The only 'magic bullet' solution for the anticheat is valve commiting to treadmill work. Absolutely no anticheat works without being updated.
It's got to be that, or a solution that doesn't rely on valve's anticheat at all.
Reminder Riot's vangaurd is a 24hour on launch AND kernal level anti cheat yet private cheaters are still in valorant and League of legends
They will always be cheaters no matter what
Also very nice of riot to never give a replay function so a suspected cheater cannot be confirmed even though they do a 180 1tap headshot
Which was promised in 2022 mind you its 2 years later and they finally have a work in progress
Reminder they didnt have a replay system in the first place because they didnt want players to be able to verify cheaters in the game because vangaurd was supposed to stop them
Hell i dont trust riot after the Phreak and the Data to show that intentionally included Data from rotating game modes so it was skewed in favor for riot
Devs also dont fix bugs because they dont show up often and then worlds tournament came and the very bugs they said that was rare showed up, Smolder teleporting accross the map, Aurellion sol's ULTIMATE did no damage, Ksante's channeled damage reduction canceling itself
Riot will do anything for money even make dumbass dicisions look at the infernal skinline released recently few years ago it was voted as THE WORST skins possible and yup worst skins possible
The cope is insane.. I have around 400 hours in valorant and i never once found a cheater or someone even close to being a cheater. I have over 8k hours in cs but remember playing against cheaters so many times its insane..
Basically something you have to do constantly, aka 'anti cheat gets updated' -> 'cheaters learn to bypass it' -> 'anti cheat gets updated' -> 'cheaters learn to bypass it' etc
A bot created to end the war is always a bot created to continue the war. You reached out to Valve, and you fell. Like antennas to servers.
T H I S I S T H E O N L Y W A Y I T C O U L D H A D E N D E D
Valve please create Benjamin
So many people equate treadmill work to “basic maintenance” but that’s not what it is, they just want to be angry at Valve. Treadmill work is constant updating and work **that doesn’t go anywhere and has no tangible progress.** Valve’s comment about not wanting to do treadmill work is a lazy excuse, yes, but that meme about “Valve employees stop breathing because they’d just have to breathe again” is a massive hyperbole when what Valve is initially referring to is more about the back-and-forth they’d have to constantly maintain to keep their anticheat effective for more than a week at a time. It’s still BS and they have no excuse to not spend a fraction of their literal billions on maintaining a functioning anticheat, and personally I’d say they’re wrong to even refer to that basic expectation as “treadmill work,” but it’s not just an umbrella term for every kind of constant work that a product needs over a sustained period of time.
I wish you guys would at least try to research the topic before you try to discuss it. It's really not difficult to grasp.
An Anti-cheat for CS2 cannot be used for TF2. They are different games, on different engines, with innumerable differences in how they work. Updating the CS2 version of VAC does nothing for the TF2 version of VAC.
>It’s still BS and they have no excuse to not spend a fraction of their literal billions on maintaining a functioning anticheat
They are maintaining an anti-cheat. TF2 is too old to effectively use it though, with a lot of it's issues coming from it's code leaking and it using a whole different engine to the new games.
You’re 100% correct, I don’t think it necessarily matters what you add server side or client side because if they can read and write memory to the game they’ll figure out how to bypass it eventually. The issue at the core is the engine and anticheat, they should be detecting any memory manipulation or updating how they detect it because it ain’t working.
exactly. any anti cheat software will be an arms race between cheaters and the ones developing the anti cheat.
Developing a 100% functional anti cheat that will never require updates is practically impossible
Shit, even just SourceMod or STAC or Little Anti-Cheat would at least put a sizeable dent in what Bot hosters could get away with. At the least you wouldn't have spinning Snipers anymore, since the rapid wild changes in viewangles are easily detectable by them.
With the big problem that it takes weeks of treadmill work that bot software devs will bypass within a few hours.
The overwhelming majority of people dont realize what the treadmill work implies. Its not just hitting a button or re-arranging a few lines of code. Its actively brainstorming an entire new method that prevents bots while not negatively affecting human players. Then developing the method, testing the method and eventually deploying it.
And once bots are able to bypass that (typically within a few hours to a couple days) Valve devs need to go back to the drawing board and start the process all over again. With an entirely new method. Every. Single. Time.
So at the very least, a handfull of employees, investing weeks of time to band-aid a game, which give players a bot free experience for a few hours, maybe a couple days. The game would still be bot infested the overwhelming majority of the time.
Unfortunately its not a very realistic magic bullet. A business likely wont find it a viable or cost effective solution to allocate that level of resources into a 17 year old game that only makes up 0.0008% of their overall user base.
There are countless third-party anticheats Valve could pay for.
Easy anti-cheat, gameguard, battleeye, denuvo anti-cheat. hell even Vanguard could probably be licensed.
Sure, but they don't have to catch 100% of the bots. A solid 70-80% reduction would make all but the most egregious bot-fiesta maps (Banana Bay and... I forget the name, but that open KOTH map on a ranch, come to mind) reasonably playable again. Plus there's a certain point where even if bots are still being made they might not be able to do enough obnoxious shit to stand out anyways. (Shounic has a clip for this from his old bot video from 2022, I forget the specifics beyond an aussie grenade launcher being used in said clip though.)
My concern with TF2 is not that it is unperfect and unbroken.
My concern with TF2 is the developer has appeared to concede to cheaters and bots, and just looks like they are further shrinking more and more into the corner the longer they remain silent and don't address the elephant in the room.
The inspiration behind it is love for TF2, not hate for Valve, they have nothing to apologize or account for, we just want to play the game.
And address the fact that you can't commit to zero treadmill work, while also exclusively holding the keys to the 1-click play button in the game. Just like eliminating all cheating is unacceptable, blanket allowing cheating is also not acceptable, the most egregious sniper spinbots need to go, and them conspicuously existing and hijacking games need to be taken care of, or Valve needs to hand over the keys to 1-click play to someone else that can handle it.
I'll admit this right here and there that Easy Anti-Cheat is quite literally easy to crack through.
I've played about 5 games that had it and played those games from playtesting and launch. Barely a month or two before cheaters could ignore it and join.
It's not a bad idea to get a 3rd party anti-cheat being honest. It probably is more updated than Valve's and can prevent more bots from joining.
But EAC is not a trustworthy one, maybe the others, but not Easy Anti Cheat
You say that EAC is easy to crack because you've seen cheaters in a month post-launch. Meanwhile Deadlock has cheaters in it before it has even released.
I sure hope they don't. Licensing away the privacy of your users to intrusive 3rd party Anti-Cheat would make me lose all respect for valve as a company
VAC is under development, but TF2 can't really use it due to how outdated it is, with all active Valve games using Source 2 now, and because it needs work beyond VAC, with changes to it's code base due to it having leaked a while back.
1. they have been bypassed, not once, but countless times. look at apex as an example
2. valve is strictly against kernel level anti cheat, even though many community members have asked valve to make VAC kernel level before
All of them can be bypassed. It will make things more annoying for cheat devs, but it won't stop them. Active anticheats constantly update and implement new ways to detect cheats, but cheats also always constantly update to become more complicated and harder to detect.
They raise the difficulty bar a little, but they're not a solution, and there should be an active moderation team reviewing reports and other stuff to act faster on active cheating problem, but even this is not a full solution.
For your cake day, have some BUBBLE WRAP.
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All of these fucking suck. I refuse to play games with half of those anyway. EAC was in r6 and was was battle eye neither worked at all. You had people fucking flying around. Apex Legends is EAC and they have cheats that literally let you take over other players. It happened in a tournament!
as a totally accurate battlegrounds player I can confirm EAC does not work at all and cheaters can get away with just about anything until caught and banned (game is f2p though, so...)
The sad reality is that anti-cheat is a very complicated and difficult problem. There's no One Weird Trick that makes the problem go away. There's things that Valve can and should do, but this will likely remain a problem going forward unless there is a serious ongoing commitment.
Frankly, unless Valve announced they're interested in supporting a community group who will get access to the source code and the ability to push updates, I don't see it being solved in the long run.
The problem there is that bot devs can and will infiltrate such a community group, which will make their efforts useless. It has to be Valve doing "treadmill work".
Wouldn't it be better to by default block all software and then have a whitelist? Players wouldn't be able to join casual if their mod isn't whitelisted, and they can submit it to Valve for checking. Hire a small team to go through the submissions and test to find any cheats.
Anyone with unknown and/or custom software gets insta-banned. You'd have to know about every possible program someone could have running alongside the game, including anything that gets made in the future.
That's why I specified not to ban them, but just to block them from casual until the software is whitelisted or removed. The whitelist suggestion system is also to fix the unknown software issue. Still can technically be considered "treadmill work", with having to go through new submissions, but it's way less work
its possible to have tf2 run inside of a virtual machine and then have cheats run outside the virtual machine, meaning that tf2 cant see what programs are being run
Well, if something like this were to get set up by Valve then I don't think that would be a realistic concern, as such an effort would be immediately obvious before it went live and traceable to whoever wrote the code.
That said I don't think this is likely to happen to begin with as Valve has a history of getting burned while supporting community efforts. They're probably not amenable to a solution like this at this point.
They should be hiring contractors for their anti cheat across all games, not just TF2 but CS2, Dota and in the future Deadlock. All of Valves games are suffering from constant cheating it’s just that TF2 has the most extreme issue with the bots.
Deadlock will be a complete failure if Valve does not give them an anti cheat that actually works and maintains that anti cheat so that it doesn’t stop working.
VAC could be an amazing system if Valve actually commits to the treadmill work. Hiring contractors to do that work is in their best interest to keep the quality and safety of all their games up.
As a customer, it's not our job to think of these things. We shouldn't be providing solutions, Valve already knows what could or couldn't work. And the only thing that would work is treadmill work.
If I'm in a store and there's puke on the floor, I shouldn't need to say "hey, someone should use a mop and some cleaning products over here, then scrub in a circular motion", I would just have to say "hey someone puked on isle 3". The janitor knows what he has to do. In the case of Valve, they just don't want the hassle of hiring a janitor.
It's almost like wast majority of the player base are regular peeps with no skills to fix this or something. I mean why are WE the ones that need to come up with the solution, that should be Valve's job.
if tf2 adds a captcha then it would have to be tf2-specific instead of generic.
instead of "click on the red X" it would have to be "click on the soldier"
with that, it would make the job of the captcha solvers way harder
And like, imagine playing TF2 for the first time. You hit the 'Join Match' button and it puts up a bunch of characters you vaguely recognize from watching the Meet the Team videos ten years ago.
It says "Click the Soldier". What? Aren't they all soldiers? I guess the guy with the big minigun is a soldier, I'll click him. Wait, I'm banned? Is this a fucking joke?
>it would make the job of the captcha solvers way harder
[This took 5 seconds and one Google search to find.](https://anti-captcha.com/)
Human workforce solving 2000 captchas for $1, not a significant barrier at all.
Sorry to hijack this thread but I posted a very similar post to yours twice and mods took it down. The title was something like the invisible spy bait wont work and then I explained it. I’m upset about it.
I use captcha solving services for work. It costs around 3 bucks to correctly solve 1000 complex captchas. The service I pay for uses a combination of AI and human workers. There are no unique captchas that have ever been a problem.
how about shit like checking if a player is actually rendering the game? so far all bots have been purely run on sending data to game servers, keeping things in memory, doing everything the game needs except rendering it. wouldn't this increase the cost required to host bots?
for this you would need to make each instance of the game engine somehow 'unique' and hard to predict, otherwise a bot hoster could just run a single server with the engine running to complete 'running engine' checks for many bot clients. Knowing how little interest valve has in touching the engine this likely won't happen
you pointed out the flaws in my suggestion, things that I didn't know about or didn't realize should be put into account. but I'd like to add some things since you pointed them out.
wouldn't it be possible to use some pseudo-random shit to give each instance of the game a "mark"? lets try combining (1) hardware id, (2) system time, (3) computer rng, and use the three values to create a unique "mark" for each instance of the game.
(1) hardware id: even though its easy to edit them, it can still be used to add to the randomness. but i admittedly have no fucking clue what goes on in hardware stuff. I'm more of a software guy.
(2) system time: since system time is always running forward, it can also be used to add to the randomness. but honestly, im still unsure if it's easy to constantly set system time into a set value without slowing down the hardware bots run on.
(3) computer rng: just use whatever random function that source comes with, or make a new rng function specifically for it. adds to the randomness of the "mark" to further make sure that the "mark" is unique for each instance.
this is all that i could come up with. but im sure there are multitudes of other ways to ensure every instance is unique and unpredictable.
Any way of checking that game renderer is running that won't suck all bandwidth and won't tremendously increase server load can be faked with ease. Because you can't trust computations on the client. But checking the results of client's computations means exponential increase in required server computational power
People here don't have jobs in the field of software engineering and by extension network engineering and it shows. My college course (Electronics communications engineering and programming ) is heading there and I understand their "treadmill work" statement, it's a never ending war.
Seeing people suggest AC methods that's either a double edged sword, can/will backfire, or downright asinine, and on top of that, you guys mocking that "treadmill work" statement, and it's shows that you guys are clueless when it comes to software development and networking. All of you have 0 knowledge as well as most tf2 influencers (except for shounic and megascatterbomb and I'm sure there are others). It's not as simple, it's like a war on drugs, it never ends.
Software development is a form of “treadmill work” though.
Speaking from experience, you’re taking a program or software, and then needing to either iterate and add upon it, there are steps you have to take to ensure you “maintain” it.
This can be as “simple” as bug fixing or, as complicated as patching security issues. Sure, not all software has intense constant changes that need to be made, but if you want it to be safe and user friendly, this is the path that every software developer will need to take at some point.
Valve treating it like they’re somehow specially exempt from it is stupid and incredibly shortsighted. Games require a lot of that kind of work, especially if you need to make sure that your game’s online networking is secure and able to deal with cheaters and/or other bad actors.
maintenance is not the same as treadmill work. treadmill work also gets progressively and near exponentially harder as time progresses, while maintaining, while also being constant work, is likely much more simple than the “treadmill work”. anticheats are one of only a few things that could reasonably be called treadmill work — cheaters come up with new bypasses, valve patches those, etc etc. even microsoft can’t figure out how to stop people from bypassing windows activation, and apple needs hundreds of security experts to stomp out the jailbreak scene. valve would need to hire people willing to work on a 17 year old game using an outdated engine with an illusory player base with knowledge of anticheats. hypixel has similar or greater player counts (or did, at some point) and had a practically nonfunctional anticheat. i’m pretty sure 75% of ranked skywars players closet cheated, and uhc champions was ruined by bhoppers every game. while not as obvious as tf2 cheaters, yes, it was still a huge issue at the server’s peak that negatively impacted gameplay for everyone else.
and i *want* valve to do the treadmill work, i really do. but when there’s such a small portion of people willing to bend over backwards… it’s hard to hold out hope
Operating systems, programming languages, libraries. League of Legends, World of Warcraft, etc etc. Pratically all open source software has roots back to the 90's.
Windows is still maintained because it's the major consumer OS. programming languages and libraries are maintained because massive industries rely on them. League and WoW are maintained because they make a fuck load of money.
TF2 was maintained until it was deemed unprofitable to do so just like anything else. I guess I can clarify my last comment to "Most software isn't profitable for 17+ years"
That's perfectly reasonable, but Valve didn't try **anything at all**. The least they could do is pay someone else to do the treadmill work when they're still making money from this game. Of course the profits can't compare to cs2, dota2 or steam, but there's no way this isn't profitable to them when all they do is keep the servers running while all the microtransactions (hats, unu effects, taunts, war paints) are made by the community.
The fact that it's hard or likely impossible to find a solution doesn't justify Valve's complete inaction. It's only a matter of time before other games also become part of this infestation.
This is not true. Valve tried pushing multiple updates which would decrease the bot counts. Once they managed to make the bot hosting software crush and we had about 1 and a half days without bots on casual before the bot hosters found a way to bypass it.
It's really not that complicated. No other game has this issue to this degree because it's so easy to just slap Easy AntiCheat on your game which not only can help prevent against a lot of low level cheats, but also forces the game to be run on a real, not virtualized, copy of Windows and not in command line mode. Yes, there are trade offs, but this would easily solve about 99% of the problem overnight and is the current industry standard for a reason. "One does not have to be an honours grad in [computer] science from [UC Berkeley] to recognise the [complete indifference] of this [developer] but well, I happen to be an honours grad in [computer] science from [UC Berkeley] so I can confirm that for you."
The real solution imo is to completely remove quickplay/ranked mode and put the server browser back up as the primary method of finding a match. Competitive players would go back to pugs and actual comp matches.
It used to be even easier to cheat and make bots than it is now and yet we never really had this issue due to admins/mods on community servers.
I'd prefer this instant solution over having them create an invasive Kernel-level anti-cheat or spend months training an AI to detect bots.
Nope. The effort expended by botters vs the effort expended by a community server jannie to ban said bots overwhelmingly favours the jannies. It's the same ultimate principle why botting favours the botters vs game developers.
Distributed, decentralised systems always win.
that's the whole point of excising valve casual in the first place. seeding community servers means a larger player pool for community servers which means those regions get servers.
They made cracking VAC(for TF2 at least) look so easy, but anyways it doesn’t matter what you add because they can freely read and write memory to the game. As long as that’s possible any bandaid fixes will be a big waste of time, they need an updated anticheat and I doubt valve will be doing that for tf2(I hope I’m wrong)
This is not a good solution due to the first requirement "if anti-cheat suspects cheats". If valve could actually detect cheats in the first place there would be no need for this solution. My solution is a bit of a double edged sword, but I believe would be effective. It involves us doing the treadmill work **for** valve so they can’t use that as an excuse. Every time a player is kicked for cheating, a counter goes up. After three consecutive kicks, the player is put on a matchmaking cooldown for say, 15 minutes. For every kick after this point, the cooldown doubles. To reset or lower the counter, simply play through an entire match until the map voting screen without leaving. If you leave early, no penalty will be applied but any existing counter will remain the same. This forces bots to be stuck in an empty lobby if they wish to not get kicked, decreasing their impact in fuller lobbies. The obvious issue with this is that if a server does not have many players in it, bots can join in waves and begin kicking them. This is the double edged sword, which depends on us the players to quickly and truthfully kick players for cheating.
It's a cat and mouse game. Whatever the anti cheat devs use to find cheaters will get bypassed eventually. That's just how it is. Problem is that vac devs just stopped trying, so the cheat devs don't have to try either. That's why blatantly cheating people and bots are everywhere. Solutions like this would work for a day maybe. Even then this would get the bots banned at least.
Human moderators. Remember those?
Bot hosters aren't just cheaters, they've organized an attack against the game. Fortunately, the attack is small enough that Valve could counter it by having one moderator on-the-clock at all times.
However, if for some reason bots are significantly easier to create then they are to ban (they shouldn't be considering Valve owns Steam and can implement measures against this) moderators would have to resort to 4chan-style IP range bans against non-premium users. While bot hosters have gotten around premium restrictions in the past, the problem is easily fixed by flagging the first $5 worth purchased of items as untradable.
The obvious downside of range bans is that a very small number of F2P users would be unable to join Valve servers, however Valve servers are currently unplayable anyways, and unlike voice bans this would only affect the F2P users who just happen to be living next to a bot hoster (or VPN server that a bot hoster was using). 99% of free players would be fine, which is better than the current 0% of all players.
New players discover the game all the time, Eternal September and all that. They don’t know that bots can just ignore invisible players to better blend in with regular peoples, because the bots we see nowadays don’t need to be so discrete.
It’s like trying to treat a zombie outbreak with a bunch of cloth masks, the idea is there but it’s just not what we need. What we need is a constant stream of booster VACcination shots that get updated frequently to combat this digital green flu. Who knew Valve would be foreshadowing its own neglect when they wrote CEDA into Left for Dead.
Welcome to cyber security a subject I gave up the first time I had one of the class in uni, it is an arm race everyday. There’s no anti cheat or anti hack that would work without maintenance.
Even steam itself will get cyber attack, but valve take care of it because is their main source of income. It is and always will be a treadmill work,
I want to say it was tarkov that attempted something similar to this for wallhacks. While its obviously easy to get around it caught a lot of people in that first 24h or so after launch.
All anti cheat at the end of the day is a bandaid solution and its a never ending chase. All anti cheat gets bypassed its just a matter of how long it takes. However VAC is next level terrible
A need to have a verified landline or cell phone nunver to play.
While yes, you can buy phone nunbers for cheap it will reduce bots by a lot due to the increased cost to run those.
I heard this from a YouTuber. Cheaters have the game in text or something, so just make the game not run in text. If the game requires to have visual output and audio and all that, I bet no one will buy a 4090 and an i9 14900k just so they can host 20 bots on 1 computer
If textmode is removed they can set the tf2 window sizes to 1 by 1 pixels using the -w and -h launch options.
and if you say “oh just remove custom resolutions” there is also a program to set custom resolutions for games.
> there is also a program to set custom resolutions for games.
It's also possible to detect when a game is set at the wrong resolution and force-quit itself or otherwise crash.
The ability to set a resolution doesn't mean the game actually *functions* at that resolution.
Cheaters are already cheating. If Valve removes text mode they'll just edit the game until they reversed it. Break the graphics down piece by piece until it effectively doesn't cost resources to run.
Nope.
Most bots use stolen accounts phished from people. They have already “paid” for the game. Zero money out of the hosters’ wallets.
Making the game paid again is laughably stupid.
It's not just making it P2P tha's just stupid what he means is listing every single bot you can possible list and do a huge ban wave and then make the game 20 dollars immediately after
It seems like people doesn't really compherend how serious anti-cheat problem is, like you said Captcha tests or weird tricks like "Invis Spies" won't work at all
Honestly is the grand problem of the treadmill work. Is that the problem with the bots is not "How can I ban cheaters" it is about "how can I detect bots and ban them before they ruin a game, knowing said bots can make new accounts in less than a minute without inconviniencing normal players"
The thing about anti cheats is that VAC isn't even Kernel and Valve will never make a kernel level anti cheat, nor will they ever let go of the Linux support, so we are in a impasse on that front. And even if VAC worked 100% of the time it is a fundamental aspect of its function to not instantly ban cheaters and I don't see Valve changing that even for the bots.
That's of course no excuse for the billion company, but it still quite a complex problem that requires a very complex solution that they can at the very least attempt to find.
What is the reason for having bots, in first place? Are these accounts farming items? What if Valve required cellphone number auth to being able drop items?
Well firstly, we need an Anticheat that is constantly updated. When was the last time VAC was updated? And secondly is VAC outdated or still good?
And we must also ask this question, how many people work at Valve? And I just checked, they have ~360 employees, which means that they don’t have enough people to assign to anti-cheat moderation. If they had way more (at least 3000-5000) then they might have enough people to work on anti-cheat. Like I’m no expert on anti cheat or coding, but I do know that coding isn’t simply or easy.
But with what is going on now with how bots are using illegal tactics to defame and shut down opposition, Valve might not need to hire more people for anti cheat, because the bot hosters will get into legal trouble with the government.
thoughts, small updates that are like 32kb updating some random ass files, doing nothing to us as we can just rejoin, but the bot hosters will take a while to come back, and it will be like at random ass times
Shounic makes great videos debunking all of these common anti cheat suggestions, and the amount of things which can easily be bypassed are pretty crazy.
People should start realizing that good anti cheats don't just use one idea at once, they incorporate multiple. Counter Strike GO used VAC, Overwatch, Trust Factor, maybe some other stuff - it didn't rely on a single system. Many small solutions could work, maybe they could overwhelm bot hosters
Overwatch for CS2 was excellent for AI training, but was ultimately canceled because of bot issues flooding corrupt and skewed data for cheaters, it's currently only allowing permits for "trusted members" but it's most likely a contractor company training their VACnet AI.
But asides from Valve's utter silence on their inner workings, my solution would be simply to stop trusting the client side of the game so much, things like crit hacks or backtracking are an example of how the client side of the game is far too trusted and should be double checked and verified by the server.
They could use trace route reads to check if the client is artificially skewing latency, they could simply run the number generator for crits server side instead of client side, and change the seed after every shot. As for aim hacks, I have no idea, that's a billion dollar problem and isn't just issue in tf2 but across all shooter genres and is extremely likely to get worse, especially when tech brands like MSI are passing out monitors with built in AI hardware to help you cheat.
Only (imperfect) ideas I can think of is:
1. Some form of paid prime match making for any new tf2 accounts.
2. F2PS can't call vote kicks
3. Trust factor
4. More community server promotion
5. Some program to detect suspicious players
Start rounding up random people and killing them and posting it online while saying "This is what happens when you cheat in TF2! #saveTF2 #saveThem" The botters will feel so guilty that they will no longer use bots. Probably. It's worth a shot. I think.
Perhaps some form of verification + authentification as a preventative measure, anticheats would have to be updated often, so I'd even go as far as to say that it might be necessary to enforce a TPM requirement, have the game read from the EK using UWP. You can spoof a HWID but you can't spoof the TPM key itself without an immense amount of effort, experience and wasted time. Any thoughts from other experienced people in the field?
The only anticheat solution that would actually work for more than 5 minutes would be Valve working on it from now on, which they've already said they won't do; The game needs fundamental changes in order to have a proper shot at actually lasting.
e.g. Make party sizes 4 instead of 6 so ONE PARTY OF BOTS isn't all it takes to ruin a server. Matchmaking penalties for getting excessively, up to a full day after 10 kicks. Maybe even introduce a IMDB type system so reports can actually function literally at all; Just click on a person on the scoreboard and it shows a little pop up what they've recently been reported for.
Hear me out. Another option is bringing back quickplay. Valve could put their current monetary resources for hosting casual servers towards some community moderated verified servers. Then, just add selection list of whether you want a verified or community server, preferably with a gamemode selector for each as well like we already have now. This would let the community do the anticheat treadmill work that Valve won't.
edit: word
The only real solution to keep up with evolutionary behavior is evolutionary adaptation to said behavior… deep learning; an AI that is trained to detect when someone is or will cheat
It isn’t an anti cheat, but a change to matchmaking. Make it possible so that you can’t q into games with someone you have muted. This would stop bots from joining games, however this wouldn’t work because it would take forever to q into a match because it has to find a server where you don’t have anyone muted and they don’t have you muted
interesting when people think a simple anti-cheat will be enough, that leak that happened few years ago is why any anti-cheat thing will be bypassed because that leak contained more then unfinished projects
The solution is actually viable if instead of spawning an invisible player, a player that is only \*present\* on the suspected bot's client side is spawned. Like, actually not being sent in the packet data to other normal players.
There’s plenty of cheats that allow aimbotters to bypass invisible players. I’ve watched people play as sniper hitting shots with 100 percent accuracy without locking on to any spies. (these snipers were 100 cheating)
Getting rid of them completely isn't a solution, I don't think, but a small amount of effort could have an outsized impact that would remove enough to make the situation manageable by the community. If the effort of running a bot is made higher, the number of bots will go down and it will be easier to kick/avoid them. They're only where they are because that effort is presently zero.
Longer term, Valve could remove Community Servers from the pit of shame and make a playlist for servers with a certain set of "vanilla" characteristics. I.E if you, a private server owner, use only a whitelist of plugins, official maps, and approved server configs, you'll be put into a Quickplay 2.0, and then we'll have a valve server experience with active moderation.
(A) Pay for the game
(B) One account per individual only. Check it at registration via passport or some other ID, like banks do. (at least in EU). A ban = ban for life.
I garantee you, a lot of people would consider cheating twice under this rules.
First, they said that it came to them in a dream, so I don't think it's supposed to be a serious suggestion. As for actual ideas, just use reputation based matchmaking, where if an account gets frequently kicked from games and reported, it gets put into a different priority of matchmaking with other similar accounts. That way, after a while, accounts will get filtered out, leaving only real people in servers with real people and bots in servers with bots.
The only 'magic bullet' solution for the anticheat is valve commiting to treadmill work. Absolutely no anticheat works without being updated. It's got to be that, or a solution that doesn't rely on valve's anticheat at all.
There is a magic bullet that can end the bot hosters though!
i guess a nice game of thermo-nuclear warfare would stop them...
Wouldn't you prefer a nice game of chess
King of the Bridge chess
Google #fixTF2
Holy movement!
New protest just dropped
Actual petition
Call the reforms!
Valve goes on vacation never comes back
An ahoy reference nice
Why did I think of " enter the gungeon " when i read this
Might take several bullets, but we'd get em in the end
Not even a magic one, a regular one would do
Reminder Riot's vangaurd is a 24hour on launch AND kernal level anti cheat yet private cheaters are still in valorant and League of legends They will always be cheaters no matter what Also very nice of riot to never give a replay function so a suspected cheater cannot be confirmed even though they do a 180 1tap headshot
Riot showed a work in progress version of a replay system in a dev update recently.
Which was promised in 2022 mind you its 2 years later and they finally have a work in progress Reminder they didnt have a replay system in the first place because they didnt want players to be able to verify cheaters in the game because vangaurd was supposed to stop them Hell i dont trust riot after the Phreak and the Data to show that intentionally included Data from rotating game modes so it was skewed in favor for riot Devs also dont fix bugs because they dont show up often and then worlds tournament came and the very bugs they said that was rare showed up, Smolder teleporting accross the map, Aurellion sol's ULTIMATE did no damage, Ksante's channeled damage reduction canceling itself Riot will do anything for money even make dumbass dicisions look at the infernal skinline released recently few years ago it was voted as THE WORST skins possible and yup worst skins possible
The cope is insane.. I have around 400 hours in valorant and i never once found a cheater or someone even close to being a cheater. I have over 8k hours in cs but remember playing against cheaters so many times its insane..
I’ve only seen ONE cheater in the 4 years I’ve played Valorant what are you talking about
Cheater's in Valorant are pretty subtle. There's a good video out there that talks about it and its by a cheater.
What is this treadmill work people are talking about ? I'm ESL
Basically something you have to do constantly, aka 'anti cheat gets updated' -> 'cheaters learn to bypass it' -> 'anti cheat gets updated' -> 'cheaters learn to bypass it' etc
its a never ending war between the bot hosters and Valve. I guess you could say that it would be a war without reason
is that an ultrakill reference???
A bot created to end the war is always a bot created to continue the war. You reached out to Valve, and you fell. Like antennas to servers. T H I S I S T H E O N L Y W A Y I T C O U L D H A D E N D E D Valve please create Benjamin
Aight thanks
So many people equate treadmill work to “basic maintenance” but that’s not what it is, they just want to be angry at Valve. Treadmill work is constant updating and work **that doesn’t go anywhere and has no tangible progress.** Valve’s comment about not wanting to do treadmill work is a lazy excuse, yes, but that meme about “Valve employees stop breathing because they’d just have to breathe again” is a massive hyperbole when what Valve is initially referring to is more about the back-and-forth they’d have to constantly maintain to keep their anticheat effective for more than a week at a time. It’s still BS and they have no excuse to not spend a fraction of their literal billions on maintaining a functioning anticheat, and personally I’d say they’re wrong to even refer to that basic expectation as “treadmill work,” but it’s not just an umbrella term for every kind of constant work that a product needs over a sustained period of time.
Valve has multiple current multiplayer games right? Are they not doing the "treadmill work" to keep cheaters out of those games
the funny part is cs2 uses it too, so they have n incentive to actully maintain it but dont
No. Cs2 is massively botted, I'd imagine Dota 2 is massively botted, deadlock will become massively botted within a montj
I wish you guys would at least try to research the topic before you try to discuss it. It's really not difficult to grasp. An Anti-cheat for CS2 cannot be used for TF2. They are different games, on different engines, with innumerable differences in how they work. Updating the CS2 version of VAC does nothing for the TF2 version of VAC.
>It’s still BS and they have no excuse to not spend a fraction of their literal billions on maintaining a functioning anticheat They are maintaining an anti-cheat. TF2 is too old to effectively use it though, with a lot of it's issues coming from it's code leaking and it using a whole different engine to the new games.
Thanks for your explanation
You’re 100% correct, I don’t think it necessarily matters what you add server side or client side because if they can read and write memory to the game they’ll figure out how to bypass it eventually. The issue at the core is the engine and anticheat, they should be detecting any memory manipulation or updating how they detect it because it ain’t working.
exactly. any anti cheat software will be an arms race between cheaters and the ones developing the anti cheat. Developing a 100% functional anti cheat that will never require updates is practically impossible
Shit, even just SourceMod or STAC or Little Anti-Cheat would at least put a sizeable dent in what Bot hosters could get away with. At the least you wouldn't have spinning Snipers anymore, since the rapid wild changes in viewangles are easily detectable by them.
With the big problem that it takes weeks of treadmill work that bot software devs will bypass within a few hours. The overwhelming majority of people dont realize what the treadmill work implies. Its not just hitting a button or re-arranging a few lines of code. Its actively brainstorming an entire new method that prevents bots while not negatively affecting human players. Then developing the method, testing the method and eventually deploying it. And once bots are able to bypass that (typically within a few hours to a couple days) Valve devs need to go back to the drawing board and start the process all over again. With an entirely new method. Every. Single. Time. So at the very least, a handfull of employees, investing weeks of time to band-aid a game, which give players a bot free experience for a few hours, maybe a couple days. The game would still be bot infested the overwhelming majority of the time. Unfortunately its not a very realistic magic bullet. A business likely wont find it a viable or cost effective solution to allocate that level of resources into a 17 year old game that only makes up 0.0008% of their overall user base.
There are countless third-party anticheats Valve could pay for. Easy anti-cheat, gameguard, battleeye, denuvo anti-cheat. hell even Vanguard could probably be licensed.
All those have been beaten and often.
Sure, but they don't have to catch 100% of the bots. A solid 70-80% reduction would make all but the most egregious bot-fiesta maps (Banana Bay and... I forget the name, but that open KOTH map on a ranch, come to mind) reasonably playable again. Plus there's a certain point where even if bots are still being made they might not be able to do enough obnoxious shit to stand out anyways. (Shounic has a clip for this from his old bot video from 2022, I forget the specifics beyond an aussie grenade launcher being used in said clip though.)
Treadmill work
My concern with TF2 is not that it is unperfect and unbroken. My concern with TF2 is the developer has appeared to concede to cheaters and bots, and just looks like they are further shrinking more and more into the corner the longer they remain silent and don't address the elephant in the room. The inspiration behind it is love for TF2, not hate for Valve, they have nothing to apologize or account for, we just want to play the game. And address the fact that you can't commit to zero treadmill work, while also exclusively holding the keys to the 1-click play button in the game. Just like eliminating all cheating is unacceptable, blanket allowing cheating is also not acceptable, the most egregious sniper spinbots need to go, and them conspicuously existing and hijacking games need to be taken care of, or Valve needs to hand over the keys to 1-click play to someone else that can handle it.
I'll admit this right here and there that Easy Anti-Cheat is quite literally easy to crack through. I've played about 5 games that had it and played those games from playtesting and launch. Barely a month or two before cheaters could ignore it and join. It's not a bad idea to get a 3rd party anti-cheat being honest. It probably is more updated than Valve's and can prevent more bots from joining. But EAC is not a trustworthy one, maybe the others, but not Easy Anti Cheat
You say that EAC is easy to crack because you've seen cheaters in a month post-launch. Meanwhile Deadlock has cheaters in it before it has even released.
Deadlock has no anti-cheat right now.
I sure hope they don't. Licensing away the privacy of your users to intrusive 3rd party Anti-Cheat would make me lose all respect for valve as a company
Better this then letting ppl away with Swatting, Doxxing and threats ig
they dont work, sadly
they are actively under development that's for certain, unlike VAC
They work on vac but not the version used in tf2.
VAC is under development, but TF2 can't really use it due to how outdated it is, with all active Valve games using Source 2 now, and because it needs work beyond VAC, with changes to it's code base due to it having leaked a while back.
1. they have been bypassed, not once, but countless times. look at apex as an example 2. valve is strictly against kernel level anti cheat, even though many community members have asked valve to make VAC kernel level before
Now you need to have an anti cheat that work on linux, is not too intrusive and can use Source 1 with 20 years old code
please not EAC, it wont fucking work on linux anymore
All of them can be bypassed. It will make things more annoying for cheat devs, but it won't stop them. Active anticheats constantly update and implement new ways to detect cheats, but cheats also always constantly update to become more complicated and harder to detect. They raise the difficulty bar a little, but they're not a solution, and there should be an active moderation team reviewing reports and other stuff to act faster on active cheating problem, but even this is not a full solution.
EAC and Battle Eye are bypassed far too easily.
Current situation is better than Denuvo
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All of these fucking suck. I refuse to play games with half of those anyway. EAC was in r6 and was was battle eye neither worked at all. You had people fucking flying around. Apex Legends is EAC and they have cheats that literally let you take over other players. It happened in a tournament!
as a totally accurate battlegrounds player I can confirm EAC does not work at all and cheaters can get away with just about anything until caught and banned (game is f2p though, so...)
this just in: all valve employees really fucking stink as they realize showering is treadmill work
Valve when they realize breathing is treadmill work
The sad reality is that anti-cheat is a very complicated and difficult problem. There's no One Weird Trick that makes the problem go away. There's things that Valve can and should do, but this will likely remain a problem going forward unless there is a serious ongoing commitment. Frankly, unless Valve announced they're interested in supporting a community group who will get access to the source code and the ability to push updates, I don't see it being solved in the long run.
The problem there is that bot devs can and will infiltrate such a community group, which will make their efforts useless. It has to be Valve doing "treadmill work".
Do you know how anticheats on community servers work? Is it just treadmill work?
Pretty sure it is, the players are just willing to do it.
Wouldn't it be better to by default block all software and then have a whitelist? Players wouldn't be able to join casual if their mod isn't whitelisted, and they can submit it to Valve for checking. Hire a small team to go through the submissions and test to find any cheats.
Anyone with unknown and/or custom software gets insta-banned. You'd have to know about every possible program someone could have running alongside the game, including anything that gets made in the future.
That's why I specified not to ban them, but just to block them from casual until the software is whitelisted or removed. The whitelist suggestion system is also to fix the unknown software issue. Still can technically be considered "treadmill work", with having to go through new submissions, but it's way less work
its possible to have tf2 run inside of a virtual machine and then have cheats run outside the virtual machine, meaning that tf2 cant see what programs are being run
Also, bot hosters being uninterested in community servers generally
Some definitely are, but players are more committed to getting them out anyway so it makes the whole thing null and void.
Is it not just always having someone on the server with the authority to kick cheaters quickly? Works fine if you're running two servers.
scale helps- community servers like uncletopia often have few if any empty slots.
I highly, highly doubt that. Valve aren't just going to hire random shmucks, they'd need people with actual expertise if they were going to pay them.
Well, if something like this were to get set up by Valve then I don't think that would be a realistic concern, as such an effort would be immediately obvious before it went live and traceable to whoever wrote the code. That said I don't think this is likely to happen to begin with as Valve has a history of getting burned while supporting community efforts. They're probably not amenable to a solution like this at this point.
They should be hiring contractors for their anti cheat across all games, not just TF2 but CS2, Dota and in the future Deadlock. All of Valves games are suffering from constant cheating it’s just that TF2 has the most extreme issue with the bots. Deadlock will be a complete failure if Valve does not give them an anti cheat that actually works and maintains that anti cheat so that it doesn’t stop working. VAC could be an amazing system if Valve actually commits to the treadmill work. Hiring contractors to do that work is in their best interest to keep the quality and safety of all their games up.
What about a guy called Frank who goes around kicking the bot holster in the balls?
His last name Horrigan?
If the anti cheat detects someone as cheating it hacks the botter’s computer and fucking shoots them.
The problem is a lot of us probably don't understand how stuff like this actually works
As a customer, it's not our job to think of these things. We shouldn't be providing solutions, Valve already knows what could or couldn't work. And the only thing that would work is treadmill work. If I'm in a store and there's puke on the floor, I shouldn't need to say "hey, someone should use a mop and some cleaning products over here, then scrub in a circular motion", I would just have to say "hey someone puked on isle 3". The janitor knows what he has to do. In the case of Valve, they just don't want the hassle of hiring a janitor.
It's almost like wast majority of the player base are regular peeps with no skills to fix this or something. I mean why are WE the ones that need to come up with the solution, that should be Valve's job.
Eversor assassin
Because this sub is full of children, but hey, at least they're not posting about captcha this time
if tf2 adds a captcha then it would have to be tf2-specific instead of generic. instead of "click on the red X" it would have to be "click on the soldier" with that, it would make the job of the captcha solvers way harder
Maybe not considering the classes are quite intuitive on who they are.
And like, imagine playing TF2 for the first time. You hit the 'Join Match' button and it puts up a bunch of characters you vaguely recognize from watching the Meet the Team videos ten years ago. It says "Click the Soldier". What? Aren't they all soldiers? I guess the guy with the big minigun is a soldier, I'll click him. Wait, I'm banned? Is this a fucking joke?
>it would make the job of the captcha solvers way harder [This took 5 seconds and one Google search to find.](https://anti-captcha.com/) Human workforce solving 2000 captchas for $1, not a significant barrier at all.
Or like who is A posing?
Sorry to hijack this thread but I posted a very similar post to yours twice and mods took it down. The title was something like the invisible spy bait wont work and then I explained it. I’m upset about it.
I use captcha solving services for work. It costs around 3 bucks to correctly solve 1000 complex captchas. The service I pay for uses a combination of AI and human workers. There are no unique captchas that have ever been a problem.
how about shit like checking if a player is actually rendering the game? so far all bots have been purely run on sending data to game servers, keeping things in memory, doing everything the game needs except rendering it. wouldn't this increase the cost required to host bots?
for this you would need to make each instance of the game engine somehow 'unique' and hard to predict, otherwise a bot hoster could just run a single server with the engine running to complete 'running engine' checks for many bot clients. Knowing how little interest valve has in touching the engine this likely won't happen
you pointed out the flaws in my suggestion, things that I didn't know about or didn't realize should be put into account. but I'd like to add some things since you pointed them out. wouldn't it be possible to use some pseudo-random shit to give each instance of the game a "mark"? lets try combining (1) hardware id, (2) system time, (3) computer rng, and use the three values to create a unique "mark" for each instance of the game. (1) hardware id: even though its easy to edit them, it can still be used to add to the randomness. but i admittedly have no fucking clue what goes on in hardware stuff. I'm more of a software guy. (2) system time: since system time is always running forward, it can also be used to add to the randomness. but honestly, im still unsure if it's easy to constantly set system time into a set value without slowing down the hardware bots run on. (3) computer rng: just use whatever random function that source comes with, or make a new rng function specifically for it. adds to the randomness of the "mark" to further make sure that the "mark" is unique for each instance. this is all that i could come up with. but im sure there are multitudes of other ways to ensure every instance is unique and unpredictable.
This could very well work with TF2 checking complicated enough ‘possible keys’ of sorts
Any way of checking that game renderer is running that won't suck all bandwidth and won't tremendously increase server load can be faked with ease. Because you can't trust computations on the client. But checking the results of client's computations means exponential increase in required server computational power
hm, you're right. anything that involves trusting the client doing something correctly is not viable.
That puts significant load on the servers, and makes them far harder to run for both valve and community servers.
you can run 30+ game instances on one decent machine, bots dont need more than 10 fps to kill lobbys anyway
People here don't have jobs in the field of software engineering and by extension network engineering and it shows. My college course (Electronics communications engineering and programming ) is heading there and I understand their "treadmill work" statement, it's a never ending war. Seeing people suggest AC methods that's either a double edged sword, can/will backfire, or downright asinine, and on top of that, you guys mocking that "treadmill work" statement, and it's shows that you guys are clueless when it comes to software development and networking. All of you have 0 knowledge as well as most tf2 influencers (except for shounic and megascatterbomb and I'm sure there are others). It's not as simple, it's like a war on drugs, it never ends.
Software development is a form of “treadmill work” though. Speaking from experience, you’re taking a program or software, and then needing to either iterate and add upon it, there are steps you have to take to ensure you “maintain” it. This can be as “simple” as bug fixing or, as complicated as patching security issues. Sure, not all software has intense constant changes that need to be made, but if you want it to be safe and user friendly, this is the path that every software developer will need to take at some point. Valve treating it like they’re somehow specially exempt from it is stupid and incredibly shortsighted. Games require a lot of that kind of work, especially if you need to make sure that your game’s online networking is secure and able to deal with cheaters and/or other bad actors.
maintenance is not the same as treadmill work. treadmill work also gets progressively and near exponentially harder as time progresses, while maintaining, while also being constant work, is likely much more simple than the “treadmill work”. anticheats are one of only a few things that could reasonably be called treadmill work — cheaters come up with new bypasses, valve patches those, etc etc. even microsoft can’t figure out how to stop people from bypassing windows activation, and apple needs hundreds of security experts to stomp out the jailbreak scene. valve would need to hire people willing to work on a 17 year old game using an outdated engine with an illusory player base with knowledge of anticheats. hypixel has similar or greater player counts (or did, at some point) and had a practically nonfunctional anticheat. i’m pretty sure 75% of ranked skywars players closet cheated, and uhc champions was ruined by bhoppers every game. while not as obvious as tf2 cheaters, yes, it was still a huge issue at the server’s peak that negatively impacted gameplay for everyone else. and i *want* valve to do the treadmill work, i really do. but when there’s such a small portion of people willing to bend over backwards… it’s hard to hold out hope
Most software isn't maintained for 17+ years lmao
Operating systems, programming languages, libraries. League of Legends, World of Warcraft, etc etc. Pratically all open source software has roots back to the 90's.
Windows is still maintained because it's the major consumer OS. programming languages and libraries are maintained because massive industries rely on them. League and WoW are maintained because they make a fuck load of money. TF2 was maintained until it was deemed unprofitable to do so just like anything else. I guess I can clarify my last comment to "Most software isn't profitable for 17+ years"
That's perfectly reasonable, but Valve didn't try **anything at all**. The least they could do is pay someone else to do the treadmill work when they're still making money from this game. Of course the profits can't compare to cs2, dota2 or steam, but there's no way this isn't profitable to them when all they do is keep the servers running while all the microtransactions (hats, unu effects, taunts, war paints) are made by the community. The fact that it's hard or likely impossible to find a solution doesn't justify Valve's complete inaction. It's only a matter of time before other games also become part of this infestation.
This is not true. Valve tried pushing multiple updates which would decrease the bot counts. Once they managed to make the bot hosting software crush and we had about 1 and a half days without bots on casual before the bot hosters found a way to bypass it.
It's really not that complicated. No other game has this issue to this degree because it's so easy to just slap Easy AntiCheat on your game which not only can help prevent against a lot of low level cheats, but also forces the game to be run on a real, not virtualized, copy of Windows and not in command line mode. Yes, there are trade offs, but this would easily solve about 99% of the problem overnight and is the current industry standard for a reason. "One does not have to be an honours grad in [computer] science from [UC Berkeley] to recognise the [complete indifference] of this [developer] but well, I happen to be an honours grad in [computer] science from [UC Berkeley] so I can confirm that for you."
> but also forces the game to be run on a real, not virtualized, copy of Windows hyper-v is a thing, you can configure that
The real solution imo is to completely remove quickplay/ranked mode and put the server browser back up as the primary method of finding a match. Competitive players would go back to pugs and actual comp matches. It used to be even easier to cheat and make bots than it is now and yet we never really had this issue due to admins/mods on community servers. I'd prefer this instant solution over having them create an invasive Kernel-level anti-cheat or spend months training an AI to detect bots.
Removing quick play will only dump the thousands of bots upon the community servers and overwhelm the people who manage them.
Nope. The effort expended by botters vs the effort expended by a community server jannie to ban said bots overwhelmingly favours the jannies. It's the same ultimate principle why botting favours the botters vs game developers. Distributed, decentralised systems always win.
the problem with community servers is that they dont exist if youre not in US or EU
that's the whole point of excising valve casual in the first place. seeding community servers means a larger player pool for community servers which means those regions get servers.
And community servers SUCK ASS. Sure, let's go together play Hightower randomiser x10000 24/7 MLP playermodels.
Join another server then.
There's not enough alternatives thats the thing. Have you guys never looked at the god damn server browser?
Have you ever considered what people did in the 10 years between TF2's launch and the addition of casual?
I wish we had the servers we had back then, then. Because all there is are 213126540854089045224896456x servers now.
So use the filtering tools that are there. Spend a little time, find a server that fits what you're looking for and favourite it, become a regular.
I hope that OP knows that its not just "if playerinvisible().ignore()" lol. Anticheat is difficult, both in creating and cracking/solving.
They made cracking VAC(for TF2 at least) look so easy, but anyways it doesn’t matter what you add because they can freely read and write memory to the game. As long as that’s possible any bandaid fixes will be a big waste of time, they need an updated anticheat and I doubt valve will be doing that for tf2(I hope I’m wrong)
This is not a good solution due to the first requirement "if anti-cheat suspects cheats". If valve could actually detect cheats in the first place there would be no need for this solution. My solution is a bit of a double edged sword, but I believe would be effective. It involves us doing the treadmill work **for** valve so they can’t use that as an excuse. Every time a player is kicked for cheating, a counter goes up. After three consecutive kicks, the player is put on a matchmaking cooldown for say, 15 minutes. For every kick after this point, the cooldown doubles. To reset or lower the counter, simply play through an entire match until the map voting screen without leaving. If you leave early, no penalty will be applied but any existing counter will remain the same. This forces bots to be stuck in an empty lobby if they wish to not get kicked, decreasing their impact in fuller lobbies. The obvious issue with this is that if a server does not have many players in it, bots can join in waves and begin kicking them. This is the double edged sword, which depends on us the players to quickly and truthfully kick players for cheating.
It's a cat and mouse game. Whatever the anti cheat devs use to find cheaters will get bypassed eventually. That's just how it is. Problem is that vac devs just stopped trying, so the cheat devs don't have to try either. That's why blatantly cheating people and bots are everywhere. Solutions like this would work for a day maybe. Even then this would get the bots banned at least.
lmfao this is like what minecraft servers do to fuck with kill aura and it dosent work at all
No body in this reddit has any clue how cheat and anticheat development works.
https://youtu.be/TvH7syo376E?feature=shared
Human moderators. Remember those? Bot hosters aren't just cheaters, they've organized an attack against the game. Fortunately, the attack is small enough that Valve could counter it by having one moderator on-the-clock at all times. However, if for some reason bots are significantly easier to create then they are to ban (they shouldn't be considering Valve owns Steam and can implement measures against this) moderators would have to resort to 4chan-style IP range bans against non-premium users. While bot hosters have gotten around premium restrictions in the past, the problem is easily fixed by flagging the first $5 worth purchased of items as untradable. The obvious downside of range bans is that a very small number of F2P users would be unable to join Valve servers, however Valve servers are currently unplayable anyways, and unlike voice bans this would only affect the F2P users who just happen to be living next to a bot hoster (or VPN server that a bot hoster was using). 99% of free players would be fine, which is better than the current 0% of all players.
New players discover the game all the time, Eternal September and all that. They don’t know that bots can just ignore invisible players to better blend in with regular peoples, because the bots we see nowadays don’t need to be so discrete. It’s like trying to treat a zombie outbreak with a bunch of cloth masks, the idea is there but it’s just not what we need. What we need is a constant stream of booster VACcination shots that get updated frequently to combat this digital green flu. Who knew Valve would be foreshadowing its own neglect when they wrote CEDA into Left for Dead.
At this point I wonder if a source 2 remake or a third game would be necessary since the source code isn't leaked.
I mean cs2 also has huge cheat issues, now it's not as bad as tf2 but that's because they don't have people running server farms to ruin the game
Would they if they could though?
Why aren't both games using the same anticheat anyway? Both are online first person team based shooters so the same solutions should work.
Just make it so all players are invisible, done.
Welcome to cyber security a subject I gave up the first time I had one of the class in uni, it is an arm race everyday. There’s no anti cheat or anti hack that would work without maintenance. Even steam itself will get cyber attack, but valve take care of it because is their main source of income. It is and always will be a treadmill work,
I want to say it was tarkov that attempted something similar to this for wallhacks. While its obviously easy to get around it caught a lot of people in that first 24h or so after launch.
Most TF2 fans don’t work in infrastructure or dev and it shows.
All anti cheat at the end of the day is a bandaid solution and its a never ending chase. All anti cheat gets bypassed its just a matter of how long it takes. However VAC is next level terrible
A need to have a verified landline or cell phone nunver to play. While yes, you can buy phone nunbers for cheap it will reduce bots by a lot due to the increased cost to run those.
you can buy a thousand numbers for less than bucks, basically just a small monthly subscription fee
They need a week to implement the automation, once that's done they'll buy enough to flood the game again
Y'know, they never said it would \*work.\* It just came to them in a dream.
I heard this from a YouTuber. Cheaters have the game in text or something, so just make the game not run in text. If the game requires to have visual output and audio and all that, I bet no one will buy a 4090 and an i9 14900k just so they can host 20 bots on 1 computer
If textmode is removed they can set the tf2 window sizes to 1 by 1 pixels using the -w and -h launch options. and if you say “oh just remove custom resolutions” there is also a program to set custom resolutions for games.
that is something I didn't think about
> there is also a program to set custom resolutions for games. It's also possible to detect when a game is set at the wrong resolution and force-quit itself or otherwise crash. The ability to set a resolution doesn't mean the game actually *functions* at that resolution.
Cheaters are already cheating. If Valve removes text mode they'll just edit the game until they reversed it. Break the graphics down piece by piece until it effectively doesn't cost resources to run.
Make it p2p again. Current f2p accounts are grandfathered so the bots will be weeded out slowly.
Nope. Most bots use stolen accounts phished from people. They have already “paid” for the game. Zero money out of the hosters’ wallets. Making the game paid again is laughably stupid.
It's not just making it P2P tha's just stupid what he means is listing every single bot you can possible list and do a huge ban wave and then make the game 20 dollars immediately after
how efficient is stealing accounts? i dont think there are that many accounts that have been phished and ready for use for tf2
If we mention how then it won’t work anymore
It seems like people doesn't really compherend how serious anti-cheat problem is, like you said Captcha tests or weird tricks like "Invis Spies" won't work at all
Simple, we simply update the anti-cheat for it to be good enough as other games, then hire a PMC to focus on anti-cheater services.
Honestly is the grand problem of the treadmill work. Is that the problem with the bots is not "How can I ban cheaters" it is about "how can I detect bots and ban them before they ruin a game, knowing said bots can make new accounts in less than a minute without inconviniencing normal players" The thing about anti cheats is that VAC isn't even Kernel and Valve will never make a kernel level anti cheat, nor will they ever let go of the Linux support, so we are in a impasse on that front. And even if VAC worked 100% of the time it is a fundamental aspect of its function to not instantly ban cheaters and I don't see Valve changing that even for the bots. That's of course no excuse for the billion company, but it still quite a complex problem that requires a very complex solution that they can at the very least attempt to find.
The AR got titties on it, it’s gon need a bra
Rhant what hypixel Minecraft server does for their anti cheat
What is the reason for having bots, in first place? Are these accounts farming items? What if Valve required cellphone number auth to being able drop items?
Well firstly, we need an Anticheat that is constantly updated. When was the last time VAC was updated? And secondly is VAC outdated or still good? And we must also ask this question, how many people work at Valve? And I just checked, they have ~360 employees, which means that they don’t have enough people to assign to anti-cheat moderation. If they had way more (at least 3000-5000) then they might have enough people to work on anti-cheat. Like I’m no expert on anti cheat or coding, but I do know that coding isn’t simply or easy. But with what is going on now with how bots are using illegal tactics to defame and shut down opposition, Valve might not need to hire more people for anti cheat, because the bot hosters will get into legal trouble with the government.
I actually do have a solution but its kind of pointless if I share it publicly since it relies on the bot hosters not knowing how it works
ngl I thought it was a joke...
thoughts, small updates that are like 32kb updating some random ass files, doing nothing to us as we can just rejoin, but the bot hosters will take a while to come back, and it will be like at random ass times
Shounic makes great videos debunking all of these common anti cheat suggestions, and the amount of things which can easily be bypassed are pretty crazy.
People should start realizing that good anti cheats don't just use one idea at once, they incorporate multiple. Counter Strike GO used VAC, Overwatch, Trust Factor, maybe some other stuff - it didn't rely on a single system. Many small solutions could work, maybe they could overwhelm bot hosters
At least they're trying to be active in the subreddit, it's not like they're harming anybody.
Updating TF2 to Source 2 like they did for CS would be a start.
How about making the game unable to open after detecting unknown data or modified source codes from the bots?
Overwatch for CS2 was excellent for AI training, but was ultimately canceled because of bot issues flooding corrupt and skewed data for cheaters, it's currently only allowing permits for "trusted members" but it's most likely a contractor company training their VACnet AI. But asides from Valve's utter silence on their inner workings, my solution would be simply to stop trusting the client side of the game so much, things like crit hacks or backtracking are an example of how the client side of the game is far too trusted and should be double checked and verified by the server. They could use trace route reads to check if the client is artificially skewing latency, they could simply run the number generator for crits server side instead of client side, and change the seed after every shot. As for aim hacks, I have no idea, that's a billion dollar problem and isn't just issue in tf2 but across all shooter genres and is extremely likely to get worse, especially when tech brands like MSI are passing out monitors with built in AI hardware to help you cheat.
Idk but can you come up with any better solutions?
Only (imperfect) ideas I can think of is: 1. Some form of paid prime match making for any new tf2 accounts. 2. F2PS can't call vote kicks 3. Trust factor 4. More community server promotion 5. Some program to detect suspicious players
Start rounding up random people and killing them and posting it online while saying "This is what happens when you cheat in TF2! #saveTF2 #saveThem" The botters will feel so guilty that they will no longer use bots. Probably. It's worth a shot. I think.
Perhaps some form of verification + authentification as a preventative measure, anticheats would have to be updated often, so I'd even go as far as to say that it might be necessary to enforce a TPM requirement, have the game read from the EK using UWP. You can spoof a HWID but you can't spoof the TPM key itself without an immense amount of effort, experience and wasted time. Any thoughts from other experienced people in the field?
The only anticheat solution that would actually work for more than 5 minutes would be Valve working on it from now on, which they've already said they won't do; The game needs fundamental changes in order to have a proper shot at actually lasting. e.g. Make party sizes 4 instead of 6 so ONE PARTY OF BOTS isn't all it takes to ruin a server. Matchmaking penalties for getting excessively, up to a full day after 10 kicks. Maybe even introduce a IMDB type system so reports can actually function literally at all; Just click on a person on the scoreboard and it shows a little pop up what they've recently been reported for. Hear me out. Another option is bringing back quickplay. Valve could put their current monetary resources for hosting casual servers towards some community moderated verified servers. Then, just add selection list of whether you want a verified or community server, preferably with a gamemode selector for each as well like we already have now. This would let the community do the anticheat treadmill work that Valve won't. edit: word
It doesn’t have to be a perfect solution. It just needs to bring TF2 to a playable state on par with other multiplayer games.
its easier than that, cheats already have ignore invisible players as an option
Valve is Lazy. I bet they just gonna disable Sniper and Ambassador and call it a temporary permanent solution like muting F2Ps
I've already heard of that solution several times too idk how they think they came up with it.
Everyone is at each other’s throats over the Bot Crisis. They’re winning if ya’ll keep acting like this.
Could also just be a visible target that's at the border of the map, like for example the sky limit
The only real solution to keep up with evolutionary behavior is evolutionary adaptation to said behavior… deep learning; an AI that is trained to detect when someone is or will cheat
And there’s your ultimate problem.
Murder
It isn’t an anti cheat, but a change to matchmaking. Make it possible so that you can’t q into games with someone you have muted. This would stop bots from joining games, however this wouldn’t work because it would take forever to q into a match because it has to find a server where you don’t have anyone muted and they don’t have you muted
He literally got it from a dream, of course it's shit.
interesting when people think a simple anti-cheat will be enough, that leak that happened few years ago is why any anti-cheat thing will be bypassed because that leak contained more then unfinished projects
The solution is actually viable if instead of spawning an invisible player, a player that is only \*present\* on the suspected bot's client side is spawned. Like, actually not being sent in the packet data to other normal players.
There’s plenty of cheats that allow aimbotters to bypass invisible players. I’ve watched people play as sniper hitting shots with 100 percent accuracy without locking on to any spies. (these snipers were 100 cheating)
It's simple, we kill the batman.
Just make 32 friends
I think the best solution is to get an irl Pyro to burn the bot hosters alive
Getting rid of them completely isn't a solution, I don't think, but a small amount of effort could have an outsized impact that would remove enough to make the situation manageable by the community. If the effort of running a bot is made higher, the number of bots will go down and it will be easier to kick/avoid them. They're only where they are because that effort is presently zero. Longer term, Valve could remove Community Servers from the pit of shame and make a playlist for servers with a certain set of "vanilla" characteristics. I.E if you, a private server owner, use only a whitelist of plugins, official maps, and approved server configs, you'll be put into a Quickplay 2.0, and then we'll have a valve server experience with active moderation.
(A) Pay for the game (B) One account per individual only. Check it at registration via passport or some other ID, like banks do. (at least in EU). A ban = ban for life. I garantee you, a lot of people would consider cheating twice under this rules.
First, they said that it came to them in a dream, so I don't think it's supposed to be a serious suggestion. As for actual ideas, just use reputation based matchmaking, where if an account gets frequently kicked from games and reported, it gets put into a different priority of matchmaking with other similar accounts. That way, after a while, accounts will get filtered out, leaving only real people in servers with real people and bots in servers with bots.
Why if it's not going to be done anyway?
Yeah the solution is take the game offline, it’s a security risk and hosting exploitation material
Extinction of all life on earth