[TF2] Suggestions regarding the Bot Crisis

[TrickyTrix935]

Ever since the code leak of 2017 bots have been on the rise in TF2 and have only been getting worse with various workarounds to everything implemented against them, below I have listed a few possible things which could be used to stop or at least hinder the bots and their creators:

Matchmaking bans based on kick record in casual and competitive Currently the community is used to kicking any bots on sight, and has become accustomed to it. I propose using this to the games advantage and creating a matchmaking ban system. This could function like so, when a player is kicked [x] times within a [x] period, they receive a matchmaking ban from casual or competitive accordingly, this matchmaking ban is extended in duration based on how many times a player has received a matchmaking ban within a certain period from each other. To prevent accidental punishments, the kicks needed to trigger a matchmaking ban within a certain time period should be extremely high, and the matchmaking ban increase could reset after a certain amount of time has elapsed without the player receiving a matchmaking ban.

Disallow newly connected players from calling votes in casual and competitive Currently some of the bots are programmed to call votes on other players as they join the game, this is to trick others in the lobby into kicking someone else aside from the bot, as well as delay the voting process intended to be used on the bot itself. A simple solution to this would be to disallow newly connected players from calling votes for a certain amount of time, which could be implemented through a cvar if adjustment is needed for other modes and in community servers.

Restrict new steam accounts from casual and competitive play for a certain amount of time One of the main problems of the bot situation is derived from how easy it is for the creators to constantly create new steam accounts. If casual play was unavailable for new accounts for a certain amount of time it would make it more time consuming for bot creators to throw more bots or replacement bots into the game, combining this with the matchmaking bans suggestion would result in a much slower bot output.

While the community has become accustom to kicking bots on sight, the bots themselves still exist unhindered in large numbers within TF2s matchmaking system. While I'm unsure if these solutions would permanently stop these bots, it could potentially slow them down to a degree and reduce their effectiveness.

[thefusingcookie]

my personal solution would be to revert the game to the pre meet your match quickplay system. this would spread bots out among several community servers where they can be easily delt with by thier moderators, it would also breath new life into the community.

centralized matchmaking will always be vulnerable to this issue

i dunno much about quickplay, as i started playing tf2 around 2023, but if it stops the bots, i'm all for it

[Kacey2k]

If you wish to contact Valve regarding existing cheats, or other technical methods of detection / deterrents

I recommend emailing the respective teams:

General Anti-Cheat Solutions: vacreview@valvesoftware.com TF2 Oriented Solutions: https://www.valvesoftware.com/en/contact?recipient=TF+Team

[blackletum]

Hi @kisak-valve, are you in a position to share any updates or plans for this issue from Valve? Thank you.

I would love to hear something from them directly as well. The only things I've seen are threads being closed on github multiple times today regarding the issues with TF2.

[xephosarkeyus]

If you wish to contact Valve regarding existing cheats, or other technical methods of detection / deterrents

I recommend emailing the respective teams:

General Anti-Cheat Solutions: vacreview@valvesoftware.com TF2 Oriented Solutions: https://www.valvesoftware.com/en/contact?recipient=TF+Team

Seeing as they chose to ignore Mega's post and redirected to here, this is probably the better solution. Ignore us in one space, we poke from another.

[sylveonsylvia]

Replying to https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Source-1-Games/issues/3477#issuecomment-2146318697

just wanna say that this is how issue trackers work, making duplicate issues or a single issue with multable issues in it make things way harder to track

this isnt a forum

[blackletum]

Replying to https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Source-1-Games/issues/3477#issuecomment-2146308337

What annoys me about it is that they still actively profit in the hundreds of millions directly just from the TF2 store, all while ignoring the issues with the game and refusing to fix them or address the community.

[leadscales]

Replying to #3477 (comment)

What annoys me about it is that they still actively profit in the hundreds of millions directly just from the TF2 store, all while ignoring the issues with the game and refusing to fix them or address the community.

mfw cheaters and bots have done more good for team fortress 2 than valve has done in nearly a decade 😹

[xephosarkeyus]

just wanna say that this is how issue trackers work, making duplicate issues or a single issue with multable issues in it make things way harder to track

this isnt a forum

Mega's post covers a lot more than this current one, alongside suggesting other solutions. The only thing outright "Duplicate" about is similar post titles.

[barneygale]

Detecting bots is much easier than detecting human cheaters, and doesn't suffer from the treadmill problem. TF2 bots are extremely basic and make no attempt to disguise themselves as real humans. There are 100 different ways to detect them, and valve could conceivably enable dozens of server-side checks. It would take years of tedious and high-skilled work for bot programmers to defeat if Valve played their cards right.

[dishwasherhuh]

From a corporate / dev standpoint, I can understand closing Mega's post, but your optics are already null, and this only makes people more angry and this can be used against you when mentioning issues among Steam, Counterstrike, DoTA, and the unreleased Deadlock, as well as any titles released getting mixed views due to your neglect and poor care of a groundbreaking title in your roster. A release of a new Team Fortress game with a similar art style and gameplay would do you better than continue working on Source and resuscitating that dinosaur completely, as well as introducing better anti-cheat and better moderation on both TF2 and the new title, so that while you develop this new project you could at least let people enjoy your game while you make it obsolete. VAC is a joke and we all know you receive so many resources from DoTA, CS2, and Steam so to contribute to this community you created would take less than the development of any other game you've created in recent history and the Source 2 engine could better support the game. However, radio silence is not an option in your circumstances, no matter what decision you make. Either you kill, fix, or remake TF2, or you lose money and all the other game communities will see this as a learning opportunity, that Valve Software cannot be trusted or coerced by their communities to fix anything that doesn't headline in profits and as soon as your favorite game has a similar cheating problem it will too be on the chopping block. CS2 is horrendous with cheaters so, we'll what happens there too.

[Kacey2k]

Migrated here from Heated Topic.

Here to say that TF2 Bot Detector is deprecated as of March 2024. So we are looking for new options.

There are other options, MAC is not the only route:

https://github.com/surepy/tf2_bot_detector (Working fork of TF2BD you linked) https://github.com/aftershavetf2/TF2Monitor https://github.com/russellane/tf2mon https://github.com/Bash-09/tf2-bot-kicker-gui

Resources to help build your own program that does the same:

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Source_RCON_Protocol https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/List_of_Team_Fortress_2_console_commands_and_variables https://github.com/Paymh/SourceEngineConsoleParser https://github.com/dborodin836/TF2-GPTChatBot/tree/master/modules/utils https://docs.comfig.app/latest/tf2/ https://github.com/ValvePython/steam https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Steam_Web_API

Client Pre-Requisites: autoexec.cfg:

sv_quota_stringcmdspersecond 1000000
sv_rcon_whitelist_address 127.0.0.1
ip 0.0.0.0
net_start
host_writeconfig
rcon_password "your_rcon_password"
hostport 27015

Recommended launch flags: -conclearlog -console -condebug -dev -usercon -g15

[RoyaleNoir]

Detecting bots is much easier than detecting human cheaters, and doesn't suffer from the treadmill problem. TF2 bots are extremely basic and make no attempt to disguise themselves as real humans. There are 100 different ways to detect them, and valve could conceivably enable dozens of server-side checks. It would take years of tedious and high-skilled work for bot programmers to defeat if Valve played their cards right.

Issue is you run the risk of bot developers making the behavior more advanced (or finding the simplest possible workaround) once those basic bots can no longer work, which could make the situation even worse for even community servers, and would definitely not take years to overcome.

[dishwasherhuh]

Replying to #3477 (comment)

What annoys me about it is that they still actively profit in the hundreds of millions directly just from the TF2 store, all while ignoring the issues with the game and refusing to fix them or address the community.

mfw cheaters and bots have done more good for team fortress 2 than valve has done in nearly a decade 😹

This take is actually the worst one to spawn from this ticket

[leadscales]

Replying to #3477 (comment)

What annoys me about it is that they still actively profit in the hundreds of millions directly just from the TF2 store, all while ignoring the issues with the game and refusing to fix them or address the community.

mfw cheaters and bots have done more good for team fortress 2 than valve has done in nearly a decade 😹

This take is actually the worst one to spawn from this ticket

refute it then :p

[motherofdragons96]

What if Valve updated the VAC system to prevent Bot hosters from entering Tf2. That could fix the bot problem.

[wgetJane]

"Undone within a week" Is inaccurate.

yeah, it'd be undone within days

[CyfunZuZu]

What if Valve updated the VAC system to prevent Bot hosters from entering Tf2. That could fix the bot problem.

You're a genius!

[xephosarkeyus]

yeah, it'd be undone within days

Also No. There's no undoing to begin with. The only conceivable workaround to an AI detecting obvious bot movement is to simulate some kind of human-esque movement, but that involves moving slower + randomizing movement. But at that point, you're basically making a basic game bot, which are far easier to beat than a sniper aimbot, on top of making the bots much more costly to run.

Detecting bot movement is a valid solution. There's several videos on youtube covering the topic, how it's a viable solution, and how there's already other games that DO this and it works WELL.

Issue is you run the risk of bot developers making the behavior more advanced (or finding the simplest possible workaround) once those basic bots can no longer work, which could make the situation even worse for even community servers, and would definitely not take years to overcome.

The thing with making bot behavior more 'advanced' is the fact that it increases the processing power needed, making them laggier to run, and reducing the amount of how many can run on a singular device.

Also, Community servers have manual moderation.. Discord servers with the ability to call a staff member on to boot the bot.

-

Generally, the point isn't to get rid of bots entirely. It's to make it as hard as possible to run them to begin with. The more processing power needed, the less bots that can be ran. It'll make votekicking them easier, because there'll often be far less of them. I'd rather see bots once every 200 rounds rather than every 2. I thought explaining this once or twice was enough, but apparently not, people still persist and think nothing will work, when there's other games that're strong evidence of these solutions working. That, or some of the pessimists here are just trolls.

[alkalineBat]

What if Valve updated the VAC system to prevent Bot hosters from entering Tf2. That could fix the bot problem.

I like this idea, but it has some downsides. Bot hosters could use Virtual Machines (which I bet they are using right now for their bot farms, with the Linux OS) and create accounts to bypass that system. Doing an anti-cheat kernel (akin to Riot Games Vanguard) would result in an arms race against Valve and the bot hosters/cheaters. Plus the pain to actually port it to Linux (without Proton support). Lets suppose that Valve was able to get this anti-cheat with support for ring 0 on Windows, MAC (Intel, not ARM), and Linux, and for the sake of modern anti-cheats, let's say that they ban the use of VM's. It's not going to be a fun ride for those who want to use Linux while using a Hardened VM with Windows.

Do I want a new anti-cheat? Yes Do I want an anti-cheat that runs at kernel level/Ring 0? No

I've seen attempts to use AI or some sort of algorithm to detect cheaters. Now I don't know how effective they are, but it looks like a good balance between ring 0 and a human reviewer (like CS-GO's Overwatch).

[wgetJane]

yeah, it'd be undone within days

Also No. There's no undoing to begin with.

i was talking about what you said here (textmode stuff is already discussed here #4475):

Text-mode is what's generally screwing things up, As some have mentioned already. Restricting actual play to visual-mode only will drastically reduce the bots. As someone already said, can't run 30 instances of TF2 if you have to run all the graphics, too.

[ethanholt1]

Oh wow, this is alive again.

I would like to remind you all to avoid heated discussion. This is a semi-professional issue tracker, not a message board. Please avoid getting angry at other users, and try to ignore anyone who is trolling. I'm already beginning to see the kindlings of flame wars, so please calm down and keep it cool, before someone makes you. Thank you.

[ethanholt1]

As for my stance on this issue. I in honesty believe nothing will ever come of it. While this issue is valid and does deserve to be tracked, solutions here will not be seriously considered due to what can only be described as an Eternal September of awful, trolly posts.

If you have a recommendation that pertains to VAC, Valve says you should email vacreview at valvesoftware dot com. Please avoid including IP addresses and attachments in your message, as these will increase the likelyhood it will be filtered.

SaveTF2 / FixTF2 is a valid initiative, however, at least from the date this was posted, nothing has come of it except for getting the Recent reviews tab of TF2 to go from Mostly Positive to mixed.

As for me, I will continue volunteering in other issues, and will attempt to no longer post in this issue, as it seems to be nothing more than a war of attrition for everyone involved.

[Maggot1970]

Please people, don't spam the github repo with aggressive and angry posts. That will not help the issue one bit. I too want to see TF2's botting issue solved; it's been a favourite game of mine since 2010 (and I played since 2008). We want constructive criticism here, it's not so much like the steam discussion forums. It doesn't mean you can't include emotion, but try to be a bit more civil in this; it could go a long way.

[Maggot1970]

Replying to #3477 (comment)

What annoys me about it is that they still actively profit in the hundreds of millions directly just from the TF2 store, all while ignoring the issues with the game and refusing to fix them or address the community.

mfw cheaters and bots have done more good for team fortress 2 than valve has done in nearly a decade 😹

This take is actually the worst one to spawn from this ticket

LeadScales is a troll. Don't interact honestly.

[WaviestBalloon]

What if Valve updated the VAC system to prevent Bot hosters from entering Tf2. That could fix the bot problem.

shounic's video still hold up well, you should watch it: https://youtu.be/SgkgsgaBBCA

38 minutes of the ups and downs of potential solutions to the bot crisis and how the situation is very complicated to solve even partially.

[nikspyratos]

I agree, let's keep the discussion civil, this isn't a forum.

That being said, there is a clear reason for this uptick on issues like this: there is still an active TF2 community out there that loves the game, but Valve's approach has been to ditch it in favour of newer titles.

Whether that's a product of a flat hierarchical culture deteriorating into social cliques (and the associated pressure of needing work on "popular" projects), or pure profit motives (also valid, this is a business after all), who can tell?

Stop Killing Games has sprung up precisely because of companies abandoning beloved titles or otherwise making them unplayable even for players who have invested tons of time and money.

Keeping TF2 on life support means more than just matchmaking and a quick play button - active effort needs to be made against bad actors. On that note even a modernised server browser would go a long way.

Valve is also not a startup, and has been quite profitable for a long time, so there's definitely not a dearth of funds to hire some people specifically to keep the game alive & safe.

[piee-kun]

Stop Killing Games has sprung up precisely because of companies abandoning beloved titles or otherwise making them unplayable even for players who have invested tons of time and money.

that's pretty misleading. stop killing games is an organisation that tries to prevent companies purposefully making games inoperable when support ends. tf2 is a game that still remains "operational" while its support isn't very active. you can't play on official servers quite well, but you can still use third party hosted servers which lets you play the game. all the things you've bought on the marketplace are still there, accessible and tradable.

Do I want a new anti-cheat? Yes Do I want an anti-cheat that runs at kernel level/Ring 0? No

you're going to have to settle with either a more effective but invasive anticheat or a less effective non invasive one. one way the botter can avoid VAC completely in its current state is just by rewriting their bot to work and interface with the system from the kernel level. this usually is quite difficult with anticheats like Vanguard since it runs on ring 0. although it's a privacy nightmare, it's the only way you can get the security that someone is connecting with a non-modified client.

I've seen attempts to use AI or some sort of algorithm to detect cheaters. Now I don't know how effective they are, but it looks like a good balance between ring 0 and a human reviewer (like CS-GO's Overwatch).

something like that is already in use in CS2. you might've noticed during the recent discourse about CS2's hacking situation, it didn't function all that well, even in the most blatant of cases, unless it was Valve's test on its AI seeing if it worked properly, though I personally doubt it. AI anticheat seems like a good idea on paper, requires a lot, and I mean it, a lot of computational power, and using all that power to keep a game bot-free that is to essentially EOL is just a stupid way to lose money. you do also have to realise that Valve doesn't have that many employees running around to just start creating a whole new AI model to detect bots and cheaters for a game that is, again, EOL.

[InAShellnut]

Hello, so while scrolling through the posts I saw some discussions about trying to disable textmode for TF2 to increase the costs to bot hosts, and how that would be quickly circumvented by the bot hosts, and I'm wondering whether it would be possible to achieve a similar effect by just making the game more resource intensive to run for everyone, regardless of if they are in textmode or not (thus avoiding the problem of bot hosts circumventing it by finding a workaround that lets them run the game in text mode).

This isn't an ideal solution, and you could still likely run multiple bots on one computer at the same time, but it would reduce the number of bots you could run at any given time, which might be able to reduce the number of bots enough for the other tools at players disposal (namely vote kicking) to be much more effective. As mentioned it's not an ideal solution and this would definitely hurt players that have less powerful hardware, but it might help reduce the severity of the bot crisis, to some extent at least.

Addendum: An idea I just had for how this could be implemented is adding in some form of proof-of-work to every packet sent (or it that already is in place just increasing the amount of work required) so that way it's impossible for bot hosts to circumvent this increased work load and as such, they have to either pay even more money to get a better computer or reduce the number of bots they can run at any given time.

[JayBoom]

Long time player here (2008)

I have to say, this game has stayed alive longer than anyone would've thought, and for that I'm greatful.

The 64 bit update we loved and it made quite a difference!

I do find tf2 a lot more playable on servers with higher ticks / better resources, though some are still stuck behind and laggy but that is up to the community owners. If valve increased the resources / tick rate for the casual servers that would be awesome too.

But enough going off topic:

The problem with this is VAC and lack of a proper reporting system. To my knowledge, upgrading VAC would require porting the game to Source Engine 2.0 (or somewhere inbetween like what CS was with it basically on "source engine 1.5"), or require a different system.

You would need a kernel-based anti-cheat but unfortunately, one like CSGO's would kill streaming/recording of the game as we saw with CSGO (haven't tried CS2 with this) as the anti-cheat's would stop OBS from recording the screen.

Otherwise you could have a system like CS has (had?) where respected members could view reports. If we just had an accurate reporting system we could possibly get these accounts banned, but unfortunately they could always just create a new one, the downside of an F2P game.

Now Team Fortress 2 still makes Valve a sizeable amount of money with them not actually really needing to do anything, the updates are mostly community managed (Workshop) and there aren't any major updates, so there is justification for asking for them to fix this and port it over, but unfortunately they didn't think from 1998-2007 that the game would last thing long and need "fixing" that the spaghetti code is one big issue.. if it was written perfectly and in hindsight needed to be ported to a new engine later then it might be okay. But unfortunately not.

The sad thing is, is we had a community team working on porting TF2 to Source Engine 2 but I believe that got shut down by Valve themselves (cease & desist), so it definetely is possible. If Valve does not want to, they should potentially leave it in community developers hands, even with Valve oversight.

[wgetJane]

Replying to #3477 (comment)

@InAShellnut sorry but this is quite possibly one of the most baffling ideas i've seen here

at least it does actually achieve the idea behind the very flawed "just remove textmode" suggestion, but this involves making EVERY client running the game perform untold amounts of unnecessary work just to mildly put a hamper down on cheater bots

let's not pretend that bot hosters are a bunch of guys down on their luck barely able to afford a laptop to host bots on, it's just a small handful of rich kids with too much time on their hands

[AgentAgrimar]

From what I've seen, bots don't operate in textmode, they just run the game as is within low spec sandboxed environments, same goes for CS2.

[Jeffonehundred]

Replying to https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Source-1-Games/issues/3477#issuecomment-2148773573

Nice to see old players still find enjoyment though the game today. I hope valve fixes this issues you speak of, of requiring a kernel based anticheat, I do not think most people would mind the lack of streamer support in order to fix this bot crisis.

[Jeffonehundred]

From what I've seen, bots don't operate in textmode, they just run the game as is within low spec sandboxed environments, same goes for CS2.

Yes, the cheating bots do, but as other community members have said, the idle bots that farm items are the ones that use text mode. A hacked client that only interacts with the games engine.

[voidplayer]

My 2 cents on this topic

Last year 1 vote screen per team update was huge to deal with cheaters. We need more of these kind of updates and less outsmart bot technology (aka, the threadmill problem). As we know, this cause problems for everybody, not just bots

Honestly, bots are able to outsmart tf2 players even in server where they are in minority, and thats the kind of problem that can be tackled

I dont have that many specific ideas, but you can probably add yours to this list. When a vote is called i have to wait to die, manually spectate the person, and then decided if i should vote yes or not. Most people dont do this because is either a hassle or dont know how. They are just overwhelmed with too much info

Most people dont know how to start a vote either. The menu is kinda hidden and next to a button to mute players. I have many hours on this game, and even i confuse the menus some times

pfp should be clearer on vote screens

Names have to be sanitized into something that is the same as people see in the score board, and hopefully when they spectate and watch the cheater from the outside

tier is another data point next to pfp to help identify players. It should be more visible everywhere

And fix badges. Right now the tier badges are useless because the important color (tier 1-8) is almost invisible and the useless color (level 1-150) is very visible

Vote screens need to be improved overall. It seems I could have even more ideas if this is something valve is willing to persue (and i think is the only way forward), but im sure you guys have smarter guys that can come up with better ideas

On top of it, many votescreens now show %name% instead of the actual name about 40% of the time, due to a bug introduced on the 64 build

No bueno

[AnOpenSauceDev]

While making voting easier to work with is a good way to let the community handle bots, this doesn't really do much for the bot problem itself. I find that in the Australia region, bots just flood servers when people aren't online and it makes searching for games that aren't infested with bots very painful. These bots usually occupy enough of the lobby for a bot majority, and nobody just wants to wait in a bot lobby for the chance of enough people joining in time.

I think that the only "easy" way to fix this problem that'll stick (for a good while at least) is to unfortunately do something like Trust Factor, where players that constantly get "yes" votes in small period of time and have indicators of not being human (only ever plays TF2, F2P, runs TF2 for an inhuman amount of time, etc) are placed with others of similar status. This will definitely punish some people unfairly however.

I really doubt that adding making valve begrudgingly add kernel-level anticheat to TF2 is actually going to do anything useful. It might make bots go away for now, but in the end the anticheat will be broken/worked around (leading to another arms race if Valve wants to fight the bots).

Not to mention kernel-level AC harms compatibility (with niche OS'es, some drivers and older systems) and leaves a huge security risk, that you can't even run in a sandbox anymore.

[voidplayer]

The bots problems is unsolvable and the side effect is that the harder you fight it, the harder the bots are going to become

Lets not pretend bot hosters dont have enough time and money to be on top of the race

Right now bots taunting players by having bots with same name and spinning snipers, have the side effect of being very easy for legit players to be able to identify and agree on kicking them

Please dont ruin this

The moment they try to hide the bots, people is going to have a very tough time kicking them. Its hard enough as it is

The louder valve says we fixed the bot issue, the more obnoxious the bots are going to become by making it less obvious

We either get the mafia in each country involved to find the bot hosters or this has to be fixed in some other way (the mafia thing is just a joke. A sad joke tbh)

These bots usually occupy enough of the lobby for a bot majority, and nobody just wants to wait in a bot lobby for the chance of enough people joining in time.

This is indeed an common issue and should be addressed. Get enough players get traction to get back the servers from the bots is indeed a problem

I cant come up with a fix for this, but it is one of the painful points about bots rn

I think that the only "easy" way to fix this problem that'll stick (for a good while at least) is to unfortunately do something like Trust Factor, where players that constantly get "yes" votes in small period of time and have indicators of not being human (only ever plays TF2, F2P, runs TF2 for an inhuman amount of time, etc) are placed with others of similar status. This will definitely punish some people unfairly however

You just pointed out the problem with this. You cant punish bots selectively without punish innocents. You are happy with this until you are the one being unfairly punished

[RaptorKalan]

To put all simply for any of those thinking Valve Can't do something... they can... they very easily can... bot behavior runs on a program... that program runs on a hosting unit... their overall behavior is easily identifiable. Literally everything the bots do is easily identifiable and can easily be tracked. All it takes is for Valve to take a few days to slap together their anti cheat or, and hear me out on this, Using an anticheat that isn't more of a suggestion????

At the moment, TF2 is one of the most played games of all time, well I say right now, but it WAS the most played game of all time, then the cheaters started happening, and Valve banned them, great! but then they Gave up on actually updating the game, Renouncing it and calling it a Discarded Project tester.

How long will it be until these bot hosters steal the account of someone with thousands of dollars of ingame items? How long will it be until the game fully falls over dead because the developers gave up on it? How long Valve? How long until you put on the big boy pants, realize your community is helping you by providing Spreadsheets, lines of code, overall solutions, and every waking hour the have to help you fix the game?

You have the abilities Valve, People are committing real world crimes on your game, on your platform, on your domain, In the legality of things, if the wrong person gets Doxed and they retaliate, Real world consequences and Legal Cases will begin happening, and then YOU will be Liable, You make updates to the store, you make tiny updates to the game every year as the summer update, you have been given the resources to remove these criminals from your game on a silver platter, but like a toddler not wanting to eat his vegetables, you have tossed it away, you have ignored it for years in favor of other projects. and thus, if it goes to court, you can be fined Millions in legal damages for Refusing to maintain a platform you upkeep.

Its in Acts like these where the Community has enough, We've already Review Bombed Tf2 for its bot problems, HalfLife2 is currently being Review bombed, how far do we as a loving community have to go, before you admit your negligence and do something?

I may understand if few idea's and comments made within my post are untrue, but I grew up with TF2, i loved the game, but seeing what its grown into has created a community willing to save it, and seeing Valve's current Response to shut us up, Its Downright deplorable.

I have no Hate towards the Moderators here, nor towards any of the Valve employee's who have never worked on TF2.

[voidplayer]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgkgsgaBBCA

[TrulySc]

@voidplayer Nobody needs to be suggesting another band-aid fix or linking to youtube pages. This is an issue that can only (and should only) be handled by valve, and giving suggestions like this will make valve think it can do another botch job to keep us quiet until we fully hemmorage players and the new blood at valve can justify shutting down the game with a blind eye.

Honest to god, with what good ANY of this source 1 issue page has ever done, the best we can turn this into is a wall of complaints and finger-wagging.

Stop defending a billion-dollar company and wake up. This will be treadmill work. There will not be big red fix button, or a magical antidote. But if I sat here on my ass and did the same thing you are saying is justifiable that Valve is doing, I'd probably have ended my own life because I thought going to work each day was too hard. But just like I have to get up each day to get money to get food, and water, and electricity, Valve needs to get up and make an effective anti-cheat so that their golden game Counter-Strike can stop getting poked at for all of 6 months.

And then maybe if there is any scraps leftover the mutt in the corner can get a bite or two in.

VAC has been this way from the start; a basic illusion with a name that sounds scary and that can detect the most commonplace cheats with crappy detection methods, just like the TSA line at an airport. But at least the airport will know to actually up their game once the first plane is attacked.

As someone who used to be in that same headspace, and is looking at myself in a mirror here: stop. You won't get a badge, you won't get a free hat drop, valve does not give a single ounce of care into you sitting here and saying that they have the right to be contempt on their "work" with VAC.

In fact, it is the exact same amout of not-giving-a-crap that they have placed torwards the effort and lengths the entire community at large has put into trying to fix the issue FOR Valve, let alone just play the game every day.

None.

So at least be realistic here.

[TrulySc]

On another note; on the off-chance that anything of value is actually taken from this post, for the love of god offer @sapphonie a contractor job.

This is the only person that has had the guts and gall to work on anything anti-cheat related for a branch of semi-modern Team Fortress Source (mainly the unspoken 2 that valve DMCA'd and immediately after promised to help, and then... neglected to do such) and while me, a complete stranger to them has no right offering them up on a silver platter, she is the best tangible proof to see that it is completely possible to do.

Joshies' work on TF2 was some of the most fun and hype I have had for a game in a long, long time, and another swing at the idea of outside contractors picking up valve's sagging sack of slack should really be considered.

[AnOpenSauceDev]

A big issue that I don't think people realize that Valve doesn't want to work with TF2 anymore. This game is really, really old, and is incredibly unstable in very weird ways thanks to Source 1.

All the talent that worked on TF2 is either likely no longer at Valve, or is working on other urgent things (Source 2, and a handful of games that may or may not exist). And hiring contractors is not going to keep TF2 going in the long run. Like I said earlier, the AC will stagnate.

Valve's structure works a bit like someone with ADHD. The big, important and "new" things automatically have a lot of the talent move there, because it's do something interesting, and the Valve policy encourages that. It's likely that nobody really wanted to do much with TF2 after the Source Engine started really aging, and Valve wanted to move forward with Source 2/CS:GO Source.

Unless someone with a lot of power makes people work on TF2, not much will happen.

[JoriKos]

(mainly the unspoken 2 that valve DMCA'd and immediately after promised to help, and then... neglected to do such)

This sounds very misleading. Eric Smith explained in an interview that they had plans to make TF2 mods (that would otherwise be taken down for reasons like leaked code or violating SSA) but covid threw a wrench into those plans (but confirmed he was still working on it as recently as Feb 2024).

Though not to say that leaving them in the dark was the right option, this comment saying it was a DMCA just adds to the "Valve is cracking down on mods" fire that was started after their rightful takedown of TF2 Source 2 and Portal 64 (which had more to do with Nintendo than Valve).

Source: https://blog.tf2maps.net/a-chat-with-eric-at-valve-hq/

[TrulySc]

@JoriKos Yes, you are absolutely correct, and thank you for clarifying, seriously.

My simplification of the events there mainly came down to the absolute frustration of trying to pull teeth from Valve. Never once before, and once after, have I ever seen a developer that makes it so unbelievably hard to allow their community to freely engage with them over a fear of "Giving False Hope" or what have you.

To be fair to myself here, they absolutely do it to themselves by being tight-lipped. The less they say, the absolutely more critical I feel I have to be of every sentence, every vowel, syllable, and anecdote I can find. So to feel like Valve is allowing us to be an active participant in their "community", we basically have to take these grains as truth, which makes it so much easier to be absolutely critical of the outcomes of them.

Topping on that the fact that it took someone going down to Valve HQ, getting a tour, and basically having a "rouge" employee tell this information to them to even know that anything was still being planned.

For all intents and purposes, It's almost like Valve as a conglomerate wants us to think that they pulled a bait-and-switch to just get us to shut up, considering they announced the original plans through a main communication point, and then never updated them through said communication point. So until I see results, that is how it feels to me personally, even though it isn't the reality of the situation.

I know that Eric is, from the horror stories I have heard of Valve's demeaning work culture, putting his entire career on the line by trying to push these projects in a space where his peers seem to mostly agree that his work is "Unimportant" and "A waste of resources". But because the majority of valve treats this with at best, apathy, and at worst, sabotage, the most I can really entail is that they absolutely did ghost us here.

[flip-dots]

My area of expertise is not game development but I have a few relatively easy suggestions that could be implemented to make bot hosters' lives a lot harder.

• Ban the IP ranges of every major cloud provider

  • Not particularly difficult
  • Easy to find
  • The ranges themselves do not need to be updated frequently
  • It makes hosting bots at scale much more difficult
  • Bot hosters may need to use their own hardware making identifying them easier

• Increase requirements to run the game

  • Most players are likely to have modern computers and will not be impacted too badly
  • Makes hosting bots at scale require more compute
  • Increases cost for hosters
  • Decreases number of bots that can be hosted
  • e.g:
  • Remove lower graphical options
  • Increase tick rate
  • Increase entity count/limit
  • Require more frequent network calls
  • Enforce minimum FPS

• If a player has been vote kicked multiple times in a row

  • Do not let them vote
  • Makes it more difficult for bots to vote out legit players
  • Makes it more difficult for bots to stall themselves from being vote kicked
  • Do not let them pick sniper
  • Reduces impact a bot can have

• Lower the number of friends that can be queued with

  • Unlikely to affect most players
  • Helps to prevent multiple bots from taking over a server

• Allow players on a server to vote to disable sniper temporarily

  • May be irritating to some players
  • Reduces impact bots can have

I suspect a more permanent solution would be to use the replay functionality which looks like it collects crosshair position and movement data to collect training data to later train a neural network to detect non-human activity, bots could be identified in the training data by looking for accounts that got VAC banned after playing or accounts that are constantly kicked from matches. Then this could be used for more general cheating detection, but I recommend trying some of the band-aid patches first.

[voidplayer]

Another common pain point is that people requeue after ever ymatch. Probably because theres no indication that new players are being actively search. This make for bots more easily to take over the server

Its a weird because i know a few people with lots of hours in tf2 that do this. After explaining to them that is better if they stay, the understand, but its still a generalized practice, so requeue is incentivized somehow

Maybe restart the match if the same map is voted for example

[voidplayer]

Another idea is use the score valve has on players (trustnet or whatever is called) on likelihood of cheating/bot can be used as a score for being automatically spectated by your team mates when dead more often

Today i was randomly scanning my team mates while dead looking for something fishy and i think is very effective way of finding cheaters if encouraged and made easier for other players

Right now spectating is not possible nor easy. Its the only way you can tell your teammates are cheating without randomly voting yes or no. You have to die, wait for deadcam, and then spectate a random place in the map, and then you have 6 seconds to rapidly find the player you suspect is cheating. This could be improved

[wgetJane]

• Ban the IP ranges of every major cloud provider

  • Not particularly difficult
  • Easy to find
  • The ranges themselves do not need to be updated frequently
  • It makes hosting bots at scale much more difficult
  • Bot hosters may need to use their own hardware making identifying them easier

@flip-dots afaik the majority of bots are already hosted from personal machines

• Increase requirements to run the game

  • Most players are likely to have modern computers and will not be impacted too badly

  • Makes hosting bots at scale require more compute

  • Increases cost for hosters

  • Decreases number of bots that can be hosted

  • e.g:

  • Remove lower graphical options

  • Increase tick rate

  • Increase entity count/limit

  • Require more frequent network calls

  • Enforce minimum FPS

utterly absurd idea

cheaters can simply not render the game while legit players will be fully affected

the recent 64-bit update, along with porting the game to 64-bit, also implemented countless optimisations in the game and engine specifically to make the game run faster and smoother, and you want to undo all of that for nothing?

this is basically the same idea behind https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Source-1-Games/issues/3477#issuecomment-2148743116

how would you even enforce minimum fps, just ridiculous

[Fizintine4ever]

There's been 3 separate incidents of alleged distribution of what is advertised as link containing Child sexual abuse material the title says There's been 3 separate incidents of alleged distribution of what is advertised as link containing Child sexual abuse material

1st Incident which was reported on X being this which appears to be a bot spamming CSA links in the lobby chat box

2nd Incident which was also reported on X being this which appears to be a cosmetic item with a questionable name that indicated a CSA link in the description of the said item , the link appears to be a .onion link

3rd incident was posted on r/tf2's subreddit being this on which a individual appears to be impersonating Uncle Dane , the famous tf2 youtuber , where the individual yet again is posting alleged CSA links in lobby's chat box , same as the 1st incident

Why has valve failed to act on these very serious allegations?

If this happens to be Valve's first acknowledgement to this issue then how quickly can we receive a a official statement from Valve of them authenticating this crime where the community will be informed if this was just a website that gives you a virus or if it actually was bots advertising CSA links

Is this a valid issue that can be posted in here? If not please educate me on the said topic as I have no expertise or knowledge about how this place works.

[voidplayer]

utterly absurd idea

You are right

These people not understanding how a computer works giving advice. Thanks very useful

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvH7syo376E

They should give a watch before speaking nonsense

One gotta understand this is not somebody being lazy, a game cant be made so it cant have bots. Neither valve nor god

The only thing you can do is preventing them from spinning

Since spinning bots are easy to spot and kick, and as someone that still plays this game, i share the fear of shounic of what this movement of clueless people that obviously dont play the game any more can do to the game

Its not perfect, but its playable most of the time. I still play this game

The treadmill problem is a bad name for the problem. Its not about making more repetitive work, its not about being lazy. Its more like a weapon escalation

They are using rocks, we just use an arrow and beat them, then they start using arrows too, but no problem, because we just use a rifle instead

Before you know it you are using nukes and the problem is exactly the same as when you started

Im trying to use similes so you understand, but it would be better if you understood how a computer works

Anything that can be done to break the cheats can be automated by the cheats and then you have an useless check that normal players have to pass too

Anther good example is the ad blocking technology. Any of you using this github is probably using adblockers. How many ads have you seen in the last 10 years? zero? yeah i havent seen a single ad in the last 10 years

The bots are the ads blockers in this example

Google is trying their hardest to battle them, make their own environment, break the web globally, lobby governments, psychological warfare...

I still havent seen a single ad in the last 10 years

On top of that, breaking the anticheat is some interesting problem that will attract more cheaters. When theres no challenge, nobody cares

Yes, they are taunting players spinning and they are all called "leave the matrix and omegatronic" to enrage players. "look we are obvious cheating the same name and valve cant do anything"

I dont do this to save a multimillion company, i do this because i still play this game and even tho is not perfect it is currently playable with some asterisks

If you understand how computer works, this can go very good for a few weeks and very bad very easily within a month

I share shounic fear of where so many nonsense of people that feel they have their heart broken from a game but dont understand how things work

A few spinning bots i can handle with the right tools. God, weve been doing it for a very long time

This is not about wants, but what can be done without making it worse

Read about the war on drugs

Things are bad, but could be much worse if you let clueless people lead the charge

[wgetJane]

what are you talking about