Save Team Fortress 2 (#savetf2)
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We don't have this problem on well moderated servers, or even self-moderated servers (vote kick etc). Smaller better supported communities can self manage the cheating problem but only if they are given the tools to do so. Yeah cheaters can still sneak in, but only until they are kicked and banned.
Matchmaking for many games just gaurantees cheaters both in bottom tier play (cheaters on new accounts) and high tier play (cheaters not yet detected). There's no relief for the casual gamer, who plays well but not often enough to warrant moderated league/ranked games.
Would have been super simple to patch the bug. Honestly made me turned off by the entire country associated with the game.
After initial contact with the company failed, I found assigning it a CVE describing the problem ( CVE-2017-14748 for example) got the ball rolling quickly.
I'm 100% sure i didnt do anything that would count as cheating, was just playing the game normally on an unjailbroken device, never interacted with another person in the game either.
Yet the chat is full of bots spamming stuff that dont seem to get banned.
Luckily i got banned before i decided to spend any money on it besides $8 for the battlepass.
Anyone saying otherwise shouldn’t be allowed to write software.
I have very fond memories of playing on a clan owned server the first few years after TF2 came out. Slowly, I got to know people, and even overcame some pretty severe shyness to talk on a mic during games. My Steam friends list grew and we learned where each other lived around North America, what each other did, who was in a relationship with who. Some people even went so far as to offer couches if someone was visiting their town.
When I last booted up TF2, I was sad to just get put in a random server and couldn't find the old crews stomping ground.
Being older now, I sometimes wish I could find a game where communities like that could form. In hindsight it felt like one of the last breaths of the old internet...
Most of the player base is approaching middle aged, and it's as close to a democratically driven game as there ever was. Jagex is very responsive to the community, almost too much.
That said, I know what you mean. Long gone are the days of internet wonder bringing people together over a quest or a death match.
Unfortunately the wild success of Dota 2 proves that this model is superior for generating monetary returns.
For example, public Minecraft servers often get harassed by cheaters and griefers. Some servers try to circumvent this with all sorts of complicated anti-cheating mods and moderation tools... but ultimately the easiest solution is to just have a whitelisted server with only people you trust. This tends to work better because every player is accountable, and has the bonus side effect of fostering a community of people who actually know each other.
Private, moderately sized, self-policed communities really do seem like the only sure-fire approach to avoiding cheaters in online multiplayer games. Otherwise it's just a constant cat-and-mouse game with the cheaters usually coming out on top.
Wouldn't surprise me if Valve sends a DMCA to their host for using their art assets
That said, between controversies like its source-code leak, a neglected matchmaker, the Crate Depression [1], and so much more... It might be time to call in quits of this game, and remember it for its peaks and hills, not for this long-lasting valley.
You report somebody and see what happens. Not entirely sure why any game needs anything more complicated.
Valve's real problem is that they have so much money they're no longer interested in opportunities to make money.
TF2 is one such example. Another egregious example is GTA V.
I think it sucks that a 'software' company is more than willing to take 50 bucks for virtual simoleons while simultaneously being too busy to moderate that same universe because of future development.
Having their cake and eating it too. Whole economy around that stuff just sucks, and it's only morally allowed because "well we need to eat, too." -- which is never that great an excuse for screwing people over.
While I lost interest after leveling up a few characters over night and letting the bot farm, my friend kept on working on them to make them better and sell them for little money. After all we were still in school and he made some good money with it. I'd assume that's the point for most cheat devs. Just doing it to show it could be done. Those people that annoyingly use the bots are just laughing their asses off while using them. Schadenfreude is a thing, you know?
In gaming, cheating is an opportunity to LARP as a better player. Gaming identities are often anonymous, cheat tools are widely available, and the prevalence of anti-cheat implies that “lots of other people are doing it” which gives some personality types sufficient moral cover.
Many people enjoy feeling superior to others, and have zero qualms about behaving immorally or against the rules. Some even get off on it and enjoy the challenge.
We see this behavior everywhere in real life as well, but it's much easier to achieve in a virtual setting. Whether that's by harassing someone verbally, or winning in a game by cheating, it triggers the same pleasure receptors for these people.
A psychologist could explain this better, and I'm sure this has been studied thoroughly.
The cosmetic items from loot boxes (as well as those attained from normal play) can then be sold in online markets (such as scrap.tf or marketplace.tf) for real-world currency.
This is probably what the primary goal of the bots is. Ironically, the source of TF2's profit for Valve (microtransactions for cosmetics) is also a partial cause for the bot crisis.
I don't think I'd waste my time on something like that today, though.
Team Fortress 2 continues to ship with fairly generous symbols in Linux and Mac builds.
improve game replay systems then add to them a webcam angle over left shoulder showing both hands, mousepad, and screen.
cheating is about inputs and outputs. screen -> eyes -> hands. in the absence of more evidence about this data flow, cheating is undefined.
Most people will put up with kernal level anticheat because they don't know what that means
Most people won't put up with having to provide additional hardware (webcams) to prove they aren't cheating
My perception (purely from personal gaming experience, to be fair) is that most esports games' existing anti-cheat solutions are good enough at suppressing obvious cheaters, so there's not enough benefit to adopting a system like this for the vast majority of players for the cost.
My understanding of TF2's problem is partially that it's easy to cheat, but unlike other games, it's also easy to cheat on multiple accounts simultaneously on the same machine, and there's not enough (if any?) enforcement to deter people from doing this.
video and gameplay needs to leave the player’s computer simultaneously, and that player needs to provide reasonable video for all gameplay.
requiring lower mouse sensitivity and greater mouse room would improve the data quality.
with luck, it will always be cheaper to detect gen-ai video then to create it. otherwise, more evidence? higher res/fps webcams?
the cheaters have run the field long enough. time for the arms race to push back!
any kind of anti-cheat is by definition surveillance.
the irony is that currently none of them work. all cost, no benefit.
if these webcams were at an arcade on every machine, would it be weird?
many people already run a distinct gaming pc, either for kernel anti-cheat or other reasons.
i would prefer not to be surveilled on my iphone.
i would prefer to be surveilled while playing fortnite or tf2. along with all the other players.
cheating will never be impossible, but it can be more expensive and asymmetric.
It's literally bots/non-human players that stare at the sky and beeline to either the objective or a predefined path. They usually spam music over in-game chat and there is simply zero plausible deniability that this player in the game is a bot. They usually come into a game, and then invite other instances of the bot to the same game, to prevent them from getting kicked (which requires 6 "yes" responses from the same team) and to kick other players from the game. These are the vast majority of bots/cheaters that you see in the game, and they are the primary reason that "casual" matchmaking is sometimes unplayable.
"real" players that are cheating in the game with some kind of aim assist, but it's still a human behind the wheel, are relatively easy to detect and spectate if you're on their team. They typically get noticed and kicked
In casual games this would just get dickpics or players pointing the camera into the table with not enough other players to care about it.
this would likely only work with a stronger reputation and ban system.
i wonder if handcam would make it harder to evade a ban?
maybe popularize baseball hat with sheet of paper taped on the side? elite gamer apparel. privacy is the meta, after all.
then just include full radar as a part of the game! stealth is overrated in pvp.
I think I made something akin to the Xbox operating system with my windows partition, which was basically TF2 OS
But I did get the earbuds with the Mac version too :)
their cash cow or main source of attention is cs2. people thought moving away from decades-old engine to a decade-old engine will solve things, but it clearly did not stop cheaters.
on the other hand, it has been leaked that valve is already making another squad shooter that derives from tf2. with the efforts split between these two titles, valve is often known to prioritize away from other titles. csgo had this while dota2 had its limelight, while the inverse can be said today with cs2.
The point of a game, from my perspective, is that it allows people to compete in a game of skill or chance (or some mixture of both) in a way that is independent of a wider socioeconomic context. For example, it doesn't matter if you're broke or a billionaire when playing chess. That's the point.
As soon as a "game" starts involving microtransactions where your real world finances determine the probability of you winning, it's not a game anymore, it's a casino. It defeats the object of a "game"; it is unfair.
If items are purely cosmetic it's one thing but we're talking about items with different gameplay attributes here.
Imagine if chess was invented today and the IP owned by a company. The entire world playing chess and then suddenly, the owner of the IP would announce that from now on, you can pay $20 and restore a piece to the board. This would of course be insane and defeat the object of the game. I also feel like it would quickly become socially unacceptable for people to invoke this option when playing chess face-to-face. Behind a screen, though, people are moderated from one another and it's an option.
Of course this is a wider comment on "F2P" games in general and why they're not valid as games in my view.
The fact that Valve doesn't allow mods of TF2 when they allowed mods of their other Source games is very telling.
Paid content was always for purely cosmetic changes (with some very small exceptions, removed in 2013). You could pay for items if you want, but they also were granted to you weekly entirely for free.
You could/can purchase every weapon in the game for about $5 total.
I played TF2 at a competitive level for a year without spending a cent on the game.
The VAST majority of those are bots.
I think if they can solve or at least mitigate the bot problem, TF2 could get its second chance.
Valve can't economically, or don't want to, make these changes to an old IP, and it might cause outrage among the Linux gamer crowd.
Some cheaters (I believe the article was recently on HN) use PCI TPM modules that they can modify, but Vanguard is detecting and banning these as well.
Hell most of the Counter-Strike competitive community has abandoned Valve's own VAC anti-cheat for FaceIT, a Windows-only kernel anticheat.
Edit: Since I'm getting downvotes on here, these anti-cheat systems work. Maybe the OS vendor should be responsible for them, but the people that play these games overwhelmingly support kernel-based anti-cheat. If you don't believe me, check out r/valorant, r/globaloffensive (CS2) or just look up any "CS2 Cheating" video on YouTube for long angry rants about Valve's ineffective anti-cheat solution when compared to the competition.
I think the success with FaceIT comes from the fact that they offer a kernel level anticheat with multiple heuristics and a paid version that makes creating new accounts hard. In-contrast, TF2 has nothing and the game is free-to-play.
But the parent has a point about neglect. This is not some ambitious operation where you have to take care of hardware verification. Valve is being asked to ban spam and stupid aimbots. They have all the information they need for that on the server side already.
Last time I tried to play, my PC bluescreened on the loading screen with an error about vgk.sys. (Vanguard) Then on reboot I get into the game late. It also bluescreened once with the same error while I wasn’t even playing too.
This anticheat causes so many problems on my computer. It always pops up saying it killed some driver. I still haven’t been able to figure out what or why. And it frequently makes all of us reboot in order to play. Other games with kernel level anti-cheat don’t have these issues.
There are definitely ways around these kernel level cheats too- it’s almost certainly just a matter of time. Vanguard specifically is just so invasive and not stable. Looking forward to finally being done with League. Enjoying Dota more anyway.
Yes, it will suck for techies and hackers, but it'll be a better world for the ordinary consumers out there.
I think this is the real reason Valve avoids kernel level anti-cheat.