I 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.
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...
Well, it's time for my weekly "You should try old school runescape" suggestion!
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.
I agree that self-policed communities seem like the best solution to the general problem.
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.
One of my memories of being a gamedev is when I tried to convince people at S2 not to go all-in on matchmaking for the reasons you outline. They looked at me like I was an alien.
Unfortunately the wild success of Dota 2 proves that this model is superior for generating monetary returns.
These sort of moves were made by pretty much every single multiplayer game around from the mid 2010s forwards. Even at the time it was very obvious what would be the result. But the casuals and new players loved it for a while $$$
Wouldn't surprise me if Valve sends a DMCA to their host for using their art assets
Yup. 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.
Recently got back into playing Diablo Immortal because i got a new m4 ipad, was playing with a standard nintendo switch controller for 2 weeks fine just doing standard story quest/leveling then banned for "Severe Exploitation - Automation (Botting), Hacks, or Third-Party Software".
I tried to appeal but just automatically rejected and no recourse or way to even know what they think i did wrong besides that vague statement above.
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.
Cheaters 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.
Some cheaters also have no problem doxxing the game developers, CM's, and anyone else they perceive to have slighted them. In a world where swatting is a real danger to a person's life, that can be quite a serious threat.
But that behavior badmouth the game publicly and seek financial repercussions, as written, are indistinguishable from what I'd expect someone who was wrongly banned by an automated anti-cheat system with all appeals met by robo-denial.
Ya. This is rampant in the gaming industry. The industry is surprisingly one of the most toxic to work in IMO. At least from a consumer communication perspective. It is actually wild to think there are individuals out there that think and act this way
Oh, 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.
100% this. Game companies want to treat games as e-sports platform, but that's incompatible with casual play. IMHO, the solution is to allow self-hosted community servers and adapt matchmaking to this, or ditch it entirely; social mechanisms will handle cheating there just fine, like they always did. Separately, create e-sports track, where entry requirement is kernel level anticheat or playing on vendor-supplied hardware in vendor-approved location or whatever bullshit is necessary. Just don't mix the two.
In multiplayer, cheats are literal plague that kill the entire experience for everyone, including the cheater. Social gaming is based around mutual understanding. If the understanding is that we play by the rules, then a cheater is going against that understanding, thereby ruining the mutual-ness.
Will 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.
I 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
They have an IP that still has a lot of fans and users. They have giant heaps of money. It's almost as if these two things could be put together somehow... perhaps by hiring another studio to update TF2 or create TF3?
Valve's real problem is that they have so much money they're no longer interested in opportunities to make money.
Similarly 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.
Cheating 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.
i'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.
Pardon 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?
The 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).
I think the rise of streamers and Internet personalities has incentivized many present day cheaters. You're more likely to strike it big—become popular, get paid—if you're good at these games. There is no shortage of YouTube videos showing streamers getting caught on stream cheating.
In team fortress 2, players can receive loot boxes/in game items during normal gameplay. The loot boxes can be unlocked by purchasing a "key" for ~$2.50, to receive cosmetic items. Many of the cosmetic items can sell for a lot, on the scale of hundreds or even thousands of dollars.
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 did it very briefly as a teenager. It was fun to spend hundreds of hours struggle bussing at a game, trying super hard, still being mediocre, to suddenly having god-like powers and mowing everyone down. It wasn't about my ego or feeling superior, it was just mechanically fun in the same way it's fun in battlefield to be in a tank hunting down people on feet.
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.
I understand the ones that stay on cheated servers. There have been CS servers in the past that made it unequivocally clear you only belong there for cheating, and it was a literal duel against cheat client configs - I've heard it was a lot of fun.
Back 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?
Really? I don’t think it’s substantially different to the psychology of cheating in any other field, whether that’s drugs in sport or tax fraud.
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.
Hmm, 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.
ESEA, FACEIT, or just other random private servers. There are several third party matchmaking services with extra anti-cheat, tighter reputation metrics, and are paid instead of free to play.
Vac 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.
I 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.
People cheat in every game. Among other factors, it's a matter of the service provider's level of moderation. Even if there are a lot of cheaters, if the host bans them quickly enough, they aren't much of a problem for the user experience.
I'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.
You probably don't play TF2. It's not just "human behind the kb/m using an aim assist cheat".
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
Assuming you mean "undefined" as "unprovable", this still seems like an extreme stance to me. I also think, even if we had this the next goal-post would be "provenance of the video".
As a cost-to-entry for a casual player, this seems like a pretty hard sell. I'd rather just find something else to play personally, than deal with a webcam and some invasive recording situation to play.
for pvp competitive games where cheating is possible, you and your computer must be more public while the game is active. how else could cheating be observed?
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.
Better also put a second camera facing the eyes to make sure the player isn't looking at e.g. a radar monitor just past the game monitor, or something in their lap. Apparently some cheating streamers will put a camera behind them precisely to show their keyboard/mouse/monitor, but then they'll put a phone or small tablet in their lap or off to the side that has radar/wallhack kind of stuff running on it.
over left shoulder handcam can show head orientation. not sure it's a good idea to require that, or crop it out. head orientation is definitely a part of inputs.
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.
What makes an aimbot an aimbot is its inhuman speed, the camera snaps from one target to the next, perfectly. Hypothetically you could GenAI a video to show hand motions, but real hand motions can't actually "snap" like that. You would see in the video that the hand controlling the mouse is snapping from one frame to the next, which would be a dead giveaway.
I 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 :)
having 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.
From 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.
TF2 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.
It'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.
It’s a fun game that has: tight mechanics, a high skill ceiling, an openness to harmless “trolling” at some level, a somewhat cartoony art style (so doesn’t look too dated), and a surprisingly active community. Honestly, there is no online class-based shooter like it.
I think if they can solve or at least mitigate the bot problem, TF2 could get its second chance.
The 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.
The 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.
There 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.
Not 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.
Custom 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.
In 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.
Well, 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.
It'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.
one 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 ...
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.