this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2024
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Out of loop. What happen?
TF2 is in a near unplayable state. Valve has neglected it and as a result it's not hard for people to bypass the anti-cheat. This has resulted in bots overtaking the game. This has been a problem for years, but there have been some recent pushes to get Valve's attention. First was #savetf2 which resulted in Valve tweeting that the "heard us" and had things planned. Well nothing happened and now we're trying again. #fixtf2 is the newest push and has come with extra steps from the community. Many people, including myself, have switched our reviews of TF2 to negative to hopefully get Valve's attention.
It's not that VAC is now trivial to bypass, it always was and is kind of by design. VAC is not an active adaptive anti-cheat, it literally just checks for predefined parameters and if anything trips then you're flagged and will later be banned.
What happened here was that a source-code leak of the original 2007 TF2 revealed an exploit that allows clients to run in a no-graphics mode that still works on modern TF2. Someone found out that you can program a script to interact with the no-graphics client and make it do stuff like join public server queues and interact with the game world. So they made it run around headshotting people. Since the client is running without graphics, it's very trivial to run tens if not hundreds of these from cheap machines.
I also want to give some insight because I see a lot of people wondering why the fuck they're doing this at all but it's actually very simple. It's the thrill of the cat-and-mouse game and they've been winning it for years. I've developed cheats (in cooperation with the developers, it was a whole thing) and I understand it. There's an element of fun to the puzzle game of trying to work around systems deliberately put in place to stop you. That's all there is to it, they're just enjoying this chase. A lot of them definitely also enjoy ruining fun but that's not the primary motivator.
I don’t think most cheats are just for the fun of the game. Most cheats get developed to sell to the huge Asian markets of cheaters. It’s fairly normalized in China and somewhat Japan to cheat in games. And then they get sold to everyone else as well.
Then after the cheats are sold, TF2 and CS2 become vulnerable to bots and idling. Many of the drops you get in those games can be sold, often for a very low price but multiplied by a thousand, it’s worth it for cheaters. And valve doesn’t much care so long as their game reviews are positive because it inflates the player counts of the games and also they can ban the accounts, take away items, and then the cheaters will spend more to get them back on a new account.
I am talking strictly of in-game spinbots, catbots, omegatronics and the rest, whatever their names are, not cheats as a whole.
Then why not prove you can do it and then shut the bot down?
Prove I can do what?
I'm guessing what they mean is: If the fun of making the bots is just chasing the thrill of "cracking the puzzle", why not create a bot just to prove you can, then shut it down afterwards?
And to that I assume the only answer is "because people are dickheads"
Yeah exactly. I'm calling BS that the thrill of the chase is the main motivator. Maybe it is for a handful, but for the most part people just like to be dickheads.
Valve is probably ignoring TF2 so that fans switch to deadlock which is tf2-overwatch-dota2 adjacent.
That seems malicious, never attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence. Valve's non-standard employee structure means nobody has to work on TF2. There are a lot of other fun things to work on at Valve, not some decades old game that doesn't make a ton (relative) of money anymore. This is probably the biggest flaw of Valve.
They're probably all too busy working on Half Life 3
They don't really work on things that have already been done, but not the way Apple does it. HF3 will never happen, if it does you bet it won't be the same medium. (think Alyx)
Half Life 3 will be the debut game for direct neural connections. You will be Gordon Freeman.
I re-installed (I have about 500 hours total) and joined for a game for the first time in years (so I'm level 0, whatever that means; I guess that was added after I quit) and had a blast. Not sure if it's only in the higher levels or because of region (I'm based in Japan). Only had time for one game on a quick work break, so not enough sample size .
It's been steadily overrun by bots, and I guess the community hit a breaking point
That suck. Nobody like bots.
Bot like cheat bot or bot like play bot?
play bot? I'm not quite sure what you mean, but ya all sorts of bots are flooding TF2. There are the normal aim-bots, but they also spam noise makers, voice chat, and text chat. They will also try and vote kick and normal player.
Maybe a "play bot" is like, when you run the practice mode the game pits you against bots instead of real players. I've seen cases of older games starting to spawn in bots like that so that the few remaining players don't realize how empty all the servers are.
Then there's cheat bots which...I'm not sure why people do that?
I see, thank you.