams right now and both were flown out to Europe by their orgs to compete there instead).
I'm sure it's a major main to maintain and occasionally add features to such an old codebase, but imo the apathy runs deeper than that.
So I'll stick to cs:go and tf2 community servers, thanks.
Who is worth trusting? The answer is complicated and depends on many things. Anti cheat developers do not deserve anyone’s trust until they are open.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ObhK8lUfIlc
https://www.theregister.com/2013/11/20/esea_gaming_bitcoin_f...
As in open source? I can't imagine that would go too well—my impression is that anti-cheat is almost entirely security by obscurity (because they have no other option; trying to beat the owner of the computer you're running on is a losing battle).
I real cost of hours spent with cheats on cs:go for me is too high.
Valorant anti-cheat is a throwback to early 2000s malware, not really years ahead.
I guess they're just printing so much money from the steam store that it's hard for anyone to care any more. I'm curious if we will ever see a great game out of valve again.
Most of the user base doesn't get sick from smooth locomotion though. Maybe teleport was better back when the project started in 2016, but in Q1 2020 especially after boneworks which came out in Q4 2019 people would see Alyx as dated. Smooth locomotion wasn't even in the game from a Q4 2019 build of the game. Continuous turning didn't even make it in until after the game was released.
Now I can handle smooth locomotion, but at the time it'd make my stomach lurch.
> I don't find there to be much replay value.
Second sentence:
> I played it once, speedran it a few times, and then played it with the developer commentary.
If that isn't replay value, what is? How often do you replay Single Player games _with_ replay value then?
I played Final Fantasy VII Remake twice, because they made the game so you can’t get everything by going though just once and I also wanted to get the PS trophies. So I replayed it, though I found it tedious and annoying at times. I don’t remember how many hours I spent but certainly under one hundred.
I’ve replayed all these games, but I wouldn’t say the latter has replay value.
I've played Alyx once and fully intend to play it again with developer commentary. Valve's commentary mode is always a treat. But beyond that I don't see myself coming back to it often. Just like with Portal.
On the other hand, I have played through Half-Life 2 quite a few times. Of course, there are also open world games like Breath of the Wild or Skyrim where I have many hundred hours of time spent.
I don't know what to suggest. Even Boneworks which is not "horror" is too scary for me. I walk through it with my tension level at 11. I made to chapter 7 before I decided it wasn't worth it to continue.
...but I also sort of liked that. :)
The most damning thing for me wasn't just the subreddits dedicated to just indexing valve's lack of attention, or the way they appear to genuinely make money off of the cheating ecosystem.
The worst was when I learned that VAC (their anti-cheating platform, IIRC) was so bad (at the time) that it appeared to only ban exact binary matches for detected cheats.
So if you wrote a cheat, that eventually, ages later did end up getting banned by VAC, all you would have to do would be to go back to your source, rename a few functions and files, recompile to a new binary, and you'd be good to go again.
As a sidenote, I just attempted to find the article that documented what I said above, and I found github repositories like this instead: https://github.com/danielkrupinski/VAC-Bypass The fact that things like this are front page google responses to phrases like "VAC Ban" (what I typed in google), really demonstrates just how abysmal Valve's performance is here.
The solution to cheating problems isn't necessarily technical, it's also social, and I think it reflects a bigger issue in our society, also present on social platforms. When anyone can interact with strangers and behave however they want, there's going to be trolls and others, motivated by the feeling that they can't be held accountable for ruining someone else's fun (or, just not realizing they are not having healthy interactions).
Lots of online platforms have developed lots of ways to cope with this, from karma systems to moderators, to social credits, to ID verification. Couldn't games take a page from that book?
Not the same level of frustration as a permaban. But I was pretty annoyed that I had to jump through hoops on a brand-new system. Really weird.
Rockstar only cared about cheating in GTA5 because people were duplicating in game money that Rockstar was trying to sell you for real money. They didn't care about cheating in GTA4 because it didn't affect any potential revenue since it only affected people who had already bought the game.
When my friends and I wrote some cheats in the past we used to hook VAC so that when it wanted to run we'd unload our hooks/cheats and let it complete scanning as normal, then once VAC was completed we'd re-hook and re-load our library/hooks.
This also allowed us to iterate on development by having live-reload of the .dll on disk by unhooking, reloading dll, and rehooking.
This was back in the days of Counter Strike: Source, when it first came out.
The day it was first released on macOS was fun too... Valve forgot to strip debug symbols on their macOS, so we were able to dump all of the debug symbols and get a much better idea on what to hook/look for and what the various structures were used for!
At least in the past, admins on servers had the option to intervene and ban people (although they could be bypassed as well). Nowadays games opt for having entirely managing servers, sadly.
Usually when someone accuses another player of cheating they are just tilted and reacting to getting out aimed or seeing something suspicious due to how netcode handles lag/ping differential with interpolation, which is adjustable.
I guess scammers money is just as green.
There are loads of farming accounts that just walk in a circle. Why do they put those players in matches with real players. If you're not going to ban them then at least honeypot them.
All seems needlessly lackadaisical.
[On the topic of cheating, and as a comparison to CS:GO ... ] What's hilarious really is how common and in plain sight the Dota 2 cheats are: there are loads of cheat engines which people can even write their own Lua scripts to manage: and are hosted on Github. They have VK pages, customer support, registered companies, online reviews ... zero legal action taken against any of these companies that I'm aware of - and very limited work done to make the cheating more difficult.
Faceit is essentially the gold standard to be honest. definitely it if you want a higher level of gameplay without cheaters. Wish there was a faceit for silvers, though
We see this with other games as studios spend more time preparing "future IP" and less time preserving their existing. One example is Bungie's Destiny franchise. Studios need to continue monitoring - and interacting with - their playerbase to find a middle that satisfies all. Bungie made a decision a few months ago that has been reversed, per community feedback about the massively negative impact said decision would have on the game and its playerbase.
Studios like Valve, Bungie, and others truly need to step up what is essentially customer service, especially as the digital entertainment market only continues to grow and open up even more opportunities for success than before.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/808773/csgo-revenue/
They also do little for scamming and impersonation. People send me and I've even randomly come across profiles that have cloned my own name/picture/profile page in an attempt to scam people by impersonating me (using my inventory page to lure them in, hoping they won't notice the URL).
Virtually every friend I have met through CSGO that has skins has gotten scammed out of at least $100. Any time I give friends a knife to borrow or to have, they immediately get dozens of friend requests from scammers. The first time I gave a friend a knife it was stolen within two weeks by a fairly sophisticated scam.
Now they have made that mode free and it’s garbage once again. Oh well, it was great while it lasted...
I tried Face It to escape this, but it was even more toxic than match-making. No obvious hackers though.