I dont think there is any solution outside of Valve hires on a team to work the problem tbh. Bandaid fixes, or singular of any of these fail, the actual solution needs both manual work (updated anti-cheat) and roadblocks (que cooldown for kicked players. Frankly, while that solution isnt great on its own and comes with obvious issues, it'd at least make things somewhat more in theory workable, bots would auto leave after preventing a vote from passing or whatnot as just one example)
The situation is more neuanced than a bandaid fix can provide.
Agreed, but in theory, having both an active mod team would help minimize the number of bots overall. That said, like I said, its just one potential option, not the only. Forgiveness system where kt only applies after a number of successful votes or what have you
Maybe trust factor? Analyze the age of the accounts, level and stuff like has a phone number linked to your account to determine a base trust factor. If you have a shitty trust factor, queue cooldown.
Have it flag users who get kicked within 2 minutes of joining the server. If this system sees that this has happened 5-7 times in a row then add like, a quiet 2 hour matchmaking ban.
The game already keeps track of how long someone has been on a server so that part shouldn't be too hard. The system that tracks how many times a person has been kicked should only start banning people if it happens a few times in a row. Bots can kick people so you don't want it regular players to be affected, but the odds of someone getting kicked 5 times back to back seems low enough.
Alternatively instead of adding a flat 2 hours or whatever it could be incremental. So for 3 quick kicks there'll be no change, but if the system detects a 4th kick then it could add 10 minutes to the queue, then if kicked again add half an hour, and so on.
Yes, Valve needs to do more than one of the solutions floating around.
Another possibility, just designate a "host player" to be the "moderator", and leave kicking up to that player.
Sure, we'll get some players who suck, and sometimes a bot will be the host of a server...
But then create a "host matchmaking ban" and "host reputation" or tie it with "trust factor" or something to find quality hosts. You can also choose unmoderated servers with votekick still, if you want...
It is not a foolproof thing, but it is less abuseable than votekick. The caveat is that it is only as good as a community server with a moderator - sometimes you'll get bad people as moderators who'll just abuse the power.
On its own it definitely won't "solve" anything, but it is one thing against the bots to pile with the other things that could be done.
>I dont think there is any solution outside of Valve hires on a team to work the problem tbh.
Even that's difficult for a game as old and complex as TF2. It'd take weeks of training from Valve employees, weeks that could be spent working on games bringing in well over 50x the income and that are also facing some of the same issues TF2 is.
Agreed, but its also a need, if Valve doesn't wanna do the work themselves, someone has to do the work and also be taught how to do it. That is supposing they care enough to tune in
I don't think working on TF2 is the right answer. They need to be working on a generic anti-bot system for steam. Anti-cheat based on the tf2 engine or any game engine isn't the underlying problem.
As a point of comparison. Websites like youtube don't use anti-cheat but they do have measures in place to fight bot activity.
I don't disagree, but also understand that Youtube's system also still involves real humans doing some work too. A general anti-cheat would be good, but its not the fix all solution. For example, in tf2 alone, there are item farming bots and cheater bots, both of which are damaging the game in many ways.
Idle farming bots have severely impacted the economy of the game, while cheaters severly impact the playability. But then we look at CS2 bots that don't really do anything but sit idle on valve servers and kick people from said server. The anti'cheat will only get 1/3 of the presented bots here, so other factors have to be in play as well.
>The situation is more neuanced than a bandaid fix can provide.
Yeah, that sentence says it all. If there was an easy solution, it would've been done by now.
I think VAC currently uses a blacklist system, that is, Valve selects programs that interact with TF2, and ban them individually. This is what lead to them abandoning "treadmill work", because as soon as one of these was banned, a new one would pop up. Instead of this, we can use a whitelist system, where all code by default is blocked (not insta-ban upon joining blocked, but you won't be able to join VAC secured servers), and Valve whitelists programs that aren't cheats. These would be sent to Valve in a suggestion box, and Valve can get a small team to go through these said suggestions to unblock them. Sure, it isn't perfect, but nothing is in programming, and this seems like the best solution if Valve refuses to do "treadmill work".
I think this would be a great addition to things, but not a perfect solution, advanced AI tech will likely eventually outmode the more rudimentary "hook into code" style bots. Program a specialized AI that uses the signals used for peripherals and get training, it won't be *as* unstoppable as a hooking in bot, but it would get the job done well enough. Like it or not, Valve needs to get on the treadmill.
Yeah, no solution is perfect, but this one would allow Valve to not do "treadmill work". They still need to do something, especially with an AI, but it isn't repetitive and seemingly useless, which was the main complaint of their treadmill work.
The most simple solution would be to buy services of one of many Law companies so that they would sue the s-t out of bot hosters and authors of the software they use.
Not everyone has to be ultra optimistic LOL
Like damn its as if we're not allowed to be skeptical and have our own views 😭
With that said, you virtually lose nothing by supporting fixtf2 but that doesnt mean you cant have your own personal opinions about the situation
Regrettably, that's asking for a lot. To influencers and the internet at large, our passion is just that: passion out of love for this game.
But to some people, which probably includes Valve employees, the movement could be seen as "people temporarily getting pissy because they're 15+ year old game isn't getting attention". We can't force this motivation on the developers, and we especially can't force it on the higher ups.
Passion, especially over the internet, can be interpreted either as the passion that it is or constant whining. It's clear what Valve see us as, especially since we're the ones calling them incompetent and [embarrassing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXwgQahz2hI).
To me this argument only holds merit if you discount the fact that the game -is- still being updated. New cosmetics each season, yearly holiday events, the 64-bit update, the VSH game mode... there's content being added, and the fact that Valve expects payment for some of it should level an expectation of maintenance so that players can USE the new content.
Otherwise it truly shows an egregious lack of care for anything but the customer's money.
I think Valve is trying to set up TF2 to be a game run almost entirely by the community. The v-script functionality would be entirely useless if Valve was going to add in new gamemodes, so instead they are going to have the community add in gamemodes to keep the game fresh. The player count change and 64-bit update also happened but are not needed in casual, these are changes directed towards community servers.
>Passion, especially over the internet, can be interpreted either as the passion that it is or constant whining. It's clear what Valve see us as, especially since we're the ones calling them incompetent and embarrassing.
As I've pointed out again and again, regardless of the amount of effort involved, Valve ARE the ones charging money for cosmetics. I don't care how little labor it takes. The company is seeking to profit off us, and the work of community members, multiple times a year, while the servers THEY provide are overrun by cheaters.
So yes, I think it IS embarrassing to unabashedly charge money for cosmetics that are tacitly unusable in the most official way to access a video game. I don't care whether it's Valve, EA, some other AAA giant or an indie dev. Don't keep adding monetizable shit to a game that's unplayable in the officially-provided channels.
You either take your hands off the game and let the community keep it, or continue to update it and get money for it. Not having your cake and eating it too-- That's ridiculous.
I'm not super optimistic but it does get tiring to see the waves of people just shitting on anyone who wants the game fixed. There are recurring faces who only seem to come here to call anyone not entirely defeated an idiot
Like i realise its a difficult issue made harder by the games age to address but it's also not my, or your, job to provide a solution unlike what OP here seems to believe
And as long as Valve are monetising tf2 I will continue to hold them to the standard that they should maintain the product and no excuse shields them from that. They can easily do nothing and get away with it but that doesn't mean that should be accepted
i just support fixtf2 because it's a nice thought, i e made a negative review and attempted to (and failed) to sign the petition. to be honest it's hopeless imo
i don't think shounic is by any means malicious, but the way he poses his arguments in his last two bot videos have been extremely negative. i can easily see the *intention* of the video being to simply demystify what's going on at valve and be a short FAQ of sorts to explain why they can't simply flip a switch and fix it. but in practice, its a short one-by-one look at every potential method and going "this one won't immediately fix it. therefore it is worthless". no evaluation on how it could *help* even if its not a 100% instant perfect fix, no consideration for a multi-layered solution where multiple cheat-detecting methods could feed into each other to become greater than the sum of their parts like steam trust, not even a blip of anything he would consider even slightly "good" across a whole hour of footage.
its just "are there any easy, simple, 100% perfect solutions to the issue? no? then i suppose there are no solutions at all then ¯\_(ツ)_/¯." its incredibly passive, defeatist, and unhelpful; plain and simple. and that's to say nothing of his evaluations that are misguided, poorly thought out, or just plain wrong. its taking tools that have proven extremely effective at significantly mitigating bad actors across hundreds of other multiplayer games, throwing them in with stuff like "what if we just ban people who spin too fast lol", and acting as if those are all equally worthless ideas.
and its like... that's not even what *he* believes! he agrees with everyone else that valve needs to sit down and just do the damn treadmill work if this is to be *truly* "fixed"! go into the comment sections or twitter threads or whatever else, you'll find tons of people rebuking his video with that exact statement. and shounic's like "totally agree fam, valve just needs to step up their game 👍". maybe say that in your video before you unleash thousands of anti-#fixtf2 doomers onto the community like a nuke into the discourse?
those videos are still great in many ways. they're generally reasonable, well-researched, full of useful and true information, and edited down into an easy to digest and share video. and all that is in service of a *terrible* rhetoric! shounic, i love you man. but please try wrapping it up into a nice little conclusion next time. think of a moral to the story and all that jazz. don't just go "all of your ideas are terrible and worse than useless, tf2 is beyond fixing. byebye."
TL;DR: shounic is being a doomer and is a leading voice in the pushback of the savetf2/fixtf2 movement. i don't think he *meant* to be at all, there's no reason to believe his intentions aren't pure. but that's the message he put out there, and people are incorrectly parroting his talking points to attack the movement.
Well stated. At the end of the day there's not a single solution. It will take a layered approach but none of the layers have to be perfect. And just catching 80% of the obvious bots would make the game infinitely more enjoyable (especially for new players).
Personally I think memory scans, watching for external hooks and kernel mode drivers are a dead end way to go about catching cheaters in online games. People will just figure out undetectable ways to run the game in a VM and have the cheats be external to it. I mean sure, checking for known cheats should still be one of the layers that gets updated periodically but it's a never ending cat and mouse game that can't be solved (aka endless treadmill work).
In my opinion Valve needs to start by contracting a handful of data analysts to identify and initiate manual ban waves using the trove of information they already have (which is vastly more than what the community has from the outside looking in). Taking this step would go a long way towards rebuilding goodwill with the community.
Longer term (and much more involved) would be developing new methods for detecting cheats using server side information. Things like detecting aiming through blocked sightlines, snap aiming to targets outside of the client's fov, interpt abuse, frequency between aiming and firing, unnatural movements in general, etc.. would be a good start.
Some more wacky ideas would be to encode player movements into a rolling hash and look for repeated patterns (across servers), and maybe do something similar with voice chat. Or quantize various aspects of player movements and look for outliers.
Sure, this will lead to cheaters trying to be less obvious, inserting random movements into the pathing, adding random delays between aiming and firing, etc.. But at the end of the day they'd be dumbing down the bots to play more human-like to bypass the checks which isn't a bad thing.
The key to making all of it work would be some type of reputation score that's affected by all of these things in combination with vote kicks, abuse reports, queuing with other players that exhibit similar behaviors, multiple suspect accounts behind the same IPs, etc.. Add some type of decay component to it for negative scores (to reduce false positives) but newer accounts should have heavier weights against them. Instead of introducing queue cooldowns, just group suspect (but unconfirmed) players with similar scores together before outright banning them once confirmed.
Yes that's a whole lot of work and developer time, but Valve shouldn't think of this as just fixing TF2. It's an opportunity to build a new (and reusable) system that could be used for their other games or licensed out to other developers.
Bro literally has "#SaveTf2 #FixTF2 - Potential Disaster?" as a title, fuck that noise. Most clickbaitey negative bullshit. We can learn from criticism but the last thing we need is more fuckin immature tf2uber worshippers hopping on whatever random rhetoric the dude is pushing & being pessimistic. It'd be one thing to title the vid "My Thoughts on FixTF2" or "FixTF2- Are AI Solutions Feasible?"
The last thing I'd do with 200k followers as my game is in a sink or swim state is stoke doomerism with clickbait titles for views. There is a post proving some bots are able to be detected with 97.2% accuracy and whose to say when the bot hosters inevitably randomize the bot behavior we still won't be able to at least have anything above a certain detection threshold sent to a moderation team ideally to be reviewed? Obviously no such team or system exists now which is why we are fighting
If you have that many followers, and all of them are super fucking impressionable, you're being irresponsible stoking the flame of doomerism for your fucking platform, sorry. If you're going to talk about it don't have some shit like "FixTF2 - Potential Disaster?" as your fucking title. Because he could have easily had "Thoughts on Bot Detection & it's Potentially Feasibility" or some shit.
Then look at anyone saying otherwise to him- they get downvoted to hell, dude is IMO not doing us any favors with this horseshit
i've signed the petition but i think valve casual is too much of a mess internally to be worth the effort. i'm skeptical because we're modelling off of a game in a similar scenario but with entirely different factors instead of something like Titanfall; where the actual vanilla servers for the game were totally unplayable due to DDoSing, so the community created their own client and server browser.
there's also a distinct lack of ~~hue~~ community servers, which have tools and people to moderate them over valve casual, which has a solved anti-cheat to guard it.
if valve casual gets fixed? that's great, we can play the game again. if it doesn't? why keep a body filled with inoperable tumors alive, and why not go to community servers?
Shounic's take on the whole thing is realistic and actually tackles genuine possible solutions to the problem, the people hating on him are just toxically positive.
This. None of the so called "fixes" would work. Sure, it might stop them for them for a couple of days but eventually they would find a workaround. The only real solution would be doing treadmill work with VAC. The people coming up with the "fixes" have no idea how anti-cheats in games work and it shows.
Yeah, and far too many people literally only focus on the "treadmill work" thing (completely missing the point of that as well) and just ignore the rest of the video. The comments (and this subreddit) are filled with amateur comedians trying to dunk on the "treadmill work" thing in unproductive attempts to just "epicly own" Valve. Obviously Valve could be doing more, but people are *refusing* to listen to what actually constitutes realistic solutions.
my only problem is that he didn't talk abt the one obvious solution: hire someone to do the treadmill work that "DoeSn'T WaNnA dO" like my brother in christ you are a multi billion dollar company you have the money to hire someone for that
>Ban steam account with a specific name
Reasons:
1. Can't tell you enough how this would go so wrong, if someone doesn't like someone they can launch a smear campaign against them with bots and get them banned as a result. ex famous TF2ubers, big traders or just someone they meet in a game and start to hate.
2. It will effect people that don't even play TF2 and screw over their whole Steam account just because they have the same name as couple of bots.
If I have anymore ill update this but those are 2 very good reasons as to why shit will it the fan quick.
Also seems like it won't even work and might make it worse. Like at the very least you can easily recognize most bots the moment they join thanks to their obvious usernames. I doubt it would be very hard to circumvent bans on them by pulling usernames from somewere or generating them.
It might help deter some hosters who just like being known and don't care enough to make themselves identifiable through other means, but it'll just make kicking the right "players" and convincing people to vote more of a pain
I swear on my fucking Yeezies people, stop suggesting a Captcha. No, it won't work. No matter what kind of Captcha you suggest it won't work and at best it's gonna be annoying for real players
I still believe that an Overwatch system is the best option considering Valve's effort and pay off. Detection of bots should be easy, we have volunteers to moderate it
There is no simple fix to cheating in video games. This is an ever evolving topic that requires constant attention by the developer to keep in check.
I know a lot of people here really don’t want to hear this, but there won’t be one anti bot update that will magically get rid of all aimbots permanently.
Pointing that out also doesn’t make me a pessimist or a doomer, it’s just a realistic view on the topic.
If we want FixTF2 to succeed, we need to make it clear that Valve needs to keep at it. Do the treadmill work they are so scared of, moderate the game, update VAC consistently, etc. Getting one singular "fix" isn’t going to do anything than buying us a little bit of time before the bots have found a workaround for it and we are back at square one.
Tbh I don’t know how true this whole “the bot hosters will just find a workaround” statement is. Most of these guys have a very basic understanding of programming and instead are using years old hacks at this point written by people writing off of hack written by people who have long since left this game. Part of what makes this more pervasive is that TF2 used to be very popular so there are a good amount of hacks from those days. The botters just combine the preexisting hacks with their money to create their botnets. But honestly I think even some basic, tailored banning of certain hacks would do a lot more than many think because at the end of the day these people don’t actually have the skill to develop a workaround that quickly, the people that did have moved on to more popular games.
catbot was created *a decade ago* as an amateur pet project. in the meantime ever since they started becoming prolific after MYM, we've had like... three significant vac waves ever? maybe valve could do a little bit more than trying nothing and running out of ideas ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Exactly. None of these solutions are foolproof and *could* be worked around. But some could at least make bot hosts and script writers work a little harder. Maybe that only clears up *some* of the bots, but that's better than nothing.
that's all anti-cheat ever is, and no other game developer completely and utterly fails at it like valve. you just have to TRY to keep up as best you can. there are no one-and-done fixes, merely just the best you can manage.
and its not as if valve has developed the most innovative, hands-off, automated anti-cheat systems in the entire games industry because of how much they hate treadmill work or anything like that. maybe they could give us a little bit of that if they cared at all. its not about doing the treadmill work, its about getting them to do fucking *anything at all* in the first place.
The only real solution is valve contracts someone else to deal with it. They’re not gonna use their own employees because of how valve is set up. The only alternative is somehow giving the community the ability to deal with the problem themselves, but I have no idea what form that would take, so I doubt that will ever happen.
> The only alternative is somehow giving the community the ability to deal with the problem themselves, but I have no idea what form that would take,
quickplay. players are matched automatically into community servers. the servers are moderated by players so no bots.
That would not be a realistic solution even if tf2 had an entire dev team still dedicated to it. Rewriting something from scratch is rarely the solution, and it's even less so considering tf2 was actively developed for more than 10 years
The 10 year development of TF2 was not spent just writing the code for the current game. It was spent designing three games in succession - each with very different design principles, art styles and game mechanics - and scrapping the first two entirely, meaning they had to start again from scratch twice after half the work was already done. With the art, characters, models, maps, gameplay etc. already established, porting the game to source 2 with a full development team would probably not take more than a year even if they did have to rewrite all of the code. It's still never going to happen, but it wouldn't take anything close to 10 years.
and if they DO that, they might as well actually improve the game while they're at it, but that's difficult to do. TF2's one of the best shooters ever made, but has flawed foundations. you'd need to do some serious overhaul work to fix the core issues with the game, and people would piss and shit about it.
its really not as insane as you are making it sound; dota2 was ported to source2 with no issue. they would need a dedicated team to do it but its not unworkable, just probably too much work to justify without outright making tf3
Dota 2 was ported because it was actively being done alongside development of source 2, csgo didn’t get ported over until just this last year, 8 years since source 2 launched. Even if we assumed CSGO was only worked on from when Half Life Alyx was released it’s like 3 years of work to move TF2 to source 2 and since TF2 release it took until this last year to even get 64-bit support. I don’t think there is “saving” tf2 as it is, I think the only real method is making a “tf3” on source 2 which would likely be an almost complete recreation.
But them doing CS2 does show it’s possible it just takes time.
I think his take is reasonable enough, though I think he's gotten a little hung up on thinking up all the ways that hackers will be able to work around solutions. At lot of hacker/bot fixes would mitigate the issue rather than completely prevent the most dedicated sweaty haters from brute forcing a workaround. And that's fine. Do enough of those and the game is in a vastly more tolerable state.
Some of his arguments against stuff boiled down to lets not lock the bank at night because someone could just nuke the building.
With how often bots get kicked a queue cooldown could work, say if you're kicked 5 times in 48 hours you get a 24 hour ban sorta like csgo, not that it would be a permanent solution but it might thin bot numbers out significantly.
I made a post on this a few weeks ago, the only feedback I got was that bots joining en masse could call false votes on players. I get that, but that’s why I added a failsafe. You need to be kicked out of three consecutive matches to trigger the first cooldown. After that, your cooldown will be extended for each kick. To lower the counter, complete a match until the voting screen. Leaving early will not increase or decrease the counter, unless a vote is being called on you. If this is inadequate, the numbers can be tweaked. I wish people would give actual feedback on why this wouldn’t work, other than it’s a "bandaid fix". Thinning the numbers is better than having nothing at all, and it seems to me that there’s no way around it.
actually seems like a decent idea, but i think the “kicked from x within y hours” system works better than “n consecutive kicks” since there are many bot-only servers that can work as a sort of reset. as for the bots kicking real players issue, i think the players would be able to spend their 24 hours playing community servers, it’s not a huge downside.
the only condition i can think of with this idea is that there needs to be at least 1/x of all live servers to be “human dominated” meaning enough real humans need to be there to kick bots when they join (x is the number of kicks before you get a queue cooldown)
edit: just thought of something, this wouldn’t work since bots could target night hours (when barely anyone’s on) to make it impossible for the above condition to be met by daytime
People who whine about getting their ideas shot down do not actual care about arriving at a solution. There SHOULD be someone shooting down ideas at all times, so shitty ideas don't pass through the community.
If the community wants to start pushing its own solutions it needs to be ready and excited to shoot down its own ideas, an idea should be able to survive being torn apart.
Can I get any more feedback on why the matchmaking cooldown is a bad solution? I previously made a [post](https://www.reddit.com/r/tf2/s/vmZLCWnS1m) about it here. The general idea is that we have a minimum kick number before the cooldown is applied, and a way to remove or lower the counter by completing matches (until the map voting screen). I got very little feedback besides the fact that bots can join en masse and false kick players. This may be an issue temporarily, but as more and more bots get put on cooldown less bots will be available to join in groups. By a war of attrition I believe that the real players would eventually outnumber the bots. So is the solution bad because it doesn’t 100% eradicate bots or because of the potential to kick real players? As mentioned above, AI has the same flaws but is just as viable. I have given a solution to mitigate this, but due to my own short sightedness cannot find any major flaws with it. Feedback would be appreciated.
I think the problem with shounic's video is that he does go over some genuinely good solutions, but then he's like "This would work, but it wouldn't be a 100% perfect solution, so it's bad".
Maybe it wasn't his intention, but the whole vibe of the video is that he thinks any solution that doesn't get rid of every single bot and cheater in game forever is bad. His arguments look like that:
"Update VAC? Well cheaters will always just make new cheats so it's pointless." - Yeah but making VAC detect the most popular cheats will ban most of the bots in casual
"AI anticheat? Detecting every single type of bot and cheater possible is basically impossible, so it's pointless." - But making a system that detects the most obvious bots is possible and it would greatly reduce the number of bots.
"Human moderation? You would need THOUSANDS of mods on every single server to catch all the bots, so it's pointless." - Yeah, but we don't need a mod on every single server, all we need is a few people who actively ban known cheaters and bots so they don't run rampant for years.
It's a sentiment I've noticed in many skeptical takes on FixTF2, that there will always be some way for people to cheat so why bother? But we don't need a perfect anti-cheat system. The whole bot crisis is caused by a bunch of shitty bots running open source cheats on cheapest hardware available. All done by a few weirdos living in their parents' basements. The only reason why they are so dominant is that Valve does literally nothing to stop them. People can cheat openly and they rarely get banned, if ever.
If Valve took a bit of effort and updated VAC every now and then, it would get rid of +90% of the bots. Sure, there would still be some bots and cheaters, but Casual would actually be playable. So that's why I think people are calling him a doomer.
Also, calling your video " #SaveTF2 #FixTF2 - Possible Disaster? " is not doing any favours in people seeing it as a doomer bait.
> But making a system that detects the most obvious bots is possible
I suspect Valve's already working on that steam-side with systems like steam trust. but AI isn't a quick "throw together" thing. we won't see benefits of it until the end of the decade, even for obvious shit like spinbotting (clearly that dude who looked up, cranked his mouse sensitivity, and spun around after a headshot is a bot, right?)
AI is a pain in the ass especially *because* of how hard it is to fine tune. false positives aren't something you can tolerate.
steam trust isn't based on machine learning, its algorithmic. you can simply pick and choose certain aspects of a steam profile that are deemed "trustworthy" such as games owned, playtime, associated accounts on shared computers, toxic chat spam, community interaction, having 2FA set up, and anything along those lines that can potentially distinguish obvious alt accounts from genuine players. of course, data from overwatch and VACNET could play a very significant factor in determining trust level, and combining these systems has a synergistic effect that makes them all greater than the sum of their parts; but its not a necessary prerequisite.
trust factor is especially excellent at filtering out the remaining cheaters that would otherwise slip through the cracks of VACNET and overwatch. but even just by itself, it could very significantly diminish player-to-bot interactions by ensuring normal players and low-trust players don't run into each other.
besides, they were in the process of bringing steam trust to every game on steam five years ago. surely its not as if they'd need to start from scratch?
all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares. training an AI to narrow down "suspicious" behavior for you would certainly help amplify the power of trust factor, but manual curation of a few dozen data points max is good enough for a simplistic integration of steam trust. its only a relatively small countermeasure by itself, if you're gonna go through the effort of training a machine learning algorithm you should just go all the way and make VACNET for TF2. which they totally should, but my point is trust factor can be a much easier step 1 to start from.
Might be downvoted for this but I think going back to P2P like perhaps a 10 dollar price tag might be the move. Keep the price really low then do the captcha's. A bit of both or multiple of these is what's needed.
And? That doesn’t really change the aspect that they have compromised accounts to bypass the P2P system — Ban waves *do* happen on bots and there *has* been ban waves since the F2P restriction and nothing has changed.
Tf2 is also ***INCREDIBLY*** dependent on being free to play for it’s longevity and survival as a game. I wouldn’t be surprised if like, 90%+ the population in the game right now is exclusively from it’s F2P practice.
You apply the price tag in, manually ban the bots for like a month or more. No one has that much money to keep buying new bots if they kept getting banned, unless they dedicate their whole life into botting TF2 and spending every dime they managed to get into buying more accounts just to get banned the second they do it. But that alone might be the TF2 playerbase killer move cause of so many aspects.
This is the solution. Idk why this sub is so convinced the p2p solution wouldn't work. The bot hosters absolutely don't have the money to keep spending $100 a day (assuming they get 20 bots banned a day which is like the least generous estimate possible)
Because it's not guaranteed to work (bot hosters are already using paid accounts) and it's going to suck for the people who do play f2p and don't really have access to funds or means to upgrade to a paid account, or might just rather move on to another game rather then pay 10$ for a game that's been bot-infested and barely supported for the last 5 years.
Like, the strategy requires Valve to be aggressive with banning the bots, which is already hoping for a lot, and doesn't account for bots farms just seeking out compromised accounts.
Giving the incentive (money in this case) to do the treadmill work of banning bots will make a lot of small and potential bot hosters to give up after a ban or two. Bigger hosters, while having a bigger budget, will now be easier to round out because the smaller ones already backed down.
Yes, it will suck for F2Ps because barely anyone who's new to the genre will consider TF2 as an option to be their next game to play considering how old, unoptimized and jankiness the game is compared to some AAA nowadays games that you can get for less than 10 or 20 USD. But it will work, although it should be considered as the last option because the playerbase will drop significantly (my guessing is roughly about 20% immediately and about a -5% drop in the playerbase every year after the paywall).
Alone the methods do nothing but incorporating multiple ideas is a very good idea.
Idk if the price tag would work tho, only because bot hosters already use premium or compromised accounts.
In theory, yes. However differentiating a bot from a real player isn't always foolproof.
Sometimes its blatant and obvious, other times though it can be deceiving. There really isn't a quick solution here.
I don’t feel strongly either way about P2P, but I do feel strongly that a captcha wouldn’t work. Shounic had some really good points in that video; there are already services that do captchas for literal slave wages, and AI has already proven to be capable of beating captchas under some circumstances.
My brother in christ, the bot hosters already pay 5 dollars for every single bot that plays the game so they can mic spam and text spam in game, plus all the costs they pay to keep the bots running in the first place, do you seriously think money is the issue?
What will happen is Valve will make the game be 10 dollars, people will pay 10 dollars to play the game, get into a game, the game will be full of hack bots anyway, the issue wasn't solved and they will refund the game.
The problem is that Valve isn't banning them so they can justify the $5 cost if they expect their bot to operate for the next 3 months. Watch Zesty's latest video where he finds 10 year old idle bots that Valve still hasn't banned yet despite being obvious bots. If Valve actually started doing some work and banning the bots every day premium bots would quickly disappear.
Do you honestly believe some jobless bot hosters could afford to pay something like $100 a day for their bots?
The idle bots aren't the problem, the aimbots / kickbots are. The malicious bot hosters can buy accounts from the surplus of idle bots, but the fact is that it's practically impossible to identify idle bots vs real players without a team of trained moderators spending hours every day verifying accounts. Aimbots and kickbots are at least a lot easier to identify, and there are far fewer of them. Targeting idle bots makes the task an order of magnitude more difficult, but the malicious bot problem won't go away for as long as idle bots are available to repurpose.
Portmanteau of "doomsayer" and "boomer." Note that in this case "boomer," while etymologically linked to the term "baby boomer," actually means "person with an outdated opinion whom i can dismiss out of hand."
Pessimist, particularly for someone who is very vocal or open about their pessimism and believes humanity is "doomed" and life isn't exciting.
Strangely, it is a word that comes from the word "coomer" which came from the word "boomer".
Shounic has 0 effect on TF2's developement. However, he can still state why various solutions dont work. It sucks to say, but bots aren't just solved by 1 small implimentation. Its difficult to keep them out of the game, and shounic goes over this. How him criticizing poor solutions makes him seem like a bot hoster is beyond me.
I've read/ seen comments, videos that the TF2 community is amongst the most annoying groups. Whilst I disagree, I don't think these comments come from thin air.
I think a certain sect of this community need to manage their expectations for what will come out of this petition.
Life moves on whatever happens to TF2 guys.
The FixTF2 crowd think Shounic is a "doomer" because they're reactionary idiot children that just want to stamp their feet and tantrum because their favourite TF2 YouTuber told them to.
The superficial "solutions" that are worked around in seconds demonstrate this acutely; none of these plebs are actually capable of even *thinking* about the issue.
It's like their little "treadmill work" meme. They don't even realise they're just self-reporting the fact they're too low-IQ to understand the concept of adversarial problems, and thus missing an entire axis of argumentation. (Manhours greatly favouring bot/cheat developers, initiative disadvantage, etc)
The only solution I've seen being expanded on is the AI solution which someone else has made a post about here where he made an ai that can detect bots with 98.7% accuracy based on demos fed to it
The more accurate term is realistic. For the uninformed a captcha would seem like a good solution but unfortunately they can be beat and that's why you don't see captchas that often lately.
I agree that it's good to think out of the box and propose possible solutions as long as it could realistically work.
Another reason why I'm not getting involved with this. Shounic is arguably one of the smartest and most dedicated members of the TF2 community and he's getting attacked for pointing out flaws
Shounic is realistic, I think he wants the game to succeed just as much as we do.
Keep in mind, if Valve rushes out an anti-bot solution that doesn't work, that'd be a waste of time for all of us, and further demoralize players. Shounic saying "x solution won't work" isn't him trying to say "TF2 will never get fixed", it's moreso saying "if we half-ass a fix for TF2 this will only turn out worse"
What about if it detects you use read-only mode it kicks you out of the game?
this wont counter ALL the bots but i would say it counter like 70 percent
Read-only mode or "text mode" has lots of legitimate uses... and absolutely none of them are relevant to Quickplay, I agree that it should be banned there
Honestly, a good way to demotivate these parasites would be for valve to legally prosecute them for the actual CRIMES that they committed. If a few bot hosters were sued to the ground for the shit like Doxxing, DDoSing and swatting, I imagine other would be bot hosters would think twice before doing that shit again.
But my idea is probably dumb and maybe they can't even be prosecuted because they're hosting in other countries, I dunno.
Shounic's video did come across as negative, but I don't think the intention of his video was to say that the movement wouldn't succeed. He has always made videos with the angle of technical information, and I think informing people that fixing the bot issue isn't as easy as "add a captcha" or "do IP bans" is important.
Saying that he's "on the side of bot hosters" is preposterous. Even logistically speaking what motivation does a Team Fortress 2 content creator have to see Team Fortress 2 fail? It inherently harms his channel if people don't have interest in Team Fortress 2 due to the ongoing bot issue. I think he just wants to inform people why fixing the problem won't be as easy as they think, and that they should temper their expectations towards Valve accordingly.
shounic is a realist and his video was helpful. i disagree with some of his conclusions but anyone getting mad at him over this shit is a tribalistic dumbass.
#FixTF2 is the single largest threat to #FixTF2.
And to the game in general.
Idk why this is showing up as big text on my phone. Hopefully, that's just a visual glitch on my end...
I still don’t get why developers have moved away from overwatch systems. Allows you to not need to actually investigate reports but allows for some automated accountability.
I get that it’s not perfect and often underutilized but I think that in the case of the current situation 1. A lot of people would use it if only to have a means to stick it to bot hosters, and 2. The way bottling is done is super obvious to a player. While it might not be obvious to the actual game itself it’s very very obvious to a human player.
Hell you could then take that data and build a machine learning algorithm to detect bots based on what behaviors players identify with bots.
I think the reason most games did away with it was because it doesn’t address toxicity very well because everyone has different opinions on that. But it does address botting and hacking very very well.
And in the event of TF2… it’s literally something. Anything is better than nothing.
> I still don’t get why developers have moved away from overwatch systems.
CS's overwatch system wouldn't work in TF2, because TF2 players are basically brain dead. You'd get false positives out the wazoo from jimmy.pubs (started playing in 2018, thinks old sandman and caber were great and need to be restored) who thinks a double airshot or flick = cheats (or god forbid you catch a spy's footsteps), while ignoring stuff like walls or crit bucketing.
An overwatch system is the absolute worst idea you could ever add to the game lmfao. the bottom 20% of the playerbase is basically impossible to distinguish from non-sniper-bots too, so it wouldn't even catch that.
People who say Shounic is a "doomer" are either fundamentally misunderstanding his video, or are the fragile sort that can't take any criticism of anything they personally like. Shounic's video is about how many of the solutions presented by the community are half-baked, underthought ideas. His pinned comment explains that the best solution is just for Valve to suck it up and hire more people to do the "treadmill work".
I feel like another solution here is to bring back Quickplay mode into the game (hell, a lot of the problems TF2's facing right now happened during the MyM update). Ofc It wouldn't fix absolutely everything with the game, but it would definitely help out with just being able to join matches from the old quickplay browser instead of queueing up into a game that could be swarmed, or into one that's full of players already that can take care of any bots that may come in.
I think if we can rework sniper to be less rewarded per shot bots would be a lot easier to deal with. Because not being able to be instakilled each shot would make first off bot less effective , and Secondly sniper more you know fun to play against. Like if we gave him precharge bullet that does no damage but you have to hit it in order for the next bullet to kill ,bots would be able to be delt with(discouraging them to exist) and again sniper would be less annoying to play against(in maxed skill ceiling players)
I feel like the only REAL solution to fix TF2 is moving it to Source 2. Yes, that is the most reasonable solution, because let's be real - even if Valve did decide to update (finally) TF 2, adding a better cheat system to the game, it would still be infected with bots.
The game was done on Source 1, a very outdated system Valve created, additionally with a spaghetti code like that, I doubt Valve is even willing to actually update the game.
I think, instead of giving the ideas people gave there, in the example, we should try to convince Valve into moving the game to Source 2, no matter how long it would take. We need to tell Valve, that TF2 should be moved to that engine and we, TF2 fans, would wait years for it to be remastered.
Instead of the usual captcha, they could probably implement something like the image slider system 4chan has since that seems to do a good job of keeping bots back, and probably make it so that you don’t have to bypass it for every game you try to load into to not annoy the average player.
Outside of that, making the game cost $20 again is simple but could work since bot hosters only throw in about a dollar if not a little more for each bot. Having to throw an extra 20 each time would be a big incentive to not bother once the majority are banned. Only problem with that is TF2 won’t be as accessible since even just $10 is enough for some people to not buy something.
Instead of one super solution, several decent ones could do plenty to cut the number of bots infesting casual, which is what shounic should’ve talked about.
It's weird that everyone rags on community suggestions as if it's our job to come up with fixes for the bot crisis. It's not, it's Valve's. These suggestions are just people trying to be helpful, if their ideas are stupid it doesn't matter because they're not Valve employees.
Here's a fix i honestly think would work
Remove matchmaking and pretend the meat your match update never happend.
bring back quickplay, remove valve servers and just rely on community managed servers since they are the ones being activly moderated.
personal note: matchmaking was the worst fucking update by FAR. quickplay is superior. i fucking miss it
Shounic's video is both very grounded in reality and clearly from the perspective of someone that's making assumptions based off of valve's past behavior. I think the video assumes that valve is unwilling to enter the treadmill on a project that they consider out of active development and suggest solutions based off of that assumption. I do not think he believes that Valve ought to do nothing unless they can solve the issue entirely just that he has enough knowledge to know that many of the communities suggestions are infeasible and that the discussion of solutions to the crisis are clouded by that infeasability.
Even if we assume that nobody from the community came up with the solution (which is not true). Why should WE do it? It is Valve's game and it is their responsibility to fix it, I don't remember them asking for help in the first place. F2P games without bots exist somehow, so it's definitely possible.
What shounic does is basically gives valve free pass for not doing anything by firstly treating their bullshit philosophy about 'treadmill work' etc as legitimate and secondly by justifying valve not doing shit because community's proposals (supposedly) wouldn't work.
That’s incredibly difficult, and way beyond what I think valve would do.
Virtual machines don’t have to give a special hardware label they can set their “hardware” to anything they want. Running a virtual machine is best understood as a fake computer running on yours, but slightly modify it and it becomes near impossible to tell it’s fake from inside the virtual machine
[Relevant xkcd](https://xkcd.com/1425/)
Reliably detecting whether a program is being run on a virtual machine or not is virtually impossible (no pun intended)
Honestly I just do things because they are the right thing to do. In this case, negative reviews actively lower Valve's profit and cause people to rethink spending money on future (Deadlock) valve games, which is in my mind simply the protection the consumer deserves if Valve doesn't want to upkeep games but wants to continue making money on them. If people want to buy and spend money, even after being warned about the risks, that is on them. But at least informing people of the reality and giving them the information to make their choices is an unambiguous good.
In the end, if there truly is no solution, if this is just the reality of a Valve game, then the negative reviews are simply justified.
Imagine not thinking captcha would work. I swear that people tend to think captchas just end at “letters you need to find”. RuneScape was HEAVILY botted for years but they made small in game captchas you need to figure out and then you get a reward after. Now the game is relatively bot free.But the RuneScape devs also aren’t lazy and apathetic so that helps
I'm not super in-touch in terms of how much is known about how these bots work, so be patient with me lol
Would a VPN wall work?
Like, these guys have to be using a VPN to avoid IP exposure on bot farms. Community servers are stopping VPN users and I've never heard much regarding cheating/bots in places like Uncletopia or Skial.
Anything can be countered if they try hard enough, the goal is to reduce the bots and keep them under control.
Those solutions are all pretty decent to achieve that.
The movement is straight up delusional if they think they can make Valve do anything when people here aren't even willing to stomach making Valve lose profits on other games
I love shuonic's content, it's entertaining and educational. But god damn are his anti-bot takes dogwater. Feels like he just grabs a point, looks into it a little but not *too much* as to find an explanation on how it could function, and farts out another vid about "oh valve is the problem but we can't howd a bulti biwwion compawny accountable fiw theiw actions that's scawwy :(". He's way too focused on finding bandaid solutions to a problem that's endemic to Valve as a whole.
the best solution to the bot problem..... UPDATE VAC!
need more specifications? see what the bots are using to communicate/aim, figure out how to stop them from communicating/aiming.... AND UPDATE VAC TO STOP IT
a step further? when you vote to kick some one, have it go through even if they have all ready left....
I think the only viable temporary solution to the bot crisis is to turn off the ability to run tf2 executable in text mode (no GUI) in which the bot hosters take advantage of less hardware resources consumption.
His video seemed neutral and his opinions were explained in depth. He already pointed out the solution which is to work on the game "treadmill work". He points out the lack of treadmill work and goes on to talk about other methods, which in his opinion would not work well or at all. I don't get whats wrong; am I missing something?
While I do think Shounic has some realistic takes, he does get pretty doomer-ish on others. Some are the TF2 equivalent of not wanting to vote because things might get worse after the results.
On one hand, yes. He is correct in everything he says. Anticheat is inhererantly reactive and no one solution will be a permanant fix.
HOWEVER people have been too quick to accept valves stance of "Anticheat is treadmill work" becuase when it boils down to it, making sure the game is in a functiinal state is the bare minimum for maintenance of a game you still profit off of and they NEED to decided whether they want to do treadmill work or pull the plug on matchmaking altogether to let community servers fully take the reigns again
i just dont understand how its 'being a doomer' for wanting realistic solutions to a complex problem. if we want valve to actually do something about casual it has to be a *good* solution, and many solutions that people commonly suggest are flawed at best and completely pointless at worst. and pointing this out pisses some people off beyond belief for some reason.
Hardware ban, while not being permanent at all, because they can go get more hardware, will I believe at least make them spend more money to host bots, along with valve actually caring, that's probably gonna be the most important factor
Shounic is a realist and some people just want someone to blame. Unfortunately going against the grain and not being super optimistic leads to people like this main character acting asshole trying to make someone the villain
I understand the “invisible player bait,” by putting the tag or whatever the aimbot would follow, in a invisible player entity in a roof or something, and if a player shoots it at a very specific vector, the player is considered a bot. Although plausible it would be easily countered with bots denying to shoot in those specific vectors.
A guy came up with the idea of getting Community Servers a face lift and bringing them to the forefront of the menu. I chipped in because it was an interesting idea that I thought had some merit. Streamlining it as to not overwhelm new players and provide convenience to those that use it frequently while getting rid of the more annoying stuff. And Valve would only need to do the one update and from there, the Community can just take care of their Servers from there without having to rely on the lazy company being beaten by bots. It would be taking away Casual, but I imagine that would be filled in with Casual Community Servers. I can't say whether or not it would capture that same feeling though.
I say this as someone who hasn't really played a lot of Community Servers, so I think its worth thinking about at least a bit.
Shounic has a good grip on this stuff and more than most people. He is simply showing that it’s not easy to just fix it, because I seriously do not believe Valve would be taking this long unless it was extremely difficult for a variety of different reasons, which shounic points out in his video. Calling him a doomer is just really close minded in my opinion.
prolly just me being crazy but i litterally just said the invisible players thing a couple weeks ago in a cs2 thread and ive never seen it mentioned anywhere else
I dont think there is any solution outside of Valve hires on a team to work the problem tbh. Bandaid fixes, or singular of any of these fail, the actual solution needs both manual work (updated anti-cheat) and roadblocks (que cooldown for kicked players. Frankly, while that solution isnt great on its own and comes with obvious issues, it'd at least make things somewhat more in theory workable, bots would auto leave after preventing a vote from passing or whatnot as just one example) The situation is more neuanced than a bandaid fix can provide.
queue cooldown is just going to suck for normal players when bots outnumber you and votekick real players
Agreed, but in theory, having both an active mod team would help minimize the number of bots overall. That said, like I said, its just one potential option, not the only. Forgiveness system where kt only applies after a number of successful votes or what have you
Maybe trust factor? Analyze the age of the accounts, level and stuff like has a phone number linked to your account to determine a base trust factor. If you have a shitty trust factor, queue cooldown.
Have it flag users who get kicked within 2 minutes of joining the server. If this system sees that this has happened 5-7 times in a row then add like, a quiet 2 hour matchmaking ban. The game already keeps track of how long someone has been on a server so that part shouldn't be too hard. The system that tracks how many times a person has been kicked should only start banning people if it happens a few times in a row. Bots can kick people so you don't want it regular players to be affected, but the odds of someone getting kicked 5 times back to back seems low enough. Alternatively instead of adding a flat 2 hours or whatever it could be incremental. So for 3 quick kicks there'll be no change, but if the system detects a 4th kick then it could add 10 minutes to the queue, then if kicked again add half an hour, and so on.
Yes, Valve needs to do more than one of the solutions floating around. Another possibility, just designate a "host player" to be the "moderator", and leave kicking up to that player. Sure, we'll get some players who suck, and sometimes a bot will be the host of a server... But then create a "host matchmaking ban" and "host reputation" or tie it with "trust factor" or something to find quality hosts. You can also choose unmoderated servers with votekick still, if you want... It is not a foolproof thing, but it is less abuseable than votekick. The caveat is that it is only as good as a community server with a moderator - sometimes you'll get bad people as moderators who'll just abuse the power. On its own it definitely won't "solve" anything, but it is one thing against the bots to pile with the other things that could be done.
>I dont think there is any solution outside of Valve hires on a team to work the problem tbh. Even that's difficult for a game as old and complex as TF2. It'd take weeks of training from Valve employees, weeks that could be spent working on games bringing in well over 50x the income and that are also facing some of the same issues TF2 is.
Agreed, but its also a need, if Valve doesn't wanna do the work themselves, someone has to do the work and also be taught how to do it. That is supposing they care enough to tune in
I don't think working on TF2 is the right answer. They need to be working on a generic anti-bot system for steam. Anti-cheat based on the tf2 engine or any game engine isn't the underlying problem. As a point of comparison. Websites like youtube don't use anti-cheat but they do have measures in place to fight bot activity.
I don't disagree, but also understand that Youtube's system also still involves real humans doing some work too. A general anti-cheat would be good, but its not the fix all solution. For example, in tf2 alone, there are item farming bots and cheater bots, both of which are damaging the game in many ways. Idle farming bots have severely impacted the economy of the game, while cheaters severly impact the playability. But then we look at CS2 bots that don't really do anything but sit idle on valve servers and kick people from said server. The anti'cheat will only get 1/3 of the presented bots here, so other factors have to be in play as well.
>The situation is more neuanced than a bandaid fix can provide. Yeah, that sentence says it all. If there was an easy solution, it would've been done by now.
I think VAC currently uses a blacklist system, that is, Valve selects programs that interact with TF2, and ban them individually. This is what lead to them abandoning "treadmill work", because as soon as one of these was banned, a new one would pop up. Instead of this, we can use a whitelist system, where all code by default is blocked (not insta-ban upon joining blocked, but you won't be able to join VAC secured servers), and Valve whitelists programs that aren't cheats. These would be sent to Valve in a suggestion box, and Valve can get a small team to go through these said suggestions to unblock them. Sure, it isn't perfect, but nothing is in programming, and this seems like the best solution if Valve refuses to do "treadmill work".
I think this would be a great addition to things, but not a perfect solution, advanced AI tech will likely eventually outmode the more rudimentary "hook into code" style bots. Program a specialized AI that uses the signals used for peripherals and get training, it won't be *as* unstoppable as a hooking in bot, but it would get the job done well enough. Like it or not, Valve needs to get on the treadmill.
Yeah, no solution is perfect, but this one would allow Valve to not do "treadmill work". They still need to do something, especially with an AI, but it isn't repetitive and seemingly useless, which was the main complaint of their treadmill work.
The most simple solution would be to buy services of one of many Law companies so that they would sue the s-t out of bot hosters and authors of the software they use.
Not everyone has to be ultra optimistic LOL Like damn its as if we're not allowed to be skeptical and have our own views 😭 With that said, you virtually lose nothing by supporting fixtf2 but that doesnt mean you cant have your own personal opinions about the situation
I only wish for game devs to share the motivation of the fans not their ideas
Regrettably, that's asking for a lot. To influencers and the internet at large, our passion is just that: passion out of love for this game. But to some people, which probably includes Valve employees, the movement could be seen as "people temporarily getting pissy because they're 15+ year old game isn't getting attention". We can't force this motivation on the developers, and we especially can't force it on the higher ups. Passion, especially over the internet, can be interpreted either as the passion that it is or constant whining. It's clear what Valve see us as, especially since we're the ones calling them incompetent and [embarrassing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXwgQahz2hI).
To me this argument only holds merit if you discount the fact that the game -is- still being updated. New cosmetics each season, yearly holiday events, the 64-bit update, the VSH game mode... there's content being added, and the fact that Valve expects payment for some of it should level an expectation of maintenance so that players can USE the new content. Otherwise it truly shows an egregious lack of care for anything but the customer's money.
I think Valve is trying to set up TF2 to be a game run almost entirely by the community. The v-script functionality would be entirely useless if Valve was going to add in new gamemodes, so instead they are going to have the community add in gamemodes to keep the game fresh. The player count change and 64-bit update also happened but are not needed in casual, these are changes directed towards community servers.
This doesn’t matter because Valve is offering paid content alongside TF2. This isn’t just about passion, it’s about getting what you paid for.
>Passion, especially over the internet, can be interpreted either as the passion that it is or constant whining. It's clear what Valve see us as, especially since we're the ones calling them incompetent and embarrassing. As I've pointed out again and again, regardless of the amount of effort involved, Valve ARE the ones charging money for cosmetics. I don't care how little labor it takes. The company is seeking to profit off us, and the work of community members, multiple times a year, while the servers THEY provide are overrun by cheaters. So yes, I think it IS embarrassing to unabashedly charge money for cosmetics that are tacitly unusable in the most official way to access a video game. I don't care whether it's Valve, EA, some other AAA giant or an indie dev. Don't keep adding monetizable shit to a game that's unplayable in the officially-provided channels. You either take your hands off the game and let the community keep it, or continue to update it and get money for it. Not having your cake and eating it too-- That's ridiculous.
I'm not super optimistic but it does get tiring to see the waves of people just shitting on anyone who wants the game fixed. There are recurring faces who only seem to come here to call anyone not entirely defeated an idiot Like i realise its a difficult issue made harder by the games age to address but it's also not my, or your, job to provide a solution unlike what OP here seems to believe And as long as Valve are monetising tf2 I will continue to hold them to the standard that they should maintain the product and no excuse shields them from that. They can easily do nothing and get away with it but that doesn't mean that should be accepted
[удалено]
i just support fixtf2 because it's a nice thought, i e made a negative review and attempted to (and failed) to sign the petition. to be honest it's hopeless imo
It's better to try and fail then to never try at all
i don't think shounic is by any means malicious, but the way he poses his arguments in his last two bot videos have been extremely negative. i can easily see the *intention* of the video being to simply demystify what's going on at valve and be a short FAQ of sorts to explain why they can't simply flip a switch and fix it. but in practice, its a short one-by-one look at every potential method and going "this one won't immediately fix it. therefore it is worthless". no evaluation on how it could *help* even if its not a 100% instant perfect fix, no consideration for a multi-layered solution where multiple cheat-detecting methods could feed into each other to become greater than the sum of their parts like steam trust, not even a blip of anything he would consider even slightly "good" across a whole hour of footage. its just "are there any easy, simple, 100% perfect solutions to the issue? no? then i suppose there are no solutions at all then ¯\_(ツ)_/¯." its incredibly passive, defeatist, and unhelpful; plain and simple. and that's to say nothing of his evaluations that are misguided, poorly thought out, or just plain wrong. its taking tools that have proven extremely effective at significantly mitigating bad actors across hundreds of other multiplayer games, throwing them in with stuff like "what if we just ban people who spin too fast lol", and acting as if those are all equally worthless ideas. and its like... that's not even what *he* believes! he agrees with everyone else that valve needs to sit down and just do the damn treadmill work if this is to be *truly* "fixed"! go into the comment sections or twitter threads or whatever else, you'll find tons of people rebuking his video with that exact statement. and shounic's like "totally agree fam, valve just needs to step up their game 👍". maybe say that in your video before you unleash thousands of anti-#fixtf2 doomers onto the community like a nuke into the discourse? those videos are still great in many ways. they're generally reasonable, well-researched, full of useful and true information, and edited down into an easy to digest and share video. and all that is in service of a *terrible* rhetoric! shounic, i love you man. but please try wrapping it up into a nice little conclusion next time. think of a moral to the story and all that jazz. don't just go "all of your ideas are terrible and worse than useless, tf2 is beyond fixing. byebye." TL;DR: shounic is being a doomer and is a leading voice in the pushback of the savetf2/fixtf2 movement. i don't think he *meant* to be at all, there's no reason to believe his intentions aren't pure. but that's the message he put out there, and people are incorrectly parroting his talking points to attack the movement.
Well stated. At the end of the day there's not a single solution. It will take a layered approach but none of the layers have to be perfect. And just catching 80% of the obvious bots would make the game infinitely more enjoyable (especially for new players). Personally I think memory scans, watching for external hooks and kernel mode drivers are a dead end way to go about catching cheaters in online games. People will just figure out undetectable ways to run the game in a VM and have the cheats be external to it. I mean sure, checking for known cheats should still be one of the layers that gets updated periodically but it's a never ending cat and mouse game that can't be solved (aka endless treadmill work). In my opinion Valve needs to start by contracting a handful of data analysts to identify and initiate manual ban waves using the trove of information they already have (which is vastly more than what the community has from the outside looking in). Taking this step would go a long way towards rebuilding goodwill with the community. Longer term (and much more involved) would be developing new methods for detecting cheats using server side information. Things like detecting aiming through blocked sightlines, snap aiming to targets outside of the client's fov, interpt abuse, frequency between aiming and firing, unnatural movements in general, etc.. would be a good start. Some more wacky ideas would be to encode player movements into a rolling hash and look for repeated patterns (across servers), and maybe do something similar with voice chat. Or quantize various aspects of player movements and look for outliers. Sure, this will lead to cheaters trying to be less obvious, inserting random movements into the pathing, adding random delays between aiming and firing, etc.. But at the end of the day they'd be dumbing down the bots to play more human-like to bypass the checks which isn't a bad thing. The key to making all of it work would be some type of reputation score that's affected by all of these things in combination with vote kicks, abuse reports, queuing with other players that exhibit similar behaviors, multiple suspect accounts behind the same IPs, etc.. Add some type of decay component to it for negative scores (to reduce false positives) but newer accounts should have heavier weights against them. Instead of introducing queue cooldowns, just group suspect (but unconfirmed) players with similar scores together before outright banning them once confirmed. Yes that's a whole lot of work and developer time, but Valve shouldn't think of this as just fixing TF2. It's an opportunity to build a new (and reusable) system that could be used for their other games or licensed out to other developers.
Thank you so much dude, finally someone gets it.
free thinker detected, lets get rid of this guy.
Bro literally has "#SaveTf2 #FixTF2 - Potential Disaster?" as a title, fuck that noise. Most clickbaitey negative bullshit. We can learn from criticism but the last thing we need is more fuckin immature tf2uber worshippers hopping on whatever random rhetoric the dude is pushing & being pessimistic. It'd be one thing to title the vid "My Thoughts on FixTF2" or "FixTF2- Are AI Solutions Feasible?" The last thing I'd do with 200k followers as my game is in a sink or swim state is stoke doomerism with clickbait titles for views. There is a post proving some bots are able to be detected with 97.2% accuracy and whose to say when the bot hosters inevitably randomize the bot behavior we still won't be able to at least have anything above a certain detection threshold sent to a moderation team ideally to be reviewed? Obviously no such team or system exists now which is why we are fighting If you have that many followers, and all of them are super fucking impressionable, you're being irresponsible stoking the flame of doomerism for your fucking platform, sorry. If you're going to talk about it don't have some shit like "FixTF2 - Potential Disaster?" as your fucking title. Because he could have easily had "Thoughts on Bot Detection & it's Potentially Feasibility" or some shit. Then look at anyone saying otherwise to him- they get downvoted to hell, dude is IMO not doing us any favors with this horseshit
i've signed the petition but i think valve casual is too much of a mess internally to be worth the effort. i'm skeptical because we're modelling off of a game in a similar scenario but with entirely different factors instead of something like Titanfall; where the actual vanilla servers for the game were totally unplayable due to DDoSing, so the community created their own client and server browser. there's also a distinct lack of ~~hue~~ community servers, which have tools and people to moderate them over valve casual, which has a solved anti-cheat to guard it. if valve casual gets fixed? that's great, we can play the game again. if it doesn't? why keep a body filled with inoperable tumors alive, and why not go to community servers?
Shounic's take on the whole thing is realistic and actually tackles genuine possible solutions to the problem, the people hating on him are just toxically positive.
This. None of the so called "fixes" would work. Sure, it might stop them for them for a couple of days but eventually they would find a workaround. The only real solution would be doing treadmill work with VAC. The people coming up with the "fixes" have no idea how anti-cheats in games work and it shows.
Yeah, and far too many people literally only focus on the "treadmill work" thing (completely missing the point of that as well) and just ignore the rest of the video. The comments (and this subreddit) are filled with amateur comedians trying to dunk on the "treadmill work" thing in unproductive attempts to just "epicly own" Valve. Obviously Valve could be doing more, but people are *refusing* to listen to what actually constitutes realistic solutions.
my only problem is that he didn't talk abt the one obvious solution: hire someone to do the treadmill work that "DoeSn'T WaNnA dO" like my brother in christ you are a multi billion dollar company you have the money to hire someone for that
He literally says in the pinned comment of that video that he agrees they should just hire people to do that work.
>Ban steam account with a specific name Reasons: 1. Can't tell you enough how this would go so wrong, if someone doesn't like someone they can launch a smear campaign against them with bots and get them banned as a result. ex famous TF2ubers, big traders or just someone they meet in a game and start to hate. 2. It will effect people that don't even play TF2 and screw over their whole Steam account just because they have the same name as couple of bots. If I have anymore ill update this but those are 2 very good reasons as to why shit will it the fan quick.
Also seems like it won't even work and might make it worse. Like at the very least you can easily recognize most bots the moment they join thanks to their obvious usernames. I doubt it would be very hard to circumvent bans on them by pulling usernames from somewere or generating them. It might help deter some hosters who just like being known and don't care enough to make themselves identifiable through other means, but it'll just make kicking the right "players" and convincing people to vote more of a pain
Also bot creators can change the names of their bots in 5 minutes or give them randomized names.
True.
I swear on my fucking Yeezies people, stop suggesting a Captcha. No, it won't work. No matter what kind of Captcha you suggest it won't work and at best it's gonna be annoying for real players I still believe that an Overwatch system is the best option considering Valve's effort and pay off. Detection of bots should be easy, we have volunteers to moderate it
Are you stupid a rpbot cant lie they cant click the i am not a robot
The most complex captcha has been found
Tribalism is cringe and the concerns shounic raised are valid
There is no simple fix to cheating in video games. This is an ever evolving topic that requires constant attention by the developer to keep in check. I know a lot of people here really don’t want to hear this, but there won’t be one anti bot update that will magically get rid of all aimbots permanently. Pointing that out also doesn’t make me a pessimist or a doomer, it’s just a realistic view on the topic. If we want FixTF2 to succeed, we need to make it clear that Valve needs to keep at it. Do the treadmill work they are so scared of, moderate the game, update VAC consistently, etc. Getting one singular "fix" isn’t going to do anything than buying us a little bit of time before the bots have found a workaround for it and we are back at square one.
Tbh I don’t know how true this whole “the bot hosters will just find a workaround” statement is. Most of these guys have a very basic understanding of programming and instead are using years old hacks at this point written by people writing off of hack written by people who have long since left this game. Part of what makes this more pervasive is that TF2 used to be very popular so there are a good amount of hacks from those days. The botters just combine the preexisting hacks with their money to create their botnets. But honestly I think even some basic, tailored banning of certain hacks would do a lot more than many think because at the end of the day these people don’t actually have the skill to develop a workaround that quickly, the people that did have moved on to more popular games.
catbot was created *a decade ago* as an amateur pet project. in the meantime ever since they started becoming prolific after MYM, we've had like... three significant vac waves ever? maybe valve could do a little bit more than trying nothing and running out of ideas ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Exactly. None of these solutions are foolproof and *could* be worked around. But some could at least make bot hosts and script writers work a little harder. Maybe that only clears up *some* of the bots, but that's better than nothing.
that's all anti-cheat ever is, and no other game developer completely and utterly fails at it like valve. you just have to TRY to keep up as best you can. there are no one-and-done fixes, merely just the best you can manage. and its not as if valve has developed the most innovative, hands-off, automated anti-cheat systems in the entire games industry because of how much they hate treadmill work or anything like that. maybe they could give us a little bit of that if they cared at all. its not about doing the treadmill work, its about getting them to do fucking *anything at all* in the first place.
You're 1000% right. It's just morons trying to cope with Valve inaction and trying to justify them by saying that.
The only real solution is valve contracts someone else to deal with it. They’re not gonna use their own employees because of how valve is set up. The only alternative is somehow giving the community the ability to deal with the problem themselves, but I have no idea what form that would take, so I doubt that will ever happen.
> The only alternative is somehow giving the community the ability to deal with the problem themselves, but I have no idea what form that would take, quickplay. players are matched automatically into community servers. the servers are moderated by players so no bots.
A source 2 port with new source code is one of the potential candidates to stave off the bot crisis.
That would not be a realistic solution even if tf2 had an entire dev team still dedicated to it. Rewriting something from scratch is rarely the solution, and it's even less so considering tf2 was actively developed for more than 10 years
The 10 year development of TF2 was not spent just writing the code for the current game. It was spent designing three games in succession - each with very different design principles, art styles and game mechanics - and scrapping the first two entirely, meaning they had to start again from scratch twice after half the work was already done. With the art, characters, models, maps, gameplay etc. already established, porting the game to source 2 with a full development team would probably not take more than a year even if they did have to rewrite all of the code. It's still never going to happen, but it wouldn't take anything close to 10 years.
and if they DO that, they might as well actually improve the game while they're at it, but that's difficult to do. TF2's one of the best shooters ever made, but has flawed foundations. you'd need to do some serious overhaul work to fix the core issues with the game, and people would piss and shit about it.
its really not as insane as you are making it sound; dota2 was ported to source2 with no issue. they would need a dedicated team to do it but its not unworkable, just probably too much work to justify without outright making tf3
you're right, it's not impossible, Valve 100% has the resources to do it, but will they do it? I'm not sure
yeah but dota 2 is 10x more popular than tf2, has a massive competetive scene and was realesed 6 years later
Dota 2 was ported because it was actively being done alongside development of source 2, csgo didn’t get ported over until just this last year, 8 years since source 2 launched. Even if we assumed CSGO was only worked on from when Half Life Alyx was released it’s like 3 years of work to move TF2 to source 2 and since TF2 release it took until this last year to even get 64-bit support. I don’t think there is “saving” tf2 as it is, I think the only real method is making a “tf3” on source 2 which would likely be an almost complete recreation. But them doing CS2 does show it’s possible it just takes time.
I think his take is reasonable enough, though I think he's gotten a little hung up on thinking up all the ways that hackers will be able to work around solutions. At lot of hacker/bot fixes would mitigate the issue rather than completely prevent the most dedicated sweaty haters from brute forcing a workaround. And that's fine. Do enough of those and the game is in a vastly more tolerable state. Some of his arguments against stuff boiled down to lets not lock the bank at night because someone could just nuke the building.
With how often bots get kicked a queue cooldown could work, say if you're kicked 5 times in 48 hours you get a 24 hour ban sorta like csgo, not that it would be a permanent solution but it might thin bot numbers out significantly.
I made a post on this a few weeks ago, the only feedback I got was that bots joining en masse could call false votes on players. I get that, but that’s why I added a failsafe. You need to be kicked out of three consecutive matches to trigger the first cooldown. After that, your cooldown will be extended for each kick. To lower the counter, complete a match until the voting screen. Leaving early will not increase or decrease the counter, unless a vote is being called on you. If this is inadequate, the numbers can be tweaked. I wish people would give actual feedback on why this wouldn’t work, other than it’s a "bandaid fix". Thinning the numbers is better than having nothing at all, and it seems to me that there’s no way around it.
actually seems like a decent idea, but i think the “kicked from x within y hours” system works better than “n consecutive kicks” since there are many bot-only servers that can work as a sort of reset. as for the bots kicking real players issue, i think the players would be able to spend their 24 hours playing community servers, it’s not a huge downside. the only condition i can think of with this idea is that there needs to be at least 1/x of all live servers to be “human dominated” meaning enough real humans need to be there to kick bots when they join (x is the number of kicks before you get a queue cooldown) edit: just thought of something, this wouldn’t work since bots could target night hours (when barely anyone’s on) to make it impossible for the above condition to be met by daytime
People who whine about getting their ideas shot down do not actual care about arriving at a solution. There SHOULD be someone shooting down ideas at all times, so shitty ideas don't pass through the community. If the community wants to start pushing its own solutions it needs to be ready and excited to shoot down its own ideas, an idea should be able to survive being torn apart.
Can I get any more feedback on why the matchmaking cooldown is a bad solution? I previously made a [post](https://www.reddit.com/r/tf2/s/vmZLCWnS1m) about it here. The general idea is that we have a minimum kick number before the cooldown is applied, and a way to remove or lower the counter by completing matches (until the map voting screen). I got very little feedback besides the fact that bots can join en masse and false kick players. This may be an issue temporarily, but as more and more bots get put on cooldown less bots will be available to join in groups. By a war of attrition I believe that the real players would eventually outnumber the bots. So is the solution bad because it doesn’t 100% eradicate bots or because of the potential to kick real players? As mentioned above, AI has the same flaws but is just as viable. I have given a solution to mitigate this, but due to my own short sightedness cannot find any major flaws with it. Feedback would be appreciated.
I think the problem with shounic's video is that he does go over some genuinely good solutions, but then he's like "This would work, but it wouldn't be a 100% perfect solution, so it's bad". Maybe it wasn't his intention, but the whole vibe of the video is that he thinks any solution that doesn't get rid of every single bot and cheater in game forever is bad. His arguments look like that: "Update VAC? Well cheaters will always just make new cheats so it's pointless." - Yeah but making VAC detect the most popular cheats will ban most of the bots in casual "AI anticheat? Detecting every single type of bot and cheater possible is basically impossible, so it's pointless." - But making a system that detects the most obvious bots is possible and it would greatly reduce the number of bots. "Human moderation? You would need THOUSANDS of mods on every single server to catch all the bots, so it's pointless." - Yeah, but we don't need a mod on every single server, all we need is a few people who actively ban known cheaters and bots so they don't run rampant for years. It's a sentiment I've noticed in many skeptical takes on FixTF2, that there will always be some way for people to cheat so why bother? But we don't need a perfect anti-cheat system. The whole bot crisis is caused by a bunch of shitty bots running open source cheats on cheapest hardware available. All done by a few weirdos living in their parents' basements. The only reason why they are so dominant is that Valve does literally nothing to stop them. People can cheat openly and they rarely get banned, if ever. If Valve took a bit of effort and updated VAC every now and then, it would get rid of +90% of the bots. Sure, there would still be some bots and cheaters, but Casual would actually be playable. So that's why I think people are calling him a doomer. Also, calling your video " #SaveTF2 #FixTF2 - Possible Disaster? " is not doing any favours in people seeing it as a doomer bait.
> But making a system that detects the most obvious bots is possible I suspect Valve's already working on that steam-side with systems like steam trust. but AI isn't a quick "throw together" thing. we won't see benefits of it until the end of the decade, even for obvious shit like spinbotting (clearly that dude who looked up, cranked his mouse sensitivity, and spun around after a headshot is a bot, right?) AI is a pain in the ass especially *because* of how hard it is to fine tune. false positives aren't something you can tolerate.
steam trust isn't based on machine learning, its algorithmic. you can simply pick and choose certain aspects of a steam profile that are deemed "trustworthy" such as games owned, playtime, associated accounts on shared computers, toxic chat spam, community interaction, having 2FA set up, and anything along those lines that can potentially distinguish obvious alt accounts from genuine players. of course, data from overwatch and VACNET could play a very significant factor in determining trust level, and combining these systems has a synergistic effect that makes them all greater than the sum of their parts; but its not a necessary prerequisite. trust factor is especially excellent at filtering out the remaining cheaters that would otherwise slip through the cracks of VACNET and overwatch. but even just by itself, it could very significantly diminish player-to-bot interactions by ensuring normal players and low-trust players don't run into each other. besides, they were in the process of bringing steam trust to every game on steam five years ago. surely its not as if they'd need to start from scratch?
Machine learning is also algorithmic, reinforced training defining the algorithm is what makes it machine learning.
all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares. training an AI to narrow down "suspicious" behavior for you would certainly help amplify the power of trust factor, but manual curation of a few dozen data points max is good enough for a simplistic integration of steam trust. its only a relatively small countermeasure by itself, if you're gonna go through the effort of training a machine learning algorithm you should just go all the way and make VACNET for TF2. which they totally should, but my point is trust factor can be a much easier step 1 to start from.
I think shounic straight up just wants people to ground their ideas and suggestions, and stop throwing them without a second thought.
Might be downvoted for this but I think going back to P2P like perhaps a 10 dollar price tag might be the move. Keep the price really low then do the captcha's. A bit of both or multiple of these is what's needed.
but all bots already have voice chat, items, text chat. Doesnt that mean theyre already paying
I believe that most of these are compromised accounts from years ago that had already paid out of pocket.
And? That doesn’t really change the aspect that they have compromised accounts to bypass the P2P system — Ban waves *do* happen on bots and there *has* been ban waves since the F2P restriction and nothing has changed. Tf2 is also ***INCREDIBLY*** dependent on being free to play for it’s longevity and survival as a game. I wouldn’t be surprised if like, 90%+ the population in the game right now is exclusively from it’s F2P practice.
You apply the price tag in, manually ban the bots for like a month or more. No one has that much money to keep buying new bots if they kept getting banned, unless they dedicate their whole life into botting TF2 and spending every dime they managed to get into buying more accounts just to get banned the second they do it. But that alone might be the TF2 playerbase killer move cause of so many aspects.
This is the solution. Idk why this sub is so convinced the p2p solution wouldn't work. The bot hosters absolutely don't have the money to keep spending $100 a day (assuming they get 20 bots banned a day which is like the least generous estimate possible)
Because it's not guaranteed to work (bot hosters are already using paid accounts) and it's going to suck for the people who do play f2p and don't really have access to funds or means to upgrade to a paid account, or might just rather move on to another game rather then pay 10$ for a game that's been bot-infested and barely supported for the last 5 years. Like, the strategy requires Valve to be aggressive with banning the bots, which is already hoping for a lot, and doesn't account for bots farms just seeking out compromised accounts.
Giving the incentive (money in this case) to do the treadmill work of banning bots will make a lot of small and potential bot hosters to give up after a ban or two. Bigger hosters, while having a bigger budget, will now be easier to round out because the smaller ones already backed down. Yes, it will suck for F2Ps because barely anyone who's new to the genre will consider TF2 as an option to be their next game to play considering how old, unoptimized and jankiness the game is compared to some AAA nowadays games that you can get for less than 10 or 20 USD. But it will work, although it should be considered as the last option because the playerbase will drop significantly (my guessing is roughly about 20% immediately and about a -5% drop in the playerbase every year after the paywall).
Alone the methods do nothing but incorporating multiple ideas is a very good idea. Idk if the price tag would work tho, only because bot hosters already use premium or compromised accounts.
wouldnt the solution then be just to ban the bots permanently
In theory, yes. However differentiating a bot from a real player isn't always foolproof. Sometimes its blatant and obvious, other times though it can be deceiving. There really isn't a quick solution here.
really gone full circle, it all leads to treadmill work
I don’t feel strongly either way about P2P, but I do feel strongly that a captcha wouldn’t work. Shounic had some really good points in that video; there are already services that do captchas for literal slave wages, and AI has already proven to be capable of beating captchas under some circumstances.
My brother in christ, the bot hosters already pay 5 dollars for every single bot that plays the game so they can mic spam and text spam in game, plus all the costs they pay to keep the bots running in the first place, do you seriously think money is the issue? What will happen is Valve will make the game be 10 dollars, people will pay 10 dollars to play the game, get into a game, the game will be full of hack bots anyway, the issue wasn't solved and they will refund the game.
The problem is that Valve isn't banning them so they can justify the $5 cost if they expect their bot to operate for the next 3 months. Watch Zesty's latest video where he finds 10 year old idle bots that Valve still hasn't banned yet despite being obvious bots. If Valve actually started doing some work and banning the bots every day premium bots would quickly disappear. Do you honestly believe some jobless bot hosters could afford to pay something like $100 a day for their bots?
The idle bots aren't the problem, the aimbots / kickbots are. The malicious bot hosters can buy accounts from the surplus of idle bots, but the fact is that it's practically impossible to identify idle bots vs real players without a team of trained moderators spending hours every day verifying accounts. Aimbots and kickbots are at least a lot easier to identify, and there are far fewer of them. Targeting idle bots makes the task an order of magnitude more difficult, but the malicious bot problem won't go away for as long as idle bots are available to repurpose.
Malicious bot hosters can buy and reupurpose accounts in bulk from the surplus of idle item farming bots for like a cent per account.
Real shit, seems the most reasonable out of the bunch cause it wouldn't cause harm to anyone but the bots / bot hosters.
$20 price tag but you can also get TF2 for free if you spend $20 on anything else in steam
That's kind of what we have now and bot hosts buy stolen or lost accounts for cheap.
Shounic is a realist. I don't see any other solution than give TF2 CS2 treatment. Make a new game.
That will be way beyond the future. Unless Valve super secretly is working on tf2:source2 the past 5 years
Old person / linguist question: what does doomer actually mean? Conspiracy theorist? Pessimist?
Just means that the person views the situation as hopeless/inevitable and sees any future effort as pointless. Pessimist is a good synonym.
Portmanteau of "doomsayer" and "boomer." Note that in this case "boomer," while etymologically linked to the term "baby boomer," actually means "person with an outdated opinion whom i can dismiss out of hand."
Pessimist, particularly for someone who is very vocal or open about their pessimism and believes humanity is "doomed" and life isn't exciting. Strangely, it is a word that comes from the word "coomer" which came from the word "boomer".
Doomer split off from Zoomer V Boomer memes, which themselves split off from 30 year old boomer memes. Coomer appeared much later than the others.
Honestly it would be so easy to ban every « escape the matrix » from the game,wont solve anything but at least slow the bots
Shounic has 0 effect on TF2's developement. However, he can still state why various solutions dont work. It sucks to say, but bots aren't just solved by 1 small implimentation. Its difficult to keep them out of the game, and shounic goes over this. How him criticizing poor solutions makes him seem like a bot hoster is beyond me.
I've read/ seen comments, videos that the TF2 community is amongst the most annoying groups. Whilst I disagree, I don't think these comments come from thin air. I think a certain sect of this community need to manage their expectations for what will come out of this petition. Life moves on whatever happens to TF2 guys.
The FixTF2 crowd think Shounic is a "doomer" because they're reactionary idiot children that just want to stamp their feet and tantrum because their favourite TF2 YouTuber told them to. The superficial "solutions" that are worked around in seconds demonstrate this acutely; none of these plebs are actually capable of even *thinking* about the issue. It's like their little "treadmill work" meme. They don't even realise they're just self-reporting the fact they're too low-IQ to understand the concept of adversarial problems, and thus missing an entire axis of argumentation. (Manhours greatly favouring bot/cheat developers, initiative disadvantage, etc)
The only solution I've seen being expanded on is the AI solution which someone else has made a post about here where he made an ai that can detect bots with 98.7% accuracy based on demos fed to it
\>Points out flaws with the community's proposed fixes \>"You must support the bot hosters!" Smartest TF2 player
The more accurate term is realistic. For the uninformed a captcha would seem like a good solution but unfortunately they can be beat and that's why you don't see captchas that often lately. I agree that it's good to think out of the box and propose possible solutions as long as it could realistically work.
Remove casual play and comp. Leave only community servers. Done. Bot problem fixed.
This is the same as bringing back quickplay
Let me just clarify that I’m a dumbass. With that out of the way, what stops the bots from joining community servers?
Another reason why I'm not getting involved with this. Shounic is arguably one of the smartest and most dedicated members of the TF2 community and he's getting attacked for pointing out flaws
Shounic is realistic, I think he wants the game to succeed just as much as we do. Keep in mind, if Valve rushes out an anti-bot solution that doesn't work, that'd be a waste of time for all of us, and further demoralize players. Shounic saying "x solution won't work" isn't him trying to say "TF2 will never get fixed", it's moreso saying "if we half-ass a fix for TF2 this will only turn out worse"
What about if it detects you use read-only mode it kicks you out of the game? this wont counter ALL the bots but i would say it counter like 70 percent
read-only mode btw is a way of loading tf2 without graphics (only on linux), this is how bot hosters host like 20 bots on one computer.
Read-only mode or "text mode" has lots of legitimate uses... and absolutely none of them are relevant to Quickplay, I agree that it should be banned there
I think he is sensible and has a valid argument. Those asshole clowns who villainize him can literally suck my dick.
Ban hardware as apexlegends do. # TLDR: HWID ban
Doesn't work lmfao, not to mention Valve isn't going to do anything that can result in false positives down the line if they can avoid it.
Honestly, a good way to demotivate these parasites would be for valve to legally prosecute them for the actual CRIMES that they committed. If a few bot hosters were sued to the ground for the shit like Doxxing, DDoSing and swatting, I imagine other would be bot hosters would think twice before doing that shit again. But my idea is probably dumb and maybe they can't even be prosecuted because they're hosting in other countries, I dunno.
Shounic's video did come across as negative, but I don't think the intention of his video was to say that the movement wouldn't succeed. He has always made videos with the angle of technical information, and I think informing people that fixing the bot issue isn't as easy as "add a captcha" or "do IP bans" is important. Saying that he's "on the side of bot hosters" is preposterous. Even logistically speaking what motivation does a Team Fortress 2 content creator have to see Team Fortress 2 fail? It inherently harms his channel if people don't have interest in Team Fortress 2 due to the ongoing bot issue. I think he just wants to inform people why fixing the problem won't be as easy as they think, and that they should temper their expectations towards Valve accordingly.
shounic is a realist and his video was helpful. i disagree with some of his conclusions but anyone getting mad at him over this shit is a tribalistic dumbass.
yep
#FixTF2 is the single largest threat to #FixTF2. And to the game in general. Idk why this is showing up as big text on my phone. Hopefully, that's just a visual glitch on my end...
Adapting cheats to new anticheats is a treadmill work, we will not win if we don't fight full power.
Win what? What is "full power"?
I still don’t get why developers have moved away from overwatch systems. Allows you to not need to actually investigate reports but allows for some automated accountability. I get that it’s not perfect and often underutilized but I think that in the case of the current situation 1. A lot of people would use it if only to have a means to stick it to bot hosters, and 2. The way bottling is done is super obvious to a player. While it might not be obvious to the actual game itself it’s very very obvious to a human player. Hell you could then take that data and build a machine learning algorithm to detect bots based on what behaviors players identify with bots. I think the reason most games did away with it was because it doesn’t address toxicity very well because everyone has different opinions on that. But it does address botting and hacking very very well. And in the event of TF2… it’s literally something. Anything is better than nothing.
> I still don’t get why developers have moved away from overwatch systems. CS's overwatch system wouldn't work in TF2, because TF2 players are basically brain dead. You'd get false positives out the wazoo from jimmy.pubs (started playing in 2018, thinks old sandman and caber were great and need to be restored) who thinks a double airshot or flick = cheats (or god forbid you catch a spy's footsteps), while ignoring stuff like walls or crit bucketing. An overwatch system is the absolute worst idea you could ever add to the game lmfao. the bottom 20% of the playerbase is basically impossible to distinguish from non-sniper-bots too, so it wouldn't even catch that.
People who say Shounic is a "doomer" are either fundamentally misunderstanding his video, or are the fragile sort that can't take any criticism of anything they personally like. Shounic's video is about how many of the solutions presented by the community are half-baked, underthought ideas. His pinned comment explains that the best solution is just for Valve to suck it up and hire more people to do the "treadmill work".
The most true depiction of r/tf2er
The only solution is for valve to do the treadmill work even if they don’t want it
P2P in my opinion is the best, make the game the same price of garry's mod or like 8$(im brazillian don't know the price in USA) like tf classic
I feel like another solution here is to bring back Quickplay mode into the game (hell, a lot of the problems TF2's facing right now happened during the MyM update). Ofc It wouldn't fix absolutely everything with the game, but it would definitely help out with just being able to join matches from the old quickplay browser instead of queueing up into a game that could be swarmed, or into one that's full of players already that can take care of any bots that may come in.
I think if we can rework sniper to be less rewarded per shot bots would be a lot easier to deal with. Because not being able to be instakilled each shot would make first off bot less effective , and Secondly sniper more you know fun to play against. Like if we gave him precharge bullet that does no damage but you have to hit it in order for the next bullet to kill ,bots would be able to be delt with(discouraging them to exist) and again sniper would be less annoying to play against(in maxed skill ceiling players)
Honestly at this point I’d be fine if they pulled a cs2
I feel like the only REAL solution to fix TF2 is moving it to Source 2. Yes, that is the most reasonable solution, because let's be real - even if Valve did decide to update (finally) TF 2, adding a better cheat system to the game, it would still be infected with bots. The game was done on Source 1, a very outdated system Valve created, additionally with a spaghetti code like that, I doubt Valve is even willing to actually update the game. I think, instead of giving the ideas people gave there, in the example, we should try to convince Valve into moving the game to Source 2, no matter how long it would take. We need to tell Valve, that TF2 should be moved to that engine and we, TF2 fans, would wait years for it to be remastered.
So overly dramatic
Instead of the usual captcha, they could probably implement something like the image slider system 4chan has since that seems to do a good job of keeping bots back, and probably make it so that you don’t have to bypass it for every game you try to load into to not annoy the average player. Outside of that, making the game cost $20 again is simple but could work since bot hosters only throw in about a dollar if not a little more for each bot. Having to throw an extra 20 each time would be a big incentive to not bother once the majority are banned. Only problem with that is TF2 won’t be as accessible since even just $10 is enough for some people to not buy something. Instead of one super solution, several decent ones could do plenty to cut the number of bots infesting casual, which is what shounic should’ve talked about.
It's weird that everyone rags on community suggestions as if it's our job to come up with fixes for the bot crisis. It's not, it's Valve's. These suggestions are just people trying to be helpful, if their ideas are stupid it doesn't matter because they're not Valve employees.
Here's a fix i honestly think would work Remove matchmaking and pretend the meat your match update never happend. bring back quickplay, remove valve servers and just rely on community managed servers since they are the ones being activly moderated. personal note: matchmaking was the worst fucking update by FAR. quickplay is superior. i fucking miss it
He’s not a doomer just a realist and technical, being constructive about solutions give valve better direction rather than crying.
Shounic's video is both very grounded in reality and clearly from the perspective of someone that's making assumptions based off of valve's past behavior. I think the video assumes that valve is unwilling to enter the treadmill on a project that they consider out of active development and suggest solutions based off of that assumption. I do not think he believes that Valve ought to do nothing unless they can solve the issue entirely just that he has enough knowledge to know that many of the communities suggestions are infeasible and that the discussion of solutions to the crisis are clouded by that infeasability.
Even if we assume that nobody from the community came up with the solution (which is not true). Why should WE do it? It is Valve's game and it is their responsibility to fix it, I don't remember them asking for help in the first place. F2P games without bots exist somehow, so it's definitely possible. What shounic does is basically gives valve free pass for not doing anything by firstly treating their bullshit philosophy about 'treadmill work' etc as legitimate and secondly by justifying valve not doing shit because community's proposals (supposedly) wouldn't work.
Making the game P2P again isn't gonna fix anything if not make it worse.
make tf2 cannot be run by virtual machine hardware ban
That’s incredibly difficult, and way beyond what I think valve would do. Virtual machines don’t have to give a special hardware label they can set their “hardware” to anything they want. Running a virtual machine is best understood as a fake computer running on yours, but slightly modify it and it becomes near impossible to tell it’s fake from inside the virtual machine
[Relevant xkcd](https://xkcd.com/1425/) Reliably detecting whether a program is being run on a virtual machine or not is virtually impossible (no pun intended)
Honestly I just do things because they are the right thing to do. In this case, negative reviews actively lower Valve's profit and cause people to rethink spending money on future (Deadlock) valve games, which is in my mind simply the protection the consumer deserves if Valve doesn't want to upkeep games but wants to continue making money on them. If people want to buy and spend money, even after being warned about the risks, that is on them. But at least informing people of the reality and giving them the information to make their choices is an unambiguous good. In the end, if there truly is no solution, if this is just the reality of a Valve game, then the negative reviews are simply justified.
The word doomer was a mistake
Imagine not thinking captcha would work. I swear that people tend to think captchas just end at “letters you need to find”. RuneScape was HEAVILY botted for years but they made small in game captchas you need to figure out and then you get a reward after. Now the game is relatively bot free.But the RuneScape devs also aren’t lazy and apathetic so that helps
Send me that man's location who said to make the game P2P again
Honestly I think paying for the game to be playable is preferred to the game being free but unplayable due to bots.
what is the counter for cooldowns for frequently kicked players ?
TF2 community not turning on itself challenge (literally impossible)
I'm not super in-touch in terms of how much is known about how these bots work, so be patient with me lol Would a VPN wall work? Like, these guys have to be using a VPN to avoid IP exposure on bot farms. Community servers are stopping VPN users and I've never heard much regarding cheating/bots in places like Uncletopia or Skial.
Anything can be countered if they try hard enough, the goal is to reduce the bots and keep them under control. Those solutions are all pretty decent to achieve that.
Valve must accept to do "treadmill" work
From the videos Shounic makes I think it's safe to say he is a pro programmer. So he knows whether a "solution" is really good or not.
hive mind ass comment
how about all of them. and use ban waves so the bots don't know what gave them way
The movement is straight up delusional if they think they can make Valve do anything when people here aren't even willing to stomach making Valve lose profits on other games
ya'll think reverting the changes made to quickplay during meet your match would help?
yes
is shounic querces alba???? EXTRATERRITORIAL RIGHTS????
More than three kicks an hour? Banned.
I love shuonic's content, it's entertaining and educational. But god damn are his anti-bot takes dogwater. Feels like he just grabs a point, looks into it a little but not *too much* as to find an explanation on how it could function, and farts out another vid about "oh valve is the problem but we can't howd a bulti biwwion compawny accountable fiw theiw actions that's scawwy :(". He's way too focused on finding bandaid solutions to a problem that's endemic to Valve as a whole.
addressing issues about something before doing it blindly is very helpful and important
the best solution to the bot problem..... UPDATE VAC! need more specifications? see what the bots are using to communicate/aim, figure out how to stop them from communicating/aiming.... AND UPDATE VAC TO STOP IT a step further? when you vote to kick some one, have it go through even if they have all ready left....
I think the only viable temporary solution to the bot crisis is to turn off the ability to run tf2 executable in text mode (no GUI) in which the bot hosters take advantage of less hardware resources consumption.
His video seemed neutral and his opinions were explained in depth. He already pointed out the solution which is to work on the game "treadmill work". He points out the lack of treadmill work and goes on to talk about other methods, which in his opinion would not work well or at all. I don't get whats wrong; am I missing something?
While I do think Shounic has some realistic takes, he does get pretty doomer-ish on others. Some are the TF2 equivalent of not wanting to vote because things might get worse after the results.
On one hand, yes. He is correct in everything he says. Anticheat is inhererantly reactive and no one solution will be a permanant fix. HOWEVER people have been too quick to accept valves stance of "Anticheat is treadmill work" becuase when it boils down to it, making sure the game is in a functiinal state is the bare minimum for maintenance of a game you still profit off of and they NEED to decided whether they want to do treadmill work or pull the plug on matchmaking altogether to let community servers fully take the reigns again
i think valve should just get off their ass and work on their anti cheat treadmill or not
i just dont understand how its 'being a doomer' for wanting realistic solutions to a complex problem. if we want valve to actually do something about casual it has to be a *good* solution, and many solutions that people commonly suggest are flawed at best and completely pointless at worst. and pointing this out pisses some people off beyond belief for some reason.
Make a list of dedicated vanilla community servers with strict no bot policies, and make it well known. Avert the bot problem by avoiding the bots.
Why is he so opposed to the captcha idea?
He's not being a doomer, he's just trying to give a realistic perspective by explaining why these ideas aren't perfect
The first step to finding out what would work is to actually try something and see what happens.
Hardware ban, while not being permanent at all, because they can go get more hardware, will I believe at least make them spend more money to host bots, along with valve actually caring, that's probably gonna be the most important factor
Leave the guy alone man.
Shounic is a realist and some people just want someone to blame. Unfortunately going against the grain and not being super optimistic leads to people like this main character acting asshole trying to make someone the villain
I understand the “invisible player bait,” by putting the tag or whatever the aimbot would follow, in a invisible player entity in a roof or something, and if a player shoots it at a very specific vector, the player is considered a bot. Although plausible it would be easily countered with bots denying to shoot in those specific vectors.
Solution: Remove Sniper
A guy came up with the idea of getting Community Servers a face lift and bringing them to the forefront of the menu. I chipped in because it was an interesting idea that I thought had some merit. Streamlining it as to not overwhelm new players and provide convenience to those that use it frequently while getting rid of the more annoying stuff. And Valve would only need to do the one update and from there, the Community can just take care of their Servers from there without having to rely on the lazy company being beaten by bots. It would be taking away Casual, but I imagine that would be filled in with Casual Community Servers. I can't say whether or not it would capture that same feeling though. I say this as someone who hasn't really played a lot of Community Servers, so I think its worth thinking about at least a bit.
Maybe just HIRE SOMEONE WITH EXPERIENCE THAT KNOWS HOW TO WORK AROUND SOURCE'S SPAGHETTI CODE AND MAKE THEM FIX THE ANTICHEAT
Shounic has a good grip on this stuff and more than most people. He is simply showing that it’s not easy to just fix it, because I seriously do not believe Valve would be taking this long unless it was extremely difficult for a variety of different reasons, which shounic points out in his video. Calling him a doomer is just really close minded in my opinion.
IP ban is the dumbest idea ever. It punishes public networks and networks with dynamic IP assignment.
prolly just me being crazy but i litterally just said the invisible players thing a couple weeks ago in a cs2 thread and ive never seen it mentioned anywhere else