10 ms·

I have several thousands of hours logged in CS:GO since it was released in 2012, and Valve's lack of concern with this particular exploit seems to mimic their i

by gr33nq 5y ago

I have several thousands of hours logged in CS:GO since it was released in 2012, and Valve's lack of concern with this particular exploit seems to mimic their inattentiveness to so many other aspects of the game. With the massive following that the Counter Strike franchise has and the boatloads of cash they continually bring in from digital cases/keys/skins, they most certainly have the resources to put out these types of fires immediately. Instead, they have taken a bare minimum approach to community outreach and maintaining a game that touts a 26 million player count each month [0]. The cheating situation is the most prominent example of how little focus the game earns from its developers. Compared to how other popular FPS titles (Valorant) handles anti-cheat, CS:GO is years behind. It's not uncommon to face at least one or two players a day who are using some form of cheat (some more obvious than others). Reporting the player does nothing, and when you visit their player profile on Steam and see accusatory comments about cheating going back months or years, you can be confident that your report will have little-to-no impact -- chalk it up as a loss and hope for more honest opponents next time. I've even seen exploits in the wild that can be used to prevent anyone else in the server from reporting a cheater in the game's UI; spinbots that can kill an entire team with perfect aim accuracy within a couple seconds; bunny hop scripts that allow for movements rates that far exceed what is normal when running -- basically things that some basic AI/ML should be able to detect with relative ease. Fortunately, other third-party services have built large player bases by offering their own in-house anti-cheat software and matchmaking service which is far more effective, but I digress. It's unfortunate to see something with such great potential get so little TLC from a company that is more than capable. [0] https://blog.counter-strike.net/ https://blog.counter-strike.net/

mberning 5y ago
You are absolutely right. This lackadaisical attitude towards their games was present in CS:S as well. Security, gameplay, performance. All of it takes a back seat to milking the cow.
ep103 5y ago
I looked into what was going on with CS:Go after trying to get back into it a few years ago, and noticing just how horrifically bad the amount of cheating was. 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 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.
- MayeulC 5y ago
  On the other hand, I cheated once (I was bored with TF2's new gameplay, and a teenager) 11 years ago , and got a lifetime VAC ban, while most die-hard cheaters would probably laugh it off and create a new account (especially now that it is f2p). Lifetime bans hardly seem proportional if you are on the receiving side. 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?
  - xahrepap 5y ago
    I had a brand new computer that i built at the start of the year. 100% new hardware. Brand new install of windows. Installed Steam, installed CS:GO. And I was unable to play because Steam flagged my system for cheating. The fix was to run some random steam exe found in the steam install directory. I guess it caused Steam to re-scan my system? 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.
    - asdff 5y ago
      Steam is terrible software. It's been losing track of my games lately, so every time I want to play something I have to wait around for 5 minutes or so for steam to rediscover the local game files it had already installed. Download management is terrible too, frequently coming to a crawl or stopping entirely. It's not my ISP throttling me, either, because this only happens with steam and not when I am downloading other massive things from other places.
      - charcircuit 5y ago
        I've not experienced those issues. In fact Steam is the best at stealing internet bandwith from everything else.
rland 5y ago
TF2 is exactly the same. It's a great game, tons of people still buying items from the store, just slowly being choked out by developer neglect. 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.
- scotth 5y ago
  Did you try Half-Life: Alyx? It was incredible, imho. I can't stop going back to it.
  - charcircuit 5y ago
    I don't find there to be much replay value. I played it once, speedran it a few times, and then played it with the developer commentary. I am looking forward to their next VR game and hopefully they don't shove smooth locomotion it last second like they did with Alyx.
    - lanternfish 5y ago
      I think smooth locomotion is an unfortunate reality of current VR hardware; If most of your userbase gets uncomfortable from non-smooth locomotion, it makes sense to design for the smooth locomotion as a first-class experience.
      - charcircuit 5y ago
        BTW you are backwards smooth locomotion is where you move around with a joystick. 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.
        5y ago
tester756 5y ago
It's interesting to see because HN tends to constantly shit on Riot because of that anti cheat
pbhjpbhj 5y ago
I've recently broken into GN ranks on CSGO and am watching suspected cheats ... I can only think the first dozen videos are a test of me, because algorithmically spotting the cheating seems like it would be super easy. About half of mine so far only look at the floor, get only awp headshots. I mean, really? 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.
- noxvilleza 5y ago
  Yeah, and annoyingly the paid platforms (like, FACEIT) have way fewer obvious cheaters - but also (due to the increased competition) a lot of subtle ones. Part of the problem is also related to the game going free-to-play, instead of taxing cheaters through time & cash, it's just time.
  - sodality2 5y ago
    Faceit AC is technologically superior, it's not just the payment on-boarding. The cheats for faceit cost $200+ and are all private. There are free, open source, undetected cheats for CSGO that are VAC undetected for 4+ years. The difference is staggering
    - noxvilleza 5y ago
      Agree on all counts - I'm just saying that if you dislike losing to obvious spinbots, then FACEIT is much better - but still have many (less obvious) hackers. [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.
      - 5y ago
sseneca 5y ago
I think Valve's ineptitude in regards to CS:GO becomes easier to explain when considering their history with Counter Strike. 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.
- ceedan 5y ago
  Source was the worst thing to ever happen to North American CS.
  - Svperstar 5y ago
    I'm old and I liked Source when it dropped. I never understood all the hate.
Zambyte 5y ago
As someone who also has thousands of hours in counter strike, you are either playing up the number of cheaters in the game (many do this, because they don't like to admit when someone is simply better), or have been extremely unlucky. I'm assuming here that you are talking about prime matchmaking, I don't have much experience with non-prime. Valorant anti-cheat is a throwback to early 2000s malware, not really years ahead.
LordOfWolves 5y ago
It's always unfortunate when a presumably valuable asset - CS:GO brought in over $400M in 2018 [1] - does not receive the attention it deserves, nonetheless requires, for continued successful operation. 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/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/808773/csgo-revenue/
weird-eye-issue 5y ago
I have a CSGO inventory worth over $40k. 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.
- willis936 5y ago
  It’s me! Your cousin! Got any spare butterfly knives?
  - weird-eye-issue 5y ago
    Several! But not for you ;)
    - willis936 5y ago
      I bought one for $90 a few years ago. It's truly wild how many video games I could buy if I sold it today. I'm not sure if I'll ever buy that many video games again in my life.
- noxvilleza 5y ago
  Wasn't their 'solution' for this to eventually allow private inventories? Feel like at some point the number of scammers adding me dropped rapidly and I think it was for this.
  - weird-eye-issue 5y ago
    That helps a bit but actually it gives another way for the scammers to trick you. They have private inventories and give some BS reason for having it private. People that actually actively trade and invest never have private inventories because otherwise how would you trade? Also most other people don't set theirs to private either if they have anything nice because they want to show it off.
andrewzah 5y ago
While valve is indeed quite neglectful, the reason they're "behind" on anticheats is because they don't run extremely invasive ones like EAC (Easy Anti-Cheat) or Vanguard (what Valorant uses). These operate exactly like malware/rootkits that you just have to trust. Blegh. Even if I wanted to run those (I do not), they don't work on linux anyways. So I'll stick to cs:go and tf2 community servers, thanks.
- issamehh 5y ago
  While I would never want to use a malware of an anticheat, you're not quite right about Linux. EAC works on Linux, however it does not work through Proton. The developers must release a Linux build themselves if you want to use it. The effect is the same because they frequently don't bother to do so of course
  - srfvtgb 5y ago
    Didn't EAC drop native support for Linux when they were acquired by Epic Games?
- willis936 5y ago
  Exactly. Valve leads the way on non invasive anti cheat. These scummy anti cheat devs are not people I want with keys to my computer. 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://youtube.com/watch?v=ObhK8lUfIlc https://www.theregister.com/2013/11/20/esea_gaming_bitcoin_fine/ https://www.theregister.com/2013/11/20/esea_gaming_bitcoin_f...
  - Gaelan 5y ago
    > Anti cheat developers do not deserve anyone’s trust until they are open. 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).
pharmakom 5y ago
Valve fixed the cheating problem for me with the latest operation. In “Broken Fang Premier” mode with high trust-factor, I would get back to back games with friendly players, none of whom appeared to be cheating. 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.

by gr33nq 5y ago

mberning 5y ago

You are absolutely right. This lackadaisical attitude towards their games was present in CS:S as well. Security, gameplay, performance. All of it takes a back seat to milking the cow.

ep103 5y ago

I looked into what was going on with CS:Go after trying to get back into it a few years ago, and noticing just how horrifically bad the amount of cheating was. 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 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.

MayeulC 5y ago
On the other hand, I cheated once (I was bored with TF2's new gameplay, and a teenager) 11 years ago , and got a lifetime VAC ban, while most die-hard cheaters would probably laugh it off and create a new account (especially now that it is f2p). Lifetime bans hardly seem proportional if you are on the receiving side. 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?
- xahrepap 5y ago
  I had a brand new computer that i built at the start of the year. 100% new hardware. Brand new install of windows. Installed Steam, installed CS:GO. And I was unable to play because Steam flagged my system for cheating. The fix was to run some random steam exe found in the steam install directory. I guess it caused Steam to re-scan my system? 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.
  - asdff 5y ago
    Steam is terrible software. It's been losing track of my games lately, so every time I want to play something I have to wait around for 5 minutes or so for steam to rediscover the local game files it had already installed. Download management is terrible too, frequently coming to a crawl or stopping entirely. It's not my ISP throttling me, either, because this only happens with steam and not when I am downloading other massive things from other places.
    - charcircuit 5y ago
      I've not experienced those issues. In fact Steam is the best at stealing internet bandwith from everything else.

rland 5y ago

TF2 is exactly the same. It's a great game, tons of people still buying items from the store, just slowly being choked out by developer neglect. 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.

scotth 5y ago
Did you try Half-Life: Alyx? It was incredible, imho. I can't stop going back to it.
- charcircuit 5y ago
  I don't find there to be much replay value. I played it once, speedran it a few times, and then played it with the developer commentary. I am looking forward to their next VR game and hopefully they don't shove smooth locomotion it last second like they did with Alyx.
  - lanternfish 5y ago
    I think smooth locomotion is an unfortunate reality of current VR hardware; If most of your userbase gets uncomfortable from non-smooth locomotion, it makes sense to design for the smooth locomotion as a first-class experience.
    - charcircuit 5y ago
      BTW you are backwards smooth locomotion is where you move around with a joystick. 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.
      - 5y ago

tester756 5y ago

It's interesting to see because HN tends to constantly shit on Riot because of that anti cheat

pbhjpbhj 5y ago

I've recently broken into GN ranks on CSGO and am watching suspected cheats ... I can only think the first dozen videos are a test of me, because algorithmically spotting the cheating seems like it would be super easy. About half of mine so far only look at the floor, get only awp headshots. I mean, really? 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.

noxvilleza 5y ago
Yeah, and annoyingly the paid platforms (like, FACEIT) have way fewer obvious cheaters - but also (due to the increased competition) a lot of subtle ones. Part of the problem is also related to the game going free-to-play, instead of taxing cheaters through time & cash, it's just time.
- sodality2 5y ago
  Faceit AC is technologically superior, it's not just the payment on-boarding. The cheats for faceit cost $200+ and are all private. There are free, open source, undetected cheats for CSGO that are VAC undetected for 4+ years. The difference is staggering
  - noxvilleza 5y ago
    Agree on all counts - I'm just saying that if you dislike losing to obvious spinbots, then FACEIT is much better - but still have many (less obvious) hackers. [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.
    - 5y ago

sseneca 5y ago

I think Valve's ineptitude in regards to CS:GO becomes easier to explain when considering their history with Counter Strike. 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.

ceedan 5y ago
Source was the worst thing to ever happen to North American CS.
- Svperstar 5y ago
  I'm old and I liked Source when it dropped. I never understood all the hate.

Zambyte 5y ago

As someone who also has thousands of hours in counter strike, you are either playing up the number of cheaters in the game (many do this, because they don't like to admit when someone is simply better), or have been extremely unlucky. I'm assuming here that you are talking about prime matchmaking, I don't have much experience with non-prime. Valorant anti-cheat is a throwback to early 2000s malware, not really years ahead.

LordOfWolves 5y ago

It's always unfortunate when a presumably valuable asset - CS:GO brought in over $400M in 2018 [1] - does not receive the attention it deserves, nonetheless requires, for continued successful operation. 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/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/808773/csgo-revenue/

weird-eye-issue 5y ago

I have a CSGO inventory worth over $40k. 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.

willis936 5y ago
It’s me! Your cousin! Got any spare butterfly knives?
- weird-eye-issue 5y ago
  Several! But not for you ;)
  - willis936 5y ago
    I bought one for $90 a few years ago. It's truly wild how many video games I could buy if I sold it today. I'm not sure if I'll ever buy that many video games again in my life.
noxvilleza 5y ago
Wasn't their 'solution' for this to eventually allow private inventories? Feel like at some point the number of scammers adding me dropped rapidly and I think it was for this.
- weird-eye-issue 5y ago
  That helps a bit but actually it gives another way for the scammers to trick you. They have private inventories and give some BS reason for having it private. People that actually actively trade and invest never have private inventories because otherwise how would you trade? Also most other people don't set theirs to private either if they have anything nice because they want to show it off.

andrewzah 5y ago

While valve is indeed quite neglectful, the reason they're "behind" on anticheats is because they don't run extremely invasive ones like EAC (Easy Anti-Cheat) or Vanguard (what Valorant uses). These operate exactly like malware/rootkits that you just have to trust. Blegh. Even if I wanted to run those (I do not), they don't work on linux anyways. So I'll stick to cs:go and tf2 community servers, thanks.

issamehh 5y ago
While I would never want to use a malware of an anticheat, you're not quite right about Linux. EAC works on Linux, however it does not work through Proton. The developers must release a Linux build themselves if you want to use it. The effect is the same because they frequently don't bother to do so of course
- srfvtgb 5y ago
  Didn't EAC drop native support for Linux when they were acquired by Epic Games?
willis936 5y ago
Exactly. Valve leads the way on non invasive anti cheat. These scummy anti cheat devs are not people I want with keys to my computer. 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://youtube.com/watch?v=ObhK8lUfIlc https://www.theregister.com/2013/11/20/esea_gaming_bitcoin_fine/ https://www.theregister.com/2013/11/20/esea_gaming_bitcoin_f...
- Gaelan 5y ago
  > Anti cheat developers do not deserve anyone’s trust until they are open. 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).

pharmakom 5y ago

Valve fixed the cheating problem for me with the latest operation. In “Broken Fang Premier” mode with high trust-factor, I would get back to back games with friendly players, none of whom appeared to be cheating. 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.