Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Duuvian]

Some sort of petition to ask Valve to go after bots and possibly video game cheaters in Team Fortress 2 has emerged. I saw it on the Steam discusson forums where there is an information contest between the two sides at this time. I don't often check the TF2 discussion forums so it's a bit of a fluke I saw it on what appears to be the initial day of the campaign.

Here is a thread with a basic description:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/440/discussions/0/4339860800343270535/

EDIT2: I only chose that thread because it had what looked like a description of what was happening whle all of the others I saw did not. I didn't cliick any links or such. The anti-petition group had forewarning and were waiting, according to the discussion forum.

Here is the main forum for TF2 if you want to check out the information contest and the threads it's spawning. I recommend the anti-petition meeting room thread as it's an interesting read.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/440/discussions/

EDIT: Posted it here as the TF2 thread was last posted in 2018 and because it's a free game.

[dragdeler]

Oh presumably they saw the lawsuit that activision won and everybody celebrates as a victory... How thick do you have to be this is terrible jurisprudence, do you actually trust crusty old judges to be able to differentiate between mod makers and cheatmakers?! I should make a service where people who believe that can be enabled to win some sidemoney with the toothfairy.


Stupid billion dollar companies too lazy to do actual computer science work, don't you worry you will get your anticheat, your denuvo, your 5 exceptions in the firewall for our superflouos launcher, and they will accomplish jack shit except spy on paying customers.... Let the lawyers handle the cheatmakers.

I allways knew mutahar is some legal andy who will wake up drenched in sweat if ever he dreams he jaywalked... But man this topic takes barely any imagination at all. You want to talk cheats? What about the fucking black ops games, first released on ps3, still being sold for 40€ while the internet tells people to stay away from the pc version because some exploit enables hackers to run arbitrary code... Oh but this is totally cool, let daddy activision get the bag from cheaters, this is how this should be handled right....

[Duuvian]

Hey, I checked and I was right, it's still going.

I don't think the Activision thing was what it was about.

That other thing you said was like the same thing they were talking about in one of the threads on the day I noticed it. TF2 users or bots can do weird shit like spread a virus for accepting whatever the hell a special effect is that can be offered by other players... except they are bots or Manns planting a virus of some sort or something. I'm not very clear on the issue but that was the word on the discussion forums. Ironically the person warning others about the name of the bot or Mann who was doing it was warned by another user that it was naming and shaming and against steam rules.

I agree on the various anti-cheats that don't work well and if they spy on the user. The last bit is probably necessary to some reasonable degree afaik to function as an antii-cheat but monetizing all or maybe even most data is bad, old people. That's a bigger problem than even video game cheating.

I played a game for a few weeks called THE FINALS, which was like TF2 with 3 classes instead of the 9+1 secret class of TF 2. It was simply plagued by cheats when it launched, and whiile it started off with a big playerbase it suffered drop quickly, and I think it was due to the cheating issue more than anything. However, I just checked the Steam discussion forum, and I don't see any threads on cheats in the first 6 pages. The devs had acknowledged the issue and pledged to fix it, maybe I'll try it again and see if it worked.

THE FINALS is also a free game, I guess I can mention that it's on steam and in all caps. Like my old favorite Planetside 2 it seems to be cosmetic purchases that pay the bills for the most part while the game effective stuff is earnable, if I understood it correctly but I didn't doublecheck. It however does lack the scale that makes Planetside 2 unique; THE FINALS is a traditional small map small teams shooter that is far more prevalent. It has breakable terrain and has in TF2 terms a heavy who is like heavy weapons guy plus soldier, a light is like scout plus spy, and a medium who is like... uh... medic with a better gun?

It has crossplay with console so there is some aim assist in on that side, but it's optional for keyboard and mouse so I turn that off. Last time I tried the autoaim seemed quite good but I think they toned it down a bit to require fine correction. I had trouble against it unless I used a grenade launcher in a way that would make demoman proud: it was rarely used so people weren't familiar with it and because I was a demoman main back in TF2 for many long Great Recession years. I assume the built-in autoaim sucks at using the grenade launcher (probably can't bounce it or aim at feets) since I was almost the only one using it. The main cool thing in THE FINALS is the breakable terrain. you can level a medium sized building as a heavy with explosives and bring a capture point to the ground floor for example. Also the heavy has a cool gun that shoots out big foam balls that you can build a fort with, or jump up walls by making stairs. The game also seemed to be popular internationally so there was some playerbase at nighttime when I'm up. It has small teams, you do capture the flag or bounties in non-ranked and there are tournaments in ranked. I haven't played it in some months so not sure how it is now. Overall though if you don't have something else in the genre to do it's not a bad game at all, especially if the cheating is less pervasive now as the discussion forums imply from not having frequent threads about it.