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- gouggoug 7y agoSlightly unrelated: I used to love playing CS. I tried recently playing again, but after 10 minutes of witnessing all sorts of cheating, I had to stop. Cheaters just killed the game for me.
- joshmn 7y agoWere you playing on VAC-secured servers? While not perfect, they're pretty good keeping up with the changing landscape of cheats.
- gouggoug 7y agoI think so? But I could be wrong.
- technonerd 7y agoIt was most def a non-prime match (VAC enabled). They are a complete shit show and deter new players from lasting long in a free to play game.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- lreeves 7y agoVAC servers don't really matter; the bans come in waves so even when new cheats are detected you're still going to play a bunch of games against people using them until the actual ban wave happens. Retroactive fixes are applied to stats and stuff so you don't have "losses" against cheaters but when you're playing against them it really sucks, and sucks the fun out of the game.
- oh_sigh 7y agoBanning in waves after they can detect the chear seems just like a money grab at the expense of real players
- xxxtentachyon 7y agoHow is it a money grab? There's no recurring subscription fees to play CS:GO
- detaro 7y ago<strikethrough, see reply>If you want to continue playing after a full ban, you need a new Steam account and buy the game again.</strikethrough> That said, taking time for detection to be developed and not wanting to give live feedback to cheat developers are also good explanations for waves.
- blattimwind 7y ago> If you want to continue playing after a full ban, you need a new Steam account and buy the game again. CSGO is free to play. If you get banned, you only have to register a new Steam account...
- detaro 7y agoOops, it is indeed. That change totally passed me by.
- 7y ago
- bdz 7y agoThere are "next gen" ROP cheats for FPS games including CS:GO https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21355058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21355058 The main problem is that VAC can be better but not without elevated privileges aka borderline rootkit and that's not gonna happen
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- willis936 7y agoMost anticheats are rootkits (see: kernel mode drivers). VAC’s tricks are behavioral detection of cheats and that’s the best approach imo. Trust factor is the real genius. Just put all of the toxic players and potential cheaters together.
- invokestatic 7y agoI used to develop cheats for CSGO (I work in anti-cheat now). The ROP chain cheat is 100% detectable right now with VAC without rootkits or the like. No cheat is “VAC-proof”. I have seen Valve’s creativity at responding to evolving threats. It’s just a matter of time.
- mhh__ 7y agoCould you explain how?
- tedk-42 7y agoForever silver IV
- dekken_ 7y agoCheating has exploded in Danger Zone mode lately. Hard to play a few games without a cheater.
- onion2k 7y agoI always felt the AWPers were cheating in CS back in the early 2000s, but I think they were just better than me.
- samcheng 7y agoAs a low-ping AWP sniper back in the day, we weren't all cheating. It was super satisfying to get a string of headshots...
- bennyelv 7y agoI agree with this. I used to play a lot (competitive matches, got to near the top of the main league in the UK for CS:Source) and I think for your average player it feels the same to be playing against good players as it does against people who are cheating. My observations during this time is that there were actually very few cheaters, and most people who were being accused on public servers were just good players playing the way that I did against players of a lower skill level. I would encounter someone who was clearly and obviously cheating only once every few weeks.
- tylerjwilk00 7y agoIt went free to play last year. This removed the cost penalty so it was flooded with cheaters.
- legohead 7y agoI was going to say, last I remember CSGO had very little cheating in it. But I haven't played in about a year...
- freeAgent 7y agoThat almost completely defeats the purpose of VAC or whatever they are calling it now. Who cares if they're banned for life when they can make an infinite number of accounts at no cost. The price of the game was what made VAC bans effective.
- techntoke 7y agoThis x100. Maybe we'll get another Counter-Strike when Half-Life 3 comes out.
- lifeformed 7y agoThere's Prime Matchmaking mode, which can only be used by players who've paid $20 or played like enough to get to level 21, which takes a long time.
- ChamindaV 7y agoYou got placed with other cheaters because you haven't played enough for system to identify, once you start playing more often you will see less cheaters. Also, as you recently started playing again, lot of players might seem so good to you that you are thinking they are cheating, they might be just good.
- laurentdc 7y agoSame, but if you try complaining on /r/globaloffensive all you get is the usual "git gud noob" or some excuse about low trust factor. Even though I have a 5 year old account with 100+ games for some reason every other match it puts me against brand new accounts blatantly cheating
- willis936 7y agoI’ve played about 550 hours of csgo. A combination of prime only matchmaking and having established a high trust factor makes it the best matchmaking experience I’ve ever had. No one hacks, toxic players are rare, many pick-up players communicate and are not toxic. The norm is to behave. It’s very refreshing. I know that outside of this ivory tower is a concentrated cess pool of trash, but if you can stick it out it is worth it to get in.
- domlebo70 7y agoI have prime and high trust factor. MM for me at least, is full of cheaters. ESEA has been a much nicer experience. I never see sketchy stuff.
- willis936 7y agoI’m not going to install kernel mode anticheat for anyone. This policy keeps me off some popular games like pubg and battlefield, but it also keeps malware off my computer. I’m surprised anyone uses ESEA after their crypto miner scandal. We’ll hear about their keyboard logger in a few years after all of the data has been sold off.
- godzillabrennus 7y agoBoot from a different drive to play games. Windows 10 is already basically a root kit. Don’t use it for anything you care about. If you must use it then you can try and regain some control but I doubt it really works: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/windows-10-doesnt-offer-much-privacy-by-default-heres-how-to-fix-it/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/windo...
- ronniegeriis 7y agoESEA and FaceIt is a better experience cheat wise. But I also observe a higher skill level there. I've only played pickups on FaceIt, and the toxicity there is the same—if not worse—as MM.
- 7y ago
- 013a 7y agoCS:GO just isn't a fun game for me. Maybe there are cheaters, but sometimes its hard to tell. Instead, I prefer framing it in same vein as why Fortnite isn't fun anymore: People are just way too good nowadays. I like to think I'm generally good at video games, but the people who play CS:GO regularly have a laser focus on it. They're better than good, and that skill discrepancy ruins the game for other people. It takes one Insane Tier player on the enemy team to ruin the game for me, or one cheater, and the probability of running into that in an average game is just too high in the top-tier competitive games. Skill-based Matchmaking doesn't help, flat out. People smurf. I used to think smurfing was this thing that you'd rarely run into, but then I found out that my roommate smurfs on Apex. At that point, another person in the room said "yeah, I've done that". In these games that are insanely cheap or free; its rampant. I legitimately think that smurfing should be a bannable offense, but I'm not aware of any companies that take it seriously (some have said that its against ToS, but do they apply the same detection heuristics to it they do for actual cheaters?)
- hutzlibu 7y agoI suppose "smurfing" means, you create a new account, to pretend that you are a new player and therefore get into matches with only newbs? So the motivation is to feel good at winning against not experienced players?
- jtms 7y agoYes, that’s exactly right. They just want to feel like gods as they stomp the new players.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago> So the motivation is to feel good at winning against not experienced players? Contrast online matchmaking systems that take your assessed skill level into account. These are certainly... widespread. I don't understand why. The design goal of such a system is that, no matter what your skill level is, you win or lose at a rate indistinguishable from chance. Are you getting better at the game? Doesn't matter; your win rate is constant. Are you getting worse under lack of pressure, since nothing you do affects your performance? Doesn't matter. Nothing you do can affect your performance. Your win rate is constant; the system will seamlessly swap in weaker players to play against you. If I'm improving at something, I want to see better results than I was getting before. If I'm getting worse, I want to see worse results.
- msrmthehomeless 7y agoSupposedly this is why csgo related content is posted here? "Hacker" news.
- rcurry 7y agoThis. The only multiplayer game I play any more is World of Tanks, and that’s because it’s so laughably rigged that even cheaters can’t stand out.
- honkycat 7y agoSame experience. People always say "Oh maybe they are smurfs, or just really good." No. Elite players are less common than hackers. And these people were actively cheating and not even pretending to not be cheating. Twitchy aiming, insta lock-on head, could go around a corner and kill 4.5 people on the other side before going down. A lot of people mistake cheating for really good players. But if you watch a lot of competitive FPS games, even the pro players do not have perfect aim and ESP. They can't round a corner and frag a whole team who is facing the correct way waiting for them. It is seriously everywhere. League of Legends has a cheating problem. Call of Duty has a cheating problem. Fortnite, PUBG, it is all of the major games. Unfortunately, I think I'm just done with competitive online gaming. Time was you could join a server, play with the same group of people. They would kick anyone with ping over 50. Anymore, there are too many people playing over WIFI with horrible connections teleporting around. And too many people paying $5/mo to get a cheat engine.
- nkrisc 7y agoOnline matchmaking has changed things for the better and for the worse. I used to play BF1942 online and there was no matchmaker. You could browse and join random servers all day, or you found one with a good community on it. You frequented it, you got to know people, and you had a great time. They probably had a good admin presence and any cheaters or toxic people got banned quickly. Used to be too that everyone's computer was almost certainly wired into their router. Now, as you say, most people are one wifi with terrible connections. Now you get placed with random people you'll never see again, a fifth of whom it feels like are cheating anyway.
- chmod775 7y ago> League of Legends has a cheating problem No it doesn't. Cheaters are incredibly rare in ranked games. Cheating is an easy way to get your account banned super fast and creating a new account is a huge time investment. You won't find any experienced people saying cheating is a problem in that game.
- rwmurrayVT 7y agoSeveral years ago it was a massive issue with BoL. They've done some serious updates to limit the issue.
- joshmn 7y agoI mean they'll just move their money elsewhere. What's the next big score, though?
- bobthepanda 7y agoSteam doesn't really care about the 'elsewhere' so long as they're not liable for it. At one point the Domino's app was being used to facilitate credit card fraud: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/06/nyregion/pizza-orders-reveal-credit-card-scheme-and-a-secondhand-market.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/06/nyregion/pizza-orders-rev...
- joshmn 7y agoOh I'm sure they don't care. I was merely curious where other's thought this stuff will end up. I never saw that original Domino's article but I can vouch for its complete validity and accuracy. I'm sure carders are still checking CCs on Dominos too. CC checkers are a hot commodity and carders are creative people. RedBox is another good example like Domino's. Anecdote: In 2008, Obama's donation gateway was also heavily used. I don't believe that was nearly as reported, though.
- djsumdog 7y agoWas that the Adam Pisces scam that was going on? (Can't tell since NYT is paywalled). There's a great non-paywalled ReplyAll podcast about that (episode #141)
- joshmn 7y agotl;dr Carders used Domino's to verify the validity of a credit card.
- robrtsql 7y agoI think that the 'checking stolen CC numbers' is the most convincing theory about Adam Pisces but ultimately the ReplyAll host concluded that it was an attacker looking for vulnerabilities in the Domino's online ordering system.
- tedk-42 7y agoThey gonna come talk to me about money laundering? On the internet? Shieeeet Reference: https://youtu.be/6ktvE2vfxSQ?t=69 https://youtu.be/6ktvE2vfxSQ?t=69
- huac 7y agothis has been the case since at least 2012 (russian mob, i think), it was a very efficient payout mechanism because you can buy keys for $2.50 and resell for $2 ish, for around a 80% recovery rate. in tf2 we had other mechanisms, e.g. bills hat = $10, earbuds = $20-25, max head = $150 for storing value, not sure if CSGO has similar things. maybe now people will just use the keys and gamble on boxes and resell the skinned guns. all of that is to say that you aren't going to stop money launderers by cutting liquidity, you do it by identifying their behaviors and blocking them based on that.
- leoc 7y agoIt's certainly been speculated about since 2012, at the very least: https://www.reddit.com/r/tf2/comments/134u4d/1111_key_injection_and_economy_manipulation/c70v4xc/ https://www.reddit.com/r/tf2/comments/134u4d/1111_key_inject... However it seems to have attracted almost no interest from journalists, for whatever reason. OTOH, since "worldwide fraud networks have recently shifted to using CS:GO keys to liquidate their gains" probably has at least some basis in reality, what's the story there? What other methods are criminals (presumably) shying away from now?
- ben174 7y agoWhy is this necessary? With crypto it's super easy to use a tumbler or simply convert to an unregulated exchange and back again.
- uwotm9 7y agoI went to a large lan party this weekend where half of the event goers were CS-only players. Holy shit, talk about toxic! There were players who, from across the room, were screaming at the top of their lungs about how someone "fucking sucks", "loser", "awful", etc etc. It was extremely embarrassing to be a part of. I'm never going to a CS-oriented event like that ever again.
- kortilla 7y agoWait until you see how people behave in real sports.
- djur 7y agoIn most sports, you can get ejected from the game for acting like that.
- twic 7y agoIn some, it's something you train at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sledging_(cricket) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sledging_(cricket)
- drak0n1c 7y agoFor fans/attendees such behavior is not that unusual. Here's a classic video taken by a Red Sox fan wandering through the Yankees Bleachers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwBa3XA3Sl4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwBa3XA3Sl4
- PrimeDirective 7y agothis is an issue for all online games, not just Counter-Strike
- uwotm9 7y agoOf course, but I haven't seen it that bad before at an event IRL.
- 7y ago
- kache_ 7y agoPeople buy and then sell WoW/runescape gold to launder money as well.
- kart23 7y agoJeeeeez. A lot of people are going to be screwed over by this. I know a couple people with thousand dollars worth of keys in their accounts. Now worthless. I remember when CSGO trading could be a source of income for some. edit: I'm dumb. didn't read it through.
- KerrickStaley 7y agoFrom the article: Pre-existing CS:GO container keys are unaffected–those keys can still be sold on the Steam Community Market and traded.
- throwaway2048 7y agoIf anything they are now far more valuable
- have_faith 7y agoNot if a chunk of that value was derived from the fraudulent activity that will assumably move elsewhere now.
- twunde 7y agoThe statement mentions that this only affects newly purchased keys
- AcerbicZero 7y agoI've played CS on and off for awhile, (Since 1.5/6) and I've collected a number of skins in CS:GO, but I've never understood the appeal of buying keys/skins. Same for most other FPS's with loot box mechanics and skins....whats the appeal? What kind of person thinks its impressive that you've swiped your credit card a few more times then they did, for the same game?
- make3 7y agothey're clothes man. people like to look cool, and spend untold amounts of hours on there, interacting with more people in the game than off the game, often
- jb_s 7y agoIt's just a flex. Same reason why people get loans to buy nice cars.
- mikaelmello 7y agoFrom my experience, it just feels good to have good-looking assets in the game. I used to buy with my spare money that came from freelancing gigs, so in my head I wasn't really spending any money that I needed, even because it never was a large amount of money, just enough to have some cool skins. In hindsight, this money could've been better spent, but I won't blame my teenage self for enjoying a little bit of financial freedom. Of course, you also get those really rich kids that only want to brag, others that buy in order to resell and profit from it, etc.
- dyingkneepad 7y agoIt's not supposed to be impressive, at least for me. Sometimes you spend some money on the game simply because you really like it and want to support the developers. I occasionally buy skins for fighting game characters simply because I enjoy looking at those skins (more than I enjoy the defaults). Heck, some characters are played exclusively because of cool skins (e.g., Blanka Chan). I see no problem spending money in something that just looks cool if you're getting your entertainment value from the game. It's the same reason why you would buy that cool shirt you saw on the internet: you already have plenty of shirts, you don't actually need one more, but it would be cool anyway.
- thinkloop 7y agoIf "almost all" the transactions are fraud, are mobsters just trading with each other? Seems odd. Seems you need to have a minority of fraud for the fraud to work.
- Felk 7y agoI suppose they count the whole transaction as malicious if one party acts fraudulently
- BryantD 7y agoNah -- the people buying the keys on the Steam Community Market are legit. I imagine it's something like this: Jack Criminal buys a bunch of keys from Valve with dirty money. Possibly Jack Criminal passes the keys off to Jane Criminal's account to muddy the waters. Jane or Jack Criminal puts the keys up for sale on the marketplace. Harry Gamer happily buys the keys. Every single transaction in that chain involves a criminal, but Harry isn't a criminal and is getting what he wants. The exact quote is "At this point, nearly all key purchases that end up being traded or sold on the marketplace are believed to be fraud-sourced." It's not that every individual transaction cheats someone, it's that they're happening in order to perpetrate an overall fraud.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- pimlottc 7y agoWhat are CS:GO containers? Are they loot boxes?
- yurrzz 7y agoyes
- wy35 7y agoHow are people able to convert their Steam balance into real-world cash? Is it even possible?
- kevingadd 7y agoPresumably from third party channels, but keep in mind steam balance can be used to purchase (and I think also gift) games from a storefront that offers the vast majority of modern releases. So it's still pretty useful to have steam balance.
- bdz 7y agoThere are 3rd party sites where you can buy and sell items for cash and crypto. They basically serve as a middleman for expensive trades. Years ago I bought myself a gaming PC this way, selling all my TF2 and CSGO skins. Yes everyone takes a cut (Valve, trading site, Paypal or whatever payment service you use) but it's still the best way to turn your digital items on Steam into cash
- mendelmaleh 7y agoWhy do they need to address this? Is it their responsability (or, business) where people get the money to buy the keys? Or what they do with the money from the sales?
- Etheryte 7y agoDid you read the full article? Your question is addressed in the second paragraph — the aftermarket for keys was largely used by fraudsters to cash out.
- mendelmaleh 7y agoThe same applies to gift cards, should they become non-transferrable?
- closeparen 7y agoTaking money from fraudy credit cards gives you chargebacks and poisons your relationship with payment processors. Transferring value between people requires a money transmitter license, which in turn requires a credible anti money laundering program.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- verumn 7y agoI had over 3k hours on CS:GO and clocked onto this very fast. When they mean fraudulent, I don't think this is carding; due to the fact steam already had measurements in place (i.e. wait 30 days before removal). What you could do is use paypal and make a charge back and steam didn't respond due to their lack of support, meaning you get free keys...