This is probably the most interesting part of the running Valve scheme to kill the bots, but a thing I want to mention is that I haven't seen a single bot since the initial report of bans last night. EU usually has hundreds of the bastards, but no they're nowhere to be seen.
There will literally never be another game like TF2. I want it to live for ever as a culture mark. It's been formative for so many people , me including.
The human cheaters were there the whole time. The playerbase at large just didn't notice them since they weren't obvious like the bots and forgot human cheaters still existed.
it's possible that sine tf2 js still in a "weakened" state people are much more willing to cheat. or that it's just been so long and you're not used to seeing closet cheaters anymore
I saw this sniper on turbine yesterday, I think his name was rush
I didn’t say anything cuz I didn’t want to be that guy but I swear he had to have had aimbot or something cuz he constantly hit the most incomprehensible headshots, like at one point I was up close zigzagging around trying to get him as scout, he was scrambling around too, then in the middle of it he pulls his gun and headshots me immediately like it was nothing.
Then again he could just be a really fucking good sniper, some players here have inhuman aim
I don't know if it was easy or not. If this is an automated system, this can't have been implemented quickly. If it is done manually, then there's a lot of moderation being done... which should've been very quick and easy overall right?
It's paradoxical, to the point we have no fucking clue as to if Valve actually did something in the first place.
"You will suffer as I, Ramattra, have suffered! Your torment will outlast the stars. When the universe dwindles into dust, there you will be, still suffering as I have Suffered!"
Genuine question: Why doesn't valve launch a lawsuit for breach of contract and use that as a vehicle to subpoena discord for the cheater dev's identities and chat logs? You just need to catch one who is US based and the chilling effect will do the rest.
(Not to say they aren't planning that in the background.)
You played on Skial without people spewing Nazi agenda, telling eachother "keep yourself safe" and throwing slurs around? Damn did Skial change this much in half a year?
I've been playing on one of the 24/7 2Fort servers for a few months, and I've only seen like 2 instances of people being edgy/trolling. Skial actually gave a week long chatban to someone dropping queer slurs.
telling eachother "keep yourself safe"
What is this referring to? I've never seen anyone say this.
Been on Skial's 24/7 2Fort for a year or two almost nonstop (especially since the 64player capability dropped). Skial is fantastic about dealing with people who use slurs. The second the N word appears, gone.
Skial is also horrible about dealing with any and all other forms of bigotry that doesn't contain a slur lmao. Both the US and EU server I've seen the most bigoted trash you can imagine at any time of day, every day of the week.
Still more worthwhile playing on it than on casual regardless (imo). I'm 40, in game chat for 20 years now has basically become visual white noise I can ignore lol.
I remember getting someone silenced by reporting them on the forums for using white supremacist and racist dogwhistles back in like 2018 or 2019, but when a MOD WAS ON THE SERVER and I noted someone using a slur (the word that's equivalent to 'a bundle of sticks'), the mod (sniveling ant that he is) said "what slur?" multiple times
I obviously didn't know that it wasn't against the rules but that dickhead thought it was really fucking funny to act like something homophobic ISN'T a slur just because Skial doesn't rule against it.
Speaking of which, for anyone who's not aware, here are Skial's rules regarding discrimination and the like:
Racism. Racial slurs or stereotypes are not allowed.
Any other discrimination based on gender or religion is not allowed based on admin discretion.
This is funny to me. "We don't tolerate ANY racism from ANYONE. Full-stop. But a sexist comment against women (or men)? Maybe. Maybe that's allowed." I'm guessing it's because of trans people, given they don't care at all about protecting those who are gay/queer either.
Now I will say, I have played on their servers for plenty of hours since then. I don't recall when I last ENCOUNTERED homophobia or even the bigotry that you did, DemonKyoto. I do see an occasional annoying person in voice or text chat but that's about it.
True. They boast about how they’re “master hackers” and whatnot meanwhile they’re just copy-pasting existing code into fucking Python or whatever Steam uses for making accounts.
I'm not sure if some scripts can screw with person's hardware. And for software bot hosters are using virtual machines, so it wont damage them anyways.
There's no difference between a "Script" and a program. It's just an arbitrary distinction at a certain point of complexity. If a program can, a csriscriptt can
Exactly, for some reason there’s this rhetoric that the hackers are ex nsa/cia actors or something. Where in reality these people only hack in tf2 because it’s the most accessibly cheater game.
Well, the issue is bot hosting consists of two groups of people. The guys who make the bot stuff, who don’t care either way about the game and enjoy the challenge of exploiting holes in security. and the idiots who actually host the bots, who don’t know the first thing about computers and just want to be assholes. The second group may be incompetent, but the first group will do the work for them
It's not about getting it back, it's about the competency modifying it. Valve is catching the current bots, they need to figure out how and then re code the bots to work around that catch.
We know the amount of script kiddies using the code has exploded lately, but what of actual cheat devs?
It depend on how they ban them. If they just put some signatures into their VAC blacklist that unfortunately easy to fix. Hopefully they can detect VMs and ban them from that. Back in my day it was common practice to create their own drivers to scrape data from protected programs.
Now all that's left for Valve to do is to actually do a good update for summer
Up to this point they've listened to the community everytime we've banded together
First was the original savetf2 that got us a temporary rest from the bots and a tweet, even if they did nothing in the end
Then the community map makers united and sent a (very polite) letter to Valve asking them to a make a summer update, from that we got our yearly holiday sized summer updates
And now all we have to do is keep adding fuel to the fire of savetf2 and maybe, just maybe, we will have a warm summer
Tbh, I wouldn't get our hopes up too much. Valve's probably all-hands-on-deck for Deadlock right now (unfortunately), and between that and the fact that CS2 could really use the VAC tune-up as well, making content for TF2 is probably a low priority.
So this is very good news. A common practice when deploying ban waves is to spread them out. If a new cheat tool or detection bypass method is created, then discovered, and then immediately accounted for and banned, it tells everyone who worked on the bannable tool that "they can detect this, so whatever you did or changed, that is now a new problem to solve". You spread out the waves so you can make a large archive of bot and cheat detection tools, and deploy that. Suddenly, hosters and cheaters don't actually know what exact part of their bots or hacks got them banned, making it much harder to find workarounds.
The initial ban wave could have been targeted, but the fact that fresh accounts are getting immediately hit suggests that Valve has updated their detection methods. It's now a matter of how long it will take hosters to find a workaround, and if Value will continue to monitor and adapt to new bots and cheats.
Im not sure I understand. What do the bot creators even gain from having this many bots flooding servers anyway? Is the return on random item drops that good? Is this like a runeacape gold scheme in venezuela or something?
Idk, I think I heard something about "mercy killing tf2" from them (although this is just a rumour). But probably it's just item farming to sell them later
They're doing all of this, yet haven't released a tweet or any kind of official mention of them banning the bots, I wonder why they haven't said anything yet?
Because this is a ban wave like any other they do. Despite what the community has been spouting for the last month or so - Valve does actually do regular ban waves on basically all their games.
This isn't some big event, it's part of their regular maintenance schedule. Why would they tweet about it?
I have not seen bots in the last three days. Keep up the pressure. We still have not heard an official statement from Valve on their stance or approach or future plans to maintain this.
i hope they wont stop there and keep removing bots as they are being created. Maybe making the game pay to play could help? Even 5 dollars or something so that the bot investment becomes huge very quickly?
Just remember, this war isn't over until TF2 is either bot-free or bots become as rare as a pre-Gen VI Shiny Pokémon, but this is a great victory! They're actually doing it!
depite I having the most hour in TF2, Im still just staying farewell to TF2 more than due to the movement. I wont be back unless you DDOS ALL their asses for good. Never getting any compensation for losing tons worth ofc as ( while if such thing happenes irl in one country, it would be major robberu) but Steam supportive willing to do nothing about such a THIEF...
They just all killed my will to even support the game in any way
I have only seen 1 bot and it was kicked shortly after, sure I would love for bots to be 100% gone, but it’s way better than dealing with full lobbies of them, since when there is only one or two they can be kicked pretty easily
This is probably the most interesting part of the running Valve scheme to kill the bots, but a thing I want to mention is that I haven't seen a single bot since the initial report of bans last night. EU usually has hundreds of the bastards, but no they're nowhere to be seen.
Valve is cooking at least. It's a start.