7 ms·
Save Team Fortress 2 (#savetf2)
- bitwize 2y agoThe way you fix a game like this is the way Valorant has done it: kernel level anticheat. Alternatively, use something like Pluton remote attestation to ensure a known good software stack from the firmware on up. 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.
- zamalek 2y agoThere are a few sources showing how pointless kernel anticheats are, and CS2 - another Valve title without kernel anticheat - does not have this problem. The issue here is neglect, nothing more.
- tapoxi 2y agoNot really true, just look at the Valorant community. Vanguard (Riot's anti-cheat) has an extremely positive reception, the only real way around it is to use Windows 10 to bypass the secure boot requirements, and they're removing support for that soon. Vanguard is an early kernel mode driver, meaning it's signed by Microsoft and ensures a secure boot using remote attestation, and loads before any cheat kernel driver would be able to. 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.
- Shank 2y agoCustom arduino (or equivalent) cheats and spoofed-identity DMA devices have, and continue to be a factor in the cat-and-mouse game. I think the reality is that kernel level anticheats can be effective at stopping low effort cheaters, but they’re completely ineffective at stopping all cheats. 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.
- viraptor 2y agoIt's just an arms race. Give it time and all parts will be virtualised or defeated through the analog hole. 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.
- snailmailman 2y agoIn my small friend group of 6-7 people we used to regularly play league of legends almost every night. Since vanguard came out we play significantly less. And some of us are trying to switch to Dota instead. The anticheat causes more problems for us than it solves. Playing is such a hassle now. We never noticed cheaters in our games. 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.
- bitwize 2y agoWell, the good news is, once Pluton catches on, remote attestation will be built into the hardware and OS, so game companies won't need to install squirrely little kernel modules to implement effective anticheat. Yes, it will suck for techies and hackers, but it'll be a better world for the ordinary consumers out there.
- ehnto 2y agoThe outrage would be from the security and privacy concious crowd I believe. Kernel level anti-cheat is a very invasive piece of software to require to play a game, and it does not solve all problems magically. I think this is the real reason Valve avoids kernel level anti-cheat.
- Aeglaecia 2y agoone would think the software that single handedly popularized MTX still generates some degree of revenue , although probably not enough to justify the man hours required in fixing it ...
- mvdtnz 2y agoIt's a 20 year old game. Just play something else.
- IntelMiner 2y ago"Why ever enjoy anything old? Just consume the new!"
- xkcd1963 2y agoThe people who downvoted you had not enough IQ to see the sarcasm
- hombre_fatal 2y agoIt's the #14 most played game on Steam by concurrent users: https://steamcharts.com/top https://steamcharts.com/top
- yimmothathird 2y agoYeah, but it’s very likely a massive amount of the player count is bots, mostly bots farming for drops at that https://youtu.be/2stmQfv93oQ?si=qaecdQh723xwpr7T https://youtu.be/2stmQfv93oQ?si=qaecdQh723xwpr7T
- hombre_fatal 2y agoI see. https://teamwork.tf/ https://teamwork.tf/ reports almost 10,000 actual players online. So, still a top 100 game.
- socramt 2y agoIt has about 80k daily active players. That’s enough to place on steams top 10 most of the time.
- gtmitchell 2y agoAnd according to recent investigations, we know approximately 70% of those ‘active’ users are actually bots.
- metadat 2y agoHmm, I wonder if people cheat at Counter-Strike 2 as well. Some folks are awfully good, almost inhumanly so, but I (perhaps foolishly) assumed the VAC system was working.
- broodbucket 2y agoNot sure if this is a joke but CS2 is rife with cheaters, especially on Valve servers
- cammikebrown 2y agoYes, but CS2 anti cheat works a lot better.
- jamesfinlayson 2y agoI think a little while ago Valve reduced the amount of symbols that ship in Linux and Mac build of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (as it was then) - I assume to make it harder for cheaters. Team Fortress 2 continues to ship with fairly generous symbols in Linux and Mac builds.
- ungamedplayer 2y agoVac only catches the most basic cheat techniques. Its not that hard to get past it, the real challenge is not distributing your code so that valve gets a copy of it to reverse.
- koolala 2y agoTF2 Orange Box was a good game. Then our digital software economy went off a cliff.
- ehnto 2y agoI have abandoned many games due to cheaters, I think it's great to look at technical solutions but I think the real solution is in community, community tools and less lock in to matchmaking. 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.
- seattle_spring 2y agoYup. The whole Diablo series has been ruined by cheating, too. The companies seem sooooo terrified to ban cheaters, and I guess I really don't understand why.
- worthless-trash 2y agoCheaters usually go on to badmouth the game on public forums. Sometimes they will attempt to also seek financial repercussions when denied access to their purchase. It is not common but it does happen, usually the game companies end up settling before the case.
- Narhem 2y agoNah I got an account banned I used to like a lot for doing stuff other people did and got away with. Would have been super simple to patch the bug. Honestly made me turned off by the entire country associated with the game.
- worthless-trash 2y agoOh, i'm not saying you wont get banned, i'm just saying that some companies have fears of bans and repercussions. 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.
- nathants 2y agothe only way to solve cheating is handcam anti-cheat. 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.
- etrautmann 2y agoWhile technically trueish, this feels unhelpful as a suggestion.
- nathants 2y agotbh i’m shocked no game is doing this already.
- bluefirebrand 2y agoAny game that made this sort of anti cheat mandatory to play online would have the smallest playerbase of any online game 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
- nathants 2y agochallenge accepted!
- pynappo 2y agoI've seen it done with human observations instead of AI, e.g. for validating the skills of the best rhythm game players or the best speedrunners. 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.
- yimmothathird 2y agoIt’s dead to me until they only take care of the bots and cheaters but nuke all cunts who defend and refuse to kick said cheaters
- nickzelei 2y agoMan I love this game and remember when it came out. Played it so much. It’s sad what has happened over the years.
- blueridge 2y agoHeavy/Medic fun time all night!
- jollyllama 2y agoIt's time to let go. It's been dead since it was free to play and all standards went out the window (ex. pyros actually using backburner, etc.). Put this game out of its misery.
- neilv 2y agoThe site uses that CloudFlare "protection", which has prevented archiving by archive.org.
- noah_buddy 2y agoI think VALVe’s structure makes solving this problem basically impossible. It’s flat and people pick what to work on. If you solve the current cheating for an old game, it’s fixed for a little while, probably months, until someone works a way around it (which they will). You’re back at square one, you haven’t moved the bottom line and people are still mad. No reasons for any eng to self select to work on it
- Sakos 2y agoCheating is something they face in CS and will face in Deadlock as well. I don't get why nobody there is interested enough (and competent enough) to work on cross-game anti-cheat.
- Narhem 2y agoI never really got this. I always played on servers with admins. You report somebody and see what happens. Not entirely sure why any game needs anything more complicated.
- sillysaurusx 2y agoIs it still that way? It seems likely that they’ve backpedaled on their flat hierarchy in decade and a half since they published that handbook.
- omnimus 2y agoWhy is it likely? Do you have any more info?
- bravetraveler 2y agoSimilarly interested; was under the impression they were private and intended to stay this way to maintain this exact dynamic. They aren't forced to grow - they can foster.
- beloch 2y ago
- thefaux 2y agoI truly do not understand the psychology of a video game cheater.
- Narhem 2y agoIt’s refusing to accept the limitations others place on you. Anything else would be seen as un-American and unacceptable in my state.
- pcwalton 2y agoThe easiest ones to understand are the extortionists: "pay me and I'll go away" is not an uncommon tactic.
- hollerith 2y agoPardon my complete ignorance. Do they try to extort the owner of the video game? If not, how does the target get so uncomfortable with the situation they would consider paying?
- julianwachholz 2y agoThe sniper bots in TF2 will instantly kill any non-bot player unless the person buys a "bot protection" from the cheaters. Playing on bot-infested servers is basically impossible unless you pay up (which you obviously shouldn't do).
- dailykoder 2y agoBack in my youth I used to write farm bots for f2p asia MMORPGS with a friend. And it was basically just one more programming problem to solve. We just did it for the sake of the challenge. 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?
- HaZeust 2y agoWill never forget staying up 24 hours in a row almost every weekend playing highlander, tc_hydro, and 2tpl_alpine. I have 3K hours in this game, and I'll always hold it near and dear to my heart. 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. 1- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjeF1iZSqBk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjeF1iZSqBk
- exabrial 2y agoI used to love tf2 on mac. Sad Apple broke it for literally no reason.
- adamomada 2y agoI used to play (a lot of) tf2 and back then it was always better to bootcamp into windows to play. There were much better ways to strip down / “game mode” windows (7?), control overclock and fans, and have bleeding edge graphics drivers, all to squeeze out a higher steady FPS on mid-2000s core 2 duo systems. 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 :)
- dlbucci 2y agoAm I getting deja vu or did this happen before? And Valve responded and said they would help? Or was that something else?
- serf 2y agoi've spoke about it before, but I think it's criminal when a video game company continues to rake-in in-game-purchase profit far after they've ceased moderation or population herding. 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.
- nxobject 2y agoShoot, I forgot TF2 is _nearly 17 years old_.
- hlandau 2y agoFrom my perspective, TF2 was ruined the moment microtransactions became involved. 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.
- rgun 2y agoThere are f2p games with microtransactions only for purely cosmetic items, like Dota2
- pillowkusis 2y agoTF2 was one the first major game to introduce a F2P+microtransactions+loot crate economy. I think they did it fairly. 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.
- rldjbpin 2y agohaving played another valve title where every other match has at least a cheater (counter-strike), i empathize with the playerbase. however, looking at other titles valve makes or is making, it seems unlikely that valve is going to take any measures that will solve the problem. 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.