#saveTF2
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- čas přidán 31. 05. 2024
- Music: BananaSlug ( / user-426347780 )
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[ todo list / current progress on upcoming videos / channel roadmap ]
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timestamps
00:00 summary of the situation
01:42 category 1: quick fixes
01:46 the treadmill problem
03:21 valve's company size vs others
03:51 suggestion 1: ban all steam accounts with a specific name
05:03 suggestion 2: IP ban all the bots
05:49 suggestion 3: hardware ban all the bots
08:38 suggestion 4: invisible players to bait bots
09:52 suggestion 5: delete all the navmeshes
10:44 category 2: solutions
10:46 suggestion 1: captcha
12:34 suggestion 2: forms of human authentication
12:40 steam guard
13:45 phone number verification
14:23 identification cards
14:49 suggestion 3: stop tf2 linux support
17:38 suggestion 4: queue cooldown
18:54 suggestion 5: prime matchmaking
21:19 suggestion 6: trust factor
22:54 suggestion 7: VACNET
24:06 suggestion 8: csgo's overwatch
28:23 suggestion 9: extremely invasive and aggressive anti cheat
31:00 suggestion 10: legal action - sue cheaters
32:56 category 3: interim solutions, imo
34:43 category 4: what i think they've been doing
36:39 this video's intent
___ (some) references ___
june 16th patch
www.teamfortress.com/post.php...
gambling commission letters
www.scribd.com/document/32655...
techraptor.net/gaming/news/up...
john mcdonald's GDC talk
• Robocalypse Now: Using...
gabe @ linuxcon 2013
• Linux really is the fu...
valorant vs virtual machine
• Indian Man Beats VALOR...
protondb
www.protondb.com/
ido's comment on Trust Factor
/ fpybtcz
big thanks to:
uncle dane, mitch, tony bamanaboni, gold, loudlux, hoste, mountain, & doomy for various help on the video
FAQ:
Q: How did you make that? What editing software do you use?
A: I use Adobe Photoshop, Premiere Pro & After Effects. Photoshop for image editing and thumbnails. Premiere Pro for compositing and After Effects for motion graphics (the fancy animations). - Hry
edit: quick clarification, i fucked up not making this clearer, but i'm partly also trying to convey what valve might be thinking - answering why valve might not have done X solution yet. i don't personally hold the views i argue as a devil's advocate. i understand you don't need everything to be perfect, valve could just do some soft fixes. but the treadmill is self admitted by valve employees to be a problem of concern, so that's why i'm trying to illustrate that perspective. i personally am not trying to ask for perfection or say they must go for only the best most fool proof solution.
---
HELLO
first time making such a massive video. let me know if you have any feedback about the video :)
also, i one-take'd the voice recording when i usually recording everything multiple times over - sorry if it's bad. script was just too long to do multiple takes
Why would the script be bad? It's so good
Shounic, is not just developing a better anti-cheat a solution? VAC is a completely archaic anti-cheat with a design philosophy from the 90s. Most games use anti-cheats that use kernel-level components. FACEIT has no issue with cheating in CS:GO or TF2 due to their kernel-level anti-cheat. Same with Easy Anti-Cheat. Valorant also has the best anti-cheat development in the entire video game industry. It's odd to say these anti-cheats are 'invasive' when... that's linked to the entire purpose of anti-cheat.
Perhaps make it a server cvar to require connecting to the server using a new kernel-level anticheat, and people who are too scared to use the new anticheat can stick to VAC """secure""" servers. Regardless, loved the video.
@@xMrPhantofulx i'm pretty sure there have been videos of people cheating on faceit servers.
@@chairinspace7956 he didn't say the script was bad, he just said sorry if the voice over was bad because the script was so long
@@xMrPhantofulx bots cheating is a secondary concern. the main problem is still just that there's lots of fake players that people don't want. if you somehow perfectly ban cheating you still have lots of fake players clogging the servers. + as i said in the video, perfect cheat measures and limits just means they get limited to human ability which is still very good and disruptive
>Maybe players should have to submit a DNA sample before they’re allowed into Steam servers.
>This doesn’t work because cheaters can simply buy artificial human DNA online at rates of $1 per hundred-million sequences.
>Well shit.
they cant keep getting away with it
@@methanesulfonic THEY CANT KEEP GETTING AWAY WITH IT
Remove the sniper class.
The cheating will stop, and who's gonna stop it? They're sniper mains, they don't get to choose lol
@@evangonzalez7732 this is the worst and most selfish solution i have ever seen
@@crxw4 it's also...
A j o k e.
It feels so disheartening that so many possible solutions are instantly shot down with "there's a website that can be used to circumvent it."
yep, its really sucks
Ppl dont often realize how easy it is to cause problems and how hard it is to fix them
@@Ultra289 That is surprisingly universal and depressing.
@@Ashe1001 and worse of all is that not only applies to fixing cheating issues or bugs...
Welcome to the world of programming
The fact that there's a community of people dedicated to cheating and ruining games is just infuriating.
I don’t get why no one has tracked down the people hosting the bots and killed them yet lol
@@meat. due to jail and lack of currency we are unable to assasinate them
@@meat. you'd be a bigger loser wasting time tracking down trolls to kill them over a video game. which is why no one has done it
@@meat. Because ending someone's life over a fucking video game is something pretty heinous.
because bots arent as bad as people that actively forcefully shut down game servers potentially permanantly
The goal would never be make it "impossible" for bots to join the game, the goal should only be to make bots too much of a hastle to bother at the current scale.
I had that feeling as well. The more I thought about valve not wanting it to be a "treadmill problem" I realized, cheating and bots are ALWAYS a treadmill problem. It never ends so complaining that they don't want to spend the time on it is just absurd.
@@user-ee6ng4bb9l It’s deadass valve employees being lazy lmao
@@aylmao1230 Oh no, i have to maintain a game that brings in money instead of doing nothing and getting paid, how horrible! - Valve employee
There are likely enough dedicated botters willing to clear any new hurdles and disrupt the game that you wouldn't even notice an improvement if you dissuaded some from botting. And once the more talented members of that black hat community find a workaround to any new barrier, the bottom feeders will come back. If that new barrier also impacts the human community of players (e.g. CAPTCHA, timed queue lockouts), then that's a win for the botters.
@@aylmao1230 Stupid comment.
I'd like to say that the fact the game got two updates fixing ancient bugs means (in my eyes) that there is people that wanted to fix TF2 for a long time, and only now they can.
you do know that those were just 2 of the probably hundreds of bug fixes COMMUNITY members fixed and just sent over to valve right?
you do know those fixes were made by community right? they were just sent over to valve
But do you realize that these are community updates, right?? They're being sent to Valve in the mail.
If they wanted to fix tf2 they would've done so a long time ago. Valve let's its workers work on whatever they want so if someone wanted to work in tf2 they would be allowed to.
@@bagofbananas790 you would think so but internal reports from balve show that senior employees can basically bully lower employees to work on more "important" things. happened with Alyx, the Steam Deck and countless other projects. savetf2 was the kick to prove that tf2 is important enough to care about.
4:20
"So you would literally ban everyone on steam called Twilight Sparkle"
Some of you may die, but it is a sacrifice I am willing to make
"Nice, we got rid of all the bots!"
"...bots?"
“Nothing of value was lost today”
A certified Trixie Moment™.
@@blobbem You sold at life.
I see this as an absolute win!
The true solution: For every 10 kills in a killstreak, you have to solve a timed pop-up CAPTCHA
This wouldn't work, because bots would be programmed to commit suicide using kill/explode commands at 9-kill streak
@@750TheBossit’s a joke
@@HexSaber that comment was also a joke about how in the video every solution like that gets refuted, like the captcha argument in the video stating that the captcha could just be outsourced to a human to do it for them or a program that auto-solves them
This except it happens every 1-10 frags. That way you cant have bot destroy itself every 9 frags.
@@750TheBoss nonwithstanding how hast a robot could solve the captcha I think just solvint it would be faster than waiting to respawn and walking back to the fight lmao
Fighting cheaters as a game developer is like fighting hackers as a security researcher. It's literally always a treadmill problem, so you have to be willing to put up a bigger fight than your adversary.
Exactly. Valve just wants to be lazy. They are so used to being paid for doing nothing nowadays.
I refuse to believe it is impossible or even very hard to put some code in a game that says “oh this person is achieving 100% headshots in rapid succession, ban them.” Especially with the algorithms people are developing it becomes easier and easier to tell people and machines apart. I fully believe it will get to a point where the only way to have a bot pass through an anti cheat, it will have to move and react in a completely human manner, and at that point your bot is not actually useful for ruining the game. You’re populating the servers and giving people a fair rival to fight against.
@@SomeOne-vf1rsIt's literally already a thing. CSGO (now CS2) has a "tripwire" condition that logs if you attempt an impossible view angle, which is notably caused by spinbotting and other aim-related ragehacking in the Source engine. This happens because of how the injected cheats modify the data being sent to the server and the data being sent back to the client. Tripping it too often too quickly results in an instant ban. I know this because I was once a script kiddie some ten years ago and got banned by this check. So a very basic check that Valve wrote themselves and has been running for ten years is entirely absent from TF2 despite this being the literal most obvious case to use it.
@@8stormy5 Wow that’s very disappointing
It’s also like that when fighting piracy
Best solution : Valve hires several platoons of dangerous, armed and skilled hitmen who are to eliminate every bot owner and cheaters.
*Cue magnum force*
That's a bit excessive, to say the least.
These miserable people deserve scrorn from community, not death.
And besides that, if cheaters can impersonate players, why don't you think they can frame someone innocent?
Well that was too serious for the reply to joke comment...
center of chaos containment
@@redbird1f873 the solution is simple.
Destroy the computers.
Make them unusable via virus.
Seems fun.
Cheaters most likely have money issues.
Boom.
"wake up and choose violence" method lol
All this being said, both teams being able to call votes at once genuinely has made the problem a lot more bearable. As long as you can survive the very start of a server, bots stand absolutely no chance anymore.
It can take a long time for anyone to start a vote kick though. In a lot of games I've been the only one to do it.
@@Markus1002 f2ps can't start a vote, before I upgraded my account to premium, whenever I tried to start a vote it just says "you cannot start a vote right now" That message never popped up after I got premium
Have you even noticed how ignorat players can be, not replying for a vote, call a vote, or even communicate and read chat? I doupth all those I see not acking are people with different language and can't read.
It would be cool if the kick cooldown time (after kicking) was shorter.
Yeahhhh except when the fella named DON'T LOOK AT ME joins your game and is absolutely unkickable literally no matter what
"invisible players to bait bots" is actually basically how minecraft servers prevent cheaters, just not quite as literally as you're interpreting it. the fake players are silently spawned behind the bots to bait the bots into snapping their heads backwards and sniping the fake player. though this has the same treadmill problem where the botters would just disable the random head rotating and instead try to create a bot that looks around "naturally" and only snipes players in view or alternate targets every shot or whatever
Many Minecraft servers have that god awful anti x-ray bot that works by randomising non-visible to player blocks
In addition to that, those invisible players also detect kill aura users. The invisible players are spawned in a way that normal players can't hit them (ie, behind the player), but kill auras can. If the server detects that the invisible player was hit, then that's a cheater.
@@koghs I know about those plugins. What’s wrong with them? They can impact performance in some cases, but I do believe they work.
TF2 bots have long since moved past trying to headshot players through walls, if an anti-cheat like that were implimented they'd either easily work around it (i.e. not targetting players in spawn) or the anti-cheat wouldn't work in the first place. Either way it'd be unnatural for casual players if the "enemies" were visible, so it's likely not a solution Valve would end up going with.
@@imaginaryboy2000 Your comment here doesn't seem very relevant to mine? Sounds like you're talking about something completely different
The idea behind many of these suggestions isn't that they would be impossible to bypass, it's that implementing them would make bot hosting exponentially more difficult and expensive. The issue isn't that bot hosting is possible, it's that it's inexpensive and easy to do at scale.
But also many of these solutions could make it exponentially more difficult for human players too. It doesn't even have to be a worse for bots than for humans, rather just enough to kill off a community. I don't imagine that many people will have more patience than that one spiteful guy who has sworn their life to making others truly miserable.
Except maybe MMO players. They seem to have patience for anything.
Exactly.
this is true for preventing any kind of abuse, the goal is to maximize pain for the cheater while also not annoying legitimete user. it's a tricky balance to achieve though. rate limiting, using cloudflare turnstile captcha, and limiting new account creation will overall make the cheating problem much easier to manage.
Basically what I got from this video
Valve is smaller than Bethesda
We are fighting Bots with Malice not Humans
The short term solutions are basically disable F2P chat 2.0
Fixing the bot problem is really complicated
Cheaters are persistent little turds
Feels like a “_____ Is not the problem, the world is” video
Yeah, the only true way to stop the hacking is to get the hackers to feel compassion…
Which they don’t at the moment.
Or if we have some magic or technology that teleport to the bot makers's home to beat them up every time they cheat.
they could just add a prime account feature like csgo has.
@@the_cat9568 what "at the moment"? They'll never have compassion. Cheaters and hackers feed off of someone's suffering and people getting mad at them. I know that because I was a cheater once in PG3D. I didn't give a single turd about the kids crying back in 2017.
The invisible player thing is at least a tiny bit feasible, Minecraft servers used to use a player that would spawn behind your back at random times and it would detect if you tracked/attacked them, banning you immediately. It moved so fast and appeared for such a short time that no real player would ever be able to track them, but players using Kill Aura would always hit the hidden player.
Bot creators could obviously figure out a way to avoid the hidden player eventually, but it did take a really long time for people to figure out how to circumvent it in minecraft
Minecraft servers still have these forms of anticheat.
@@celestialowl8865 For instance, hypixel uses something similar, but it's actually worse than it. If the biggest server is using something similar, then other servers are going to use this solution.
i actually do track them when I see them, and I get very scared of a player just materializing behind me (i'm hardwired to think there are many reasons for that to happen)
no bans yet
Some servers even have anti xray, it places a ton of fake ores around and i believe hides any real ones until they are in line of sight
@@router_BasedUser Played too much tf2?
While not as effective, I still think the hardware ban would at the very least discourage bot users to a certain degree, and definitely annoy them. It may not be flawless, but it is one of the better solutions out of all of these. A big problem with player based cheat detection, is that especially in Tf2, there are tons of toxic players. It's not uncommon for people to get kicked and reported for simply being good at the game, or just to get kicked for no good reason. I just hope we get more support from Valve and at least ease the situation.
It would literally be useless. Spoofing hardware ID is so easy that it could even be built into the cheats themselves. As in, it would detect when an account was banned and immediately rotate all the hardware IDs to something else. Not to mention, of course, the possibility of banning cheaters using random hardware IDs, only for some poor bastard to buy a legitimate piece of hardware only to find out it was banned years ago.
i main sniper, yeah? i usually get kicked from a server at least once a day, and i only have ten total hours on tf2 as of writing this. it is definitely something that happens often
@@GirlGoneGaming Well any solution should also include the Deletion of the sniper class for game health reasons.
deep learning to detect bot like behavior is an extremely good way of dealing with the problem. you state in the video that this will only force bots to play more like humans. EXACTLY. If bots are playing like humans, then the game is restored and playable again. if bots are always playing "bad" enough to not get detected as bots, then they are completely pointless and stop being a problem. its like having a fake doctor that knows literally everything about medicine, and never makes a single mistake despite not having a medical degree.
Yes, it's a beautiful solution. Though, we'll have to see exactly what sort of machine learning scheme valve implements to see how effective it is or isn't.
Idk I think playing against a thousand players who are all as good as the dozen or so top players would be pretty infuriating too.
Its a valid method but they can still votekick if they manage to overrun a server
Yeah bots behaving like players is not ideal but miles ahead of sniper bots
@@PurpleColonel well it's better than nothing lol
This has opened my eyes A LOT than i could've known, i really didn't know valve basically had the lowest count of staff untill now, that explains a lot of things
Yes.
But also concider that they keep game production and earnings from this and other games.
TF2 alone earn them a LOT of money.
The minimal staff just tells you the amount of corruption this company has:
Minimize cost, maximize gains.
Specially up CEO salaries, as is seen in several industries like industry and interteinment this is the MOST POPULAR thing now.
Menwhile low rank worker are trated like slaves, avused, bullied, exploited and treathen with firings trought illegal means as to not repay them.
Immediately want to say: I haven't watched the video yet.
For about three years I just assumed that all this time they were taking care of DOTA, SOURCE 2/Half Life Alyx instead of focusing on other places. I remember watching some video that explains how Valve works with its programmers, how they don't technically have dedicated folk on a special seat but many different folk working on different projects that sometimes come together to focus on one thing (like game creation) and literally the next day that same group would scatter for updating CSGO or other games, and then one day come back to game creation etc.
IMO it's a combination of things that lead up to "abandoning" TF2, not just money. But at the same time, Valve is somewhat secretive when it comes to what happens there and the truth could be something completely different.
The meme "last 2 TF2 dev be like" is not only a meme anymore.
@@ericquiabazza2608 calm down son, that's not corruption
@@ericquiabazza2608 shut up dude you look ridiculous
TF2 having a consistently larger player count helps quite a bit with making bots less likely to appear in games.
Then maybe they should untangle the spaghetti code so people with older and cheaper computers can still play. I used to play all the time on my ThinkPad E540 and now the game barely runs on it and frequently crashes because there's so much bullshit constantly running in the background that wasn't there before. Poor people are far more likely to play a free game and are far less likely to have good PCs.
Untangling the tf2 code is like me asking you to sprout wings in the next 5 seconds and fly. It's not going to happen, one of the main reasons no one wants to work on tf2 is bc of said code, let alone attempting to fix it.
@@LieseFury Cope.
@@airayne5176 God forbid someone ask a game developer to develop a game.
@@M50A1 Your mom doesn't love you.
I was quite blown away when someone I knew suggested removing the nav meshes. I studied nav meshes for a short time, so hearing something like that was crazy to me since they can simply be remade with nav_generate.
I thought the same thing haha. I used to tinker with game bots all the time when I was younger so I learned about nav meshes for them so I could use them on more maps.
When i first got tf2 i didnt have good internet, so i played with bots and i learned this very quickly lol
Note for the name banning solution its also horrible since in the case its implemented on a regular basis you could just set up a bunch of bots with the same name as someone you want banned and they're done
I could tell number 2 was a bot. That aside, a bot that plays like a bad/new player aren't the problem. Its bots that play at superhuman levels that are the issue.
even if they're forced to make the bots play more like humans, they can still fill up servers and disrupt the game in other ways, kick any human players, cause long queue times, make chat unusable, follow teammates around while constantly hitting them with the frying pan, etc.
@@squmulonimbus Right, but it's an improvement over the server-destroying sniper bots.
yeah that pissed me off so much like, we just want these aimbotters gone at the very fuckign least god im so mad
Exactly, I'm still fine with playing against bots that play "normally". It's those stupid insta-kill bots that have basically ruined the game.
Exactly, and I've never played tf2 before (just lots of csgo) and I could still instantly tell #2 was a bot and others were human. Overwatch can work well if implemented properly, and like you said the biggest issue are the blatant insane cheating bots, who cares if there's a bot that sucks?
"We're always, always short on engineers" seems to be a problem in every industry, doesn't it
Ngl, i wanted to be an engineer, but schools keep telling me im under qualified
@@idrissberchil25 its pretty much a money job, no one really wants to do it if they don’t happen to be skilled at it, and if they are- theres better paying options then a middle man company that survives on game taxes
Valve just doesn't want to hire a ton of people.
it absolutely is a problem in every industry, but as @@gyroninjamodder said, that's not why valve is short. _valve_ of all companies won't have issues finding competent engineers
Well. More reasons for finish my informatic engineering carrer
A perfect solution: add a crypto miner to TF2 that cannot be removed! Valve would profit from the bot makers, and the bots would be more expensive to run!
(in case you hadn't noticed, this is a joke suggestion)
Or maybe remove Sniper class completely from game
@@lokipoki3122 yes, that would make more spy crab bots!
Remove all classes, all weapons, etc. Then, there won't be snipers or spy crabs.
just fry hardware and send the maximum amount of police to everyones house possible
@@lokipoki3122 Now you are thinking outside of the box XD
Honestly, the idea of Valve sueing for 10 million dollars from bot hosters and then using it to fund the Heavy update, even if it wouldn't stop all the bot hosters would be damn sweet. And optimistic.
"See if you can tell which one is a bot or human"
**shows someone using the tomislav at long range**
Shounic you're making this too eazy
When I saw that heavy with the festive skin Tomislav with awful tracking, for a moment I thought Shounic got some footage of me playing.
@@Hambrack yeah me too i play like that bruh
yeh the cheater was easy to spot
this man really spelt easy with a z
@@Hambrack fat sniper
I think alot of people don't realize that even if we fixed them being able to aimbot and instant kill players. They would still dogpile lobbies, fill player slots, and kick players. Just because we fix one issue doesn't mean they magically go away. The people that host these bots will do anything to disrupt the game.
So lets just delete the game
There still must be some solution. Although every game has cheaters, none has as many automated bot cheaters as TF2. Either other games have some solution that works for them, or TF2 is just the only game that's ever been targeted by this many bots at once, and any other game *could* be overrun if enough botmakers tried
I'm not sure if there's anything bots could do that's more disruptive than instakilling human players, though. Filling player slots and kicking humans is something they already try to do right now, and they're usually unsuccessful because TF2 is a popular game with a lot of human players.
Capcha was invented for a reason.
@@alexxx4434 The video addresses this. There are paid captcha-solving services that hire real humans to solve captchas for you
I think the solution isn't any single one of the presented solutions, but a combination of many/all of them. Steam guard, trust factor, overwatch system, queue cooldown, prime matchmaking, vacnet, and a captcha *all combined* would be a ton to just drop on bots, and while each "fix" on it's own could be circumvented or bypassed given enough time/effort/money, adding ALL of these together would hopefully be enough to prevent 99% of it; think of it like a water filter. You don't just have a carbon filter, or just a sand filter, or just a mesh filter etc., you have ALL the stages combined so anything that gets through one stage gets caught by the next, filtering it finer and finer until the final product is safe enough to drink.
All the proposed solutions combined would be like the stages in a water filter; while it may be possible for some particularly nasty things to bypass one or two stages, bypassing ALL of them would be unfeasible for the majority of cheaters due to the amount of workarounds and paywalls required, and even for those most dedicated to trying to do everything they can to bypass the systems it'd be too much of a financial burden to be worth the tiny payoff of mildly annoying players with the few bots they can afford past.
Sorry to necro, but, thank you, this is actually the correct take. Dealing with bots, spammers, etc. has always been about mitigation, and the handwringing over all of these strategies as if they're meant to be employed individually to stop all botting forever vs. being used as part of a multi-layered defense to make botting too onerous to be feasible for most people is so semantic it drives me nuts.
I agree
Honestly this also the bot hosters want too though. Their goal is simply to frustrate people enough so that they stop playing. And I can definitely see people getting upset from changes like this into the game where valve ends up doing the job the bot hosters want for them. People who just want to play the game would already dislike any change that makes it harder to play a match. Some also do not want to give personal info to any company, and that can include things like phone numbers.
These people would be driven away from the game. Which is what the bot hosters want. They don’t care how it happens, they just want people to get mad and stop playing.
Gonna play the devil's advocate here; if the combination of solutions end up annoying real human players to a degree similar to bots, then the botters had pretty much won.
Except you don't see games with all those solutions, because they all died of a compromised gaming experience.
It'd be like going to a fast food restaurant with a hundred people in the queue. You don't see them, because I'd like to be home by sundown.
15:28 Something to add, the reason that there have been so many bots within the past few years when before then there were basically none, was that Cathook was made, which was undetected, free, and could be ran in multiple instances easily. It is undetected because it is on Linux, and due to the nature of how Linux works, VAC is severely limited on there in comparison to Windows.
Lmaobox also does not allow for unlimited active instances like Cathook, so it would require the bot hoster to pay roughly $10 for every instance he wants to open, as you can only open 2 at a time reliably. (As $20/2 = 10)
As cathook is completely open source, Valve would have an incredibly easy time getting VAC to detect it if it was ported to Windows.
Bot hosters don't make much profit at all from bot hosting, it's just fun to them. I doubt most would pay the $10 price for every 2 instances they want active.
Another reason that Cathook is so popular for hosting bots is because Linux is very lightweight and easy to run in the background in comparison to Windows, making it more viable for low end computers.
If they can hack the game, you don't think they would crack the bot software?
@@henrikginnerup8345 a cracked version exists, but it is detected by VAC and will result in a quick ban
I appreciate the realism of this video, people really think its a lot easier to solve a problem like this and it's quite frustrating sometimes. Keep it up!
Yes and no.
CZcams is the same and people has express it abuse.
What happen is that this is in part an excuse.
"I wont clean the bathroom because is gonna get dirty again" type of deal.
Is even more fake when you concider the alarmin low staff, this tells you corpo interest is in exploit staff to the limit while gaining maximum profit.
So it isnt that they "Cant easily" is that they are NOT gonna put more money or hiring anyone else to deal with this.
It defies their bottom line ideals.
Ok but how do community servers instantly ban bots? How do they know??
@@shumo7096 Do they really instantly ban bots? Or is it just that the bots are only queuing for casual?
@@shumo7096 because they're smaller so its easier to ban them manually
@@shumo7096 They're monitored by active human admins, compare with Valve servers in hundreds, you'd need hundreds of admins for that, and that'll cost Valve money.
Which is why they prefer using AI do the admin job instead.
The "just use community servers" solution is just the "give up" solution, it isn't one.
And giving up isn’t honorable of right in any shape or form
@@crosssans6245thats a very "sink with the ship" kind of mindset
I know it’s giving up, but playing with the same 23 people with small variations everyday is very fun. It’s like playing with a friend online but nobody is even on your friend list.
this video is a breath of fresh air. I am so sick and tired of watching CZcamsrs think they know everything and saying valve doesn't care about TF2.
They don’t though. They simply hire someone else who could not possibly fix these major problems alone and release cosmetic cases to milk their abandoned game for a little more money, never releasing a substantial gameplay update, a statement about how they’re working on it that isn’t because they were forced to by some twitter movement that died immediately as they pushed out a low-effort response. Or maybe what we really need is an official statement about TF2 being abandoned for good instead of the game being kept on life support. Valve clearly does not want or cannot work on this game, and until there is real change in the way TF2 is handled I cannot see it in any other way.
@@nts0n Despite how much we hate valve that they don't do anything about and we keep consistently saying this is how we should fix it. Like the video said, there is no "Real" fix and thing will continue once again.
Even if they hire someone, it not a instantly clear victory since a Dev team that probably not even more then 10 vs a community with hundred or thousand.
Remember the Dev at Valve is force to fight against a community solely to hacking their game.
Saying how to fix is the easy part.
Actually coding the fix and prevention is that cancer multiply by cancer
@@capofantasma97 valve works on valve time. They don't force employees to work on updates. What they do have is quotas. There are currently two employees working part-time on TF2 they can't work full-time on TF2 because they have a quota to make. So those people are working on other games like DOTA and CS go.
Please do your research about valve first before saying dumb stuff. It's not that valve doesn't care about TF2 it's that they have a lot of stuff on their plate right now. and they don't work like regular Triple-A game companies. Valve is currently working on VR hardware/software and VR games.
the employees at valve have wheels on their desk because they have the right to work on any game they want at any time. But they have a yearly quota they have to meet. So a lot of valve employees have to work on games that look good on paper. Optimizing TF2 doesn't look good on paper because it is a garbage amount of spaghetti code. The spaghetti code is the main reason why no new employees don't want to work on TF2. And the yearly quota is the main reason why old employees don't want to work on TF2 full time.
@@capofantasma97 agreed, valve can just make csgo case and Dota pass, and only from that buy fuскing half of Texas(they can't but y get me), the only thing they want to work with is source 2 cuz idk it's looks cool and have much less problems than first source and vr games which in future will be even more popular, but people think valve just interested by money which they can get in any amount they need in month
@@capofantasma97 I agree with half of your statement here but the other half I disagree. and you have the right to your opinion just as I do about mine. yes I did get most of my information from the valve News Network.
I haven't heard anything about valve doing crunch because they don't really do release dates but I could be wrong.
but this part in your argument here "no one outside of Valve has a clear view on the internal organization. And I doubt you are one of their employees."
that is the biggest Catch-22 for an argument ever. Yeah I'm not a valve employee... but neither are you.
that line they're invalidated the rest of your argument. I don't understand what you were trying to gain by saying that
Please don't say dumb stuff while telling people to not say dumb stuff ¯\_( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)_/¯
Ya know what? After watching the segment beginning at 24:06, it dawned on me: no one actually gives a damn about bots in general. As long as the account you're playing against or along-side shows certain kinds of expected behavior (newbie, casual, try-hard, friendly, etc.), it's just another round.
The problem is the blatant display of contempt that is 6 snipers wearing free cosmetics and aiming at the sky running around and one-shotting anyone who dares expose a single pixel of their head - all while mic-spamming garbage, soft-locking the objective, kicking legitimate players, and attempting to crash the server.
There have always been bots and there will always be bots. What needs to stop is this objectively evil behavior preventing people from even playing the game.
Bingo my man
Unfortunately, the only way to do that is to track down the IRL people running these bots and arrest them.
@@Wiimeiser You arrest one, 10 more take his place.
This was already seen in software piracy. Won't work here either, just like it does not work on any other illegal activity even in real life. Arrest one drug dealer, there are still more ready to take their place.
@@MrPablosek but at the same time tf2 is a relatively small community. The amount of possible cheaters is finite. And the amount doesn't have to be 0, just low enough that it doesn't impact most of the rounds.
@@MrPablosek That is assuming an infinite number of bot hosts ready and waiting to take the place of anyone arrested. While there are likely some out there who would jump in, they are not infinite. And when they start getting arrested then odds are those who remain will stop doing it because the reward is not worth the risk. Difference between that and drug dealers is money, risk to reward, there's not much reward for flooding a game with bad bots.
Now the real question is can these bot hosts be arrested, is what they are doing even illegal. I'm pretty sure it is but I am not aware of any relevant laws.
With all due respect, the CSGO Overwatch solution has worked wonders for the hitscan approach that currently plagues the game with sniper headshot spam. While you could argue that swapping to an approach that uses projectile classes to avoid detection, the "Suspect" gameplay you showed wasn't anywhere near as oppressive or unbeatable as a sniper that headshots you the moment you're visible.
IMO the reason the convictions dosnt go up is less to do with its effectiveness and more to do with the fact that there are only so many cheaters but if you can use overeat h and see a bot obviously doing what they do that’s a easy convictions
i'd just remove sniper class lol
While you have a point, the problem is that the TF2 community has shown that they have no idea how differentiate between a cheater and a good player, and the fat magic controversy has shown that.
But the point is TF2 IS NOT A COMPETITIVE. The problem is a lot of people in tf2 community doesnt know who is a cheater and who is a skiller. FatMagic is a big example
Shounic is literally the kind of person who would say
"well, this is able to cure one kind of cancer, but it doesn't cure ALL cancer, so we shouldn't even bother doing it"
Well here's the deal. If bots are all limited to just human capabilities, that's not that very disruptive, right? You can still have a spy roll up behind a bot and take him out. I think that would be a good deterrent, since bot hosters wouldn't really be incentivised to just have a bunch of bots that basically do nothing
Pub stompers are enough to mow down an entire team. Not to mention people like Fatmagic or FSoaS.
@@hexa138 Much better matchmaking using something like elo/glicko, or NS2's hive skill rating, could fix this - use people's rating to segregate them such that everyone only ever plays with people of a similar skill level. That means you'll only ever encounter bots about as good as you are. It also has the additional benefit of no longer matching players with people they can't possibly beat, or matching players with opponents who are too bad to be fun to play against.
@@Skeletons_Riding_Ostrichesyeah, they tried that, twice
@@Skeletons_Riding_Ostriches or just nuke matchmaking altogether because tf2 is not competitive and it shouldn't be treated as such
@@SamuelTrademarked Based
Cheating is a form of denial-of-service. (no, DDOS attacks are NOT the ONLY manifestation of a "denial of service"). There should be private firms who specialize in uncovering the identities of cheaters and cheat-program developers, and, in the law enforcement side, there should be prosecutors who take this seriously (if necessary, enact legislation to change this from being a civil matter to a criminal matter). Just because this is happening within videogames shouldn't matter to the gravity of the situation -- a violation of private property rights, is a violation of private property rights.
Good luck handling cheaters from another country. This only works if there is one world gov,
Sounds completely mental.
Take my wallet.
It’s basically vandalism
Good luck with the chinese
like 90% of cheaters are russian and chinese so they're untouchable legally
Only (about) 350 employees at Valve versus other companies having 500+ employees puts it into perspective why Valve is often radio silent as well as the extra time it may take for Valve to fix issues. With their other projects like steam deck and source 2, they likely don't have the Mannpower deal with so many tasks and game fixes all at once.
Despite how long it took, I'm still simply glad that TF2 is slowly but surely getting updates and attention from Valve once again.
so your saying that it takes more than 350 people to talk? seems wrong
@@SheLikesLoons I've basically just accepted Valve's silence. The only thing I really question about this whole TF2 situation is why did it take so long for updates to happen?
The game is thriving, popular, and the community is strong, yet it feels like it was just left to die.
I can understand why they are just silent
Hehe mannpower
Also, most employees at valve are VR engineers.
They can afford not making games because steam is just _that_ dominant
Thank you for talking about the "ban Team Fortress 2 on Linux" solution. Always annoyed me that people didn't understand how easily it would be to switch the cheat to another OS.
free wifi anywhere you go
@@ggolden that theory is as lazy as "windows cheat makers" then
Are we gonna ignore the elephant in the room and not mention that literally EVERY Valve and community server runs on Linux?
That would be a massive shot in their own foot.
@@JohnBread69 Not every server, Valve also maintains a Windows build of srcds (not to mention you can always just host a listen server)
But yes, every Valve server and most community servers do use Linux
@@ggolden HOLD UP!!!
So, my takeaway from this video is that in order to fix the botting problem, TF2 needs to be removed from Linux AND Windows. It's the perfect solution! No more bots!
macs only
@@ryjelsum the most recent Macs aren't even able to run TF2 rn LOL!
@@hoodcate LMAO i forgot good point. they can if you tinker enough but 99.9% of people aint gonna know where to start with that
cheaters on their way to make their own tf2 game to cheat on
Have we considered turning TF2 servers off and on again
24:10 somebody saying that he wants to add overwatch in team fortress without giving the context is one of the most cursed things possible
A bunch of Wintons diving spinbotting snipers may be able to shut them down.
"Just use community server" is not a valid option when there is just no good community replacement of valve server in your region. It's all either Hale server or 24/7 2fort, hightower and randomizer as well as orange.
they were far better before valve butchered them. now the only server host that's able to compete with a vanilla experience is uncletopia. the remaining servers after MYM are just wacky alternative modes that were never competing for the same vanilla playerbase, so they weren't killed off. but being ejected out of the queue system doomed community servers to be a niche option compared to valve's official casual queue.
we need to bring back community servers into the casual queue so they can live again. the only way this problem will be solved is if valve gives us the ability to do it ourselves.
Not to mention I'm not a professional comp winning TF2 player so I can't compete in Uncletopia XD
this was mentioned in the video
Right? Normal Community servers are scarce if you don't live in NA
My thoughts exactly, I actually dislike gmod a lot because it's 100% community servers, there's no one authority that standarizes how some gamemodes are meant to be and you get countless bloat addons you will never care about and they just add error models that look really ugly.
It's worth mentioning that since ipv4 addresses are becoming more and more scarce ISP's have started utilizing something called cgNAT which can mean a bunch of customers using the same ISP may have the same public IP address. In that case ip banning a single IP address could possibly ban hundreds of people.
No players - no bots, very elegant solution
@@littlehorn0063 Pragmatic. I like it.
@@littlehorn0063 Genius and straight to the point.
IPv4 addresses are not really becoming more scarce. A lot of devices just have a local network IPv4 then go through a router which acts as the one IP address that is actually internet facing. It will take us a long time to run out of IPv4.
@@courier3567 What are you talking about, ipv4 addresses are already exhausted?? This happened in 2019! Any addresses that you may get now have been reclaimed. They are super scarce.
8:40 CS:GO used to unintentionally have this feature. On the map Cache the colliders behind the metal texture on the wall of tree room had a large gap directly across from the T-side entrance to B site. It created this invisible line of sight that players silent aim would get caught up in. The gap was so large and in such a high traffic area that, no matter how small you set your fov, if someone was in B main it would lock. Before Cache was remade there used to be entire video essays on this issue. Sadly the only clip I can easily find of this in 2022 is a somewhat controversial one, but if you download an older version of the map you can still see it for yourself today. /watch?v=fGrmUQAh-WQ
the solution is making them think they are still playing when they are in fact kicked, they would not know as they don't even see the game happening, just some information that could be faked and sent to every TF2 client (i would not notice, the bots would scenario?)
Same issue as the 'invisible player right behind you' problem. In the way that bot makers would eventually realize the trick and reprogram their bots accordingly.
At the overwatch part i could correctly guess that suspect 2 was the bot. His camera movement was too smooth and consistent for humans to replicate, and it was very distinctly trailing behind the player it was shooting(this is how the smoothing feature usually works in aimbots). Keep in mind, this was a very short clip, and in an entire match, the bot is bound to slip up eventually(the bots are indeed advanced but they can still be detected, usually due to incorrectly navigating the map such as randomly jumping into walls, getting stuck in a very shallow hole or not being able to make jumps that most humans can). I think overwatch for TF2 would be very beneficial due to casual bots usually using blatant hacks. And if they try to act legit, what's differentiating them from valve-made bots?
I feel like classes like pyro, medic, and engineer can follow a really simple set of rules and get away with boting very easily
Exactly. The argument against overwatch is really bad in my opinion. It's very easy to tell if someone is cheating, especially if you're a more experienced player. And the main reason you'd even use it is to get rid of the spinbotting snipers, not a random expert bot that can't ruin your game.
It was obvious because of pipes, you can’t miss them so perfectly, you’ll shoot it all around
If anything instead of looking for signs of botting, looking for signs of human-ness always work. Things like little movements and reactions that are impossible for a bot to completely simulate
but OW is clearly only meant for competitive matches, not a 12v12 games.
In the "see if you can figure out who the cheater is" I was actually able to detect who the bot was. Not sure how. But either way, I think the problem isn't that "there are bots in the game". It's that "there are bots that are instantly and repeatedly making the game unplayable, ruining the game for users in the process." If there were bots in the game as bad as that demo, then I wouldn't have an issue with them because they're not disrupting my gameplay. At most, I'd probably offer to teach them if I saw them on my team. And a lack of response would probably indicate that they're either all good or a bot, which I wouldn't mind because it's casual.
For me it was a combo of the excessively smooth mouse movement paired with the way it almost looked to be "intentionally" missing it's shots. It would very carefully and deliberately aim at the wrong location.
Yeah that part boggles the mind. The game is fu*king unplayable because of aimbot snipers instantly killing everyone they see, not because of demos simulating noobs...
The reason you can probably tell the difference is because players 1 and 3 actually use their secondary weapons, something that bots will rarely ever do.
Also the 2nd player was pre-aiming around the corner at a demo he wouldn’t be able to see.
@@sheacorduroy5565 I think it might have been the smoothness and consistent speed of the mouse movement.
@@MicRouSn7 That's definitely what stood out most. Especially since the other 2 players had some very human looking mouse movement, for example the pistol tracking at 28:00 looks *exactly* how you would expect of a person physically moving their mouse rather than a program following a calculated path
Another solution: Bring back community based games. The days before where automatic match making did not exists, and where people would usually play on the same servers every day. Let the social network be the trust factor, and part of the match making algorithm.
There is no need to being them back, as they never were gone. We still have community servers and they are still very popular.
@@OGSumo There are several problems with them currently.
1: They are kinda hidden for the average player and by extension don't fill up easily as the less educated users simply remain unaware the server browser exists.
2: The game doesn't let you do some things on community servers, like make progress towards your Contracts to unlock some weapons/skins.
3: The bots are only held at bay on community servers when the folks running the server are keeping an eye on it and manually banning em. If no admin, they can be just as easily overrun by bots as official servers.
You say that like Valve "got rid of" community servers
The problem with community servers is they still get bots that bypass everything, its hard to find a server of the gamemode you want (specially without being modded), some servers even ban you for not having html motd enabled and etc etc
Which is why most ppl dont play there
They are not hidden or anything, its just that mm system of casual is better and more reliable
There is a much bigger issue with this even if we ignore the bot problem.
As much as I hate to admit it, as it stands right now, *community servers cannot fully replicate casual TF2.*
There's just a lot of nuance when it comes to queueing in casual, and the majority of community servers trying to tap into this "casual experience" face several issues.
1. There can only be so many community servers. In this potential dystopia where casual queueing is no longer possible, if the community servers are full, people who wants to play casual would have no choice but to wait until someone disconnects. The one clear example I can think of this is Uncletopia.
2. Community servers has a much lesser pool of regular players. If these regulars are with high skill level, combined with the fact that there can only be so much community servers, newer players trying to get into community casual would be subjected to constant one-sided matches, leaving them no room to enter, even if they even managed to find a time when the servers aren't full.
3. Community casual servers are just inherently more serious than casual (if we only include official Valve normal gamemodes except CTF, especially 2fort servers). This means we get lesser "funny" times such as when the entire server forgets that they are on a payload match and starts doing a massive conga line, and instead we get everyone constantly tryharding.
the point isn't to completely stop bots, if we can get to the point where there are only a few bots playing the game and theya re not disrupting the match, then we would have reached an equilibrium
I'm really thankful that you cleared up the misconception with Linux and people blaming all their bot problems on it. It has really gotten out of control and I wish people learned more that these solutions people come with can be bypassed over time
Linux is a communist subversion meant to destroy America
His "clarification" is objectively incorrect lmfao.
also I'm a Linux user and I do *not* want to have to dual boot with Windows or smth
@@saltedjules_ then just use windows and stop being both an NPC and a hipster at the same time
@@0Ploxx there's so many reasons to pick Linux over Windows
Just throwing a bit of my own opinion in on Overwatch.
My main gripe with the system is the low tickrate of the demo that you are supposed to watch and create your judgement upon. The demoman was easy to recognize as a bot since the grenade launcher is a slow weapon and thus the lead on the enemies was easy to notice. But with the scout I had doubts since I had no way of telling if the scout was hitting or missing any of the shots, there's just too much information missing, I can't see the jitter of the mouse or the flicks performed.
Plus, his video had no crosshair.
@@hoffer_moment obv there are ways to make it less obvious. that was a valve bot. It was made with no intention to hide the fact its a bot.
Then again, it would be incredibly hard to code an AI to move and aim in a convincing manner.
When I looked at the players, I didn't even necessarily pay attention to the crosshair placement. I was looking at the whole screen to see how the aiming was occurring. Which yeah made the bot stand out pretty well
Actually that scout is quite obvious. He doesn't jump as normal scouts will do since bot's navigation only tells them where they should jump to cross obstacles, and for a bad aim scout, he usually shoots around a target, too left or too right etc. , but this scout's bullet just simply follows the target's trait and keeps an fixed distance, which a bot will normally do. Besides, even newbies scouts are told to use jumping to dodge enemy's attack but bots don't know about this. My English is bad and hopefully you could understand what I typed :D
@@specttor5755 the scout was real though...
Scout was the easiest one, he bumped on the wall and missed all his shots, that's quite literally footage of me playing scout
The best solution i can think of is the Playerbase going scorched earth. Hopefully some white hats are willing to help track down these bot hosts. Think if it as this lovely quote. "One sword keeps another in it's sheathe." The threat of violence is often enough to prevent further escalation. Once the bot hosts find out you know where they live they will be very inclined to stop being literal human garbage. But that feels a bit extreme.
Idea to stop the cheaters
When a computer is found to be cheating TF2 will just overheat to such an extent that it just explodes
This sounds dumb on the surface but is honestly one of the better ideas I've heard. Purposely strain the hardware to the limit. Or trick it into mining bitcoin or something lol
If tf2 was developed by Aperture Science:
I'd hate to be the bearer of bad news, but not only can that lead into trouble for Valve (especially for false positives), but virtual machines can entirely ignore this problem.
@@thesaltgod make the virtual machine program corrupt, to the point it has to be deleted by the original computer host
@@bigpvzfan42069 Virtual machines are practically indistinguishable from a regular operating system, as they're meant to be. You really can't specifically have a different effect for virtual machines, and even if you could, it would again put Valve into legal trouble since you can't just make video games that destroy people's systems, *especially* at the risk of false positives.
The thing is, for every solution, there’s someone who already thought about it. So the only for having no cheater is if cheaters don’t see the point in chesting
Remove drops.
Game is still fun. Maybe more so
@@raandomplayer8589 maybe remove drops for free accounts
@@fuuji111 nah
@@fuuji111 please no
@@fuuji111 that would make the game pay to win
The tf2 overwatch system would probably be pretty good if it wad explicitly made to catch obvious, game disrupting bots. Not cheating real people or single "realistic" bots, those can be vote kicked by the other players or countered by smart medic ubers, were talking spinning, gibus wearing, parties of bots that absolutely shutdown servers
First thing first is that tf2 is too chaotic, game has been played by too many people.
So the best thing is a ban time limit for new joins, aim lock identifier, server side tracker identifier (tracking players across walls), softlock out(trapping bots to specific servers to overload their computer or make them idle).
Second possibility is banning behavior repeating bots(since all bots are ai, they will control 100% nearly always). ban those with no kill attempts.
Third is too much info being given so restrictions are a must (rendering all players instead of view&area filtered).
Fourth is introduce (happy accidents ) for those with overcriting and overprecision . Let me be honest sniper mains with too dam much precision pisses me off. Do they use a aim guide?do they actually have skills? I don't care as long as they hit too many headshots, game becomes who can kill that maniac first.
Fifth and last is basically making them lagg by overflowing the bots with info they don't need or causing them to overwork the hardware. Queuing bots can be spotted fairly easily and can be done away with doing the same thing but on reverse wasting their computing resources possibly making them unable to function.
tf2 overwatch sounds wrong
Honestly, I had no idea it was this complicated and I appreciate the explanation. Thank you.
5:00 I think that we should ip ban them. If their family members are gonna wonder why they are banned too they can shit talk the person who was cheating so they can take responsibility for their actions
I don't think they even have family
@@masterkasidit2ofc not lol
17:38 Apparently there was a matchmaking cooldown system that used to function which was the in game report system. Valve ended up disabling it due to the fact that bots were also using it to votekick players and then spam the player with so many in game reports that many have ended up with matchmaking cooldowns.
I was actually able to tell suspect 2 was the bot, because despite missing their mark a ton, the aim felt artificial, and as if they were aiming based on hitscan rather than projectiles
Also the very unnatural tracking they had on the bridge.
Suspect 2's aiming was very steady and it reacted robotically to enemies that appeared in their line of sight. Not really the best examples shounic could have used.
that's what i thought. i could tell without a doubt that suspect 2 was the bot and others were real pretty much immediately.
I also instantly knew, the moving felt artificial, I don't even know how to describe it, it's uncanny, weird
For me the movement felt off, especially on the bridge. Real players don't walk like that. It feels like the bot is switching directions on a timer, giving the movement a cadence, while real players just switch their direction at any time.
they should be fixing it anyways. I don't care how hard it is. literally no other game has this problem.
I can think of a few games that have similar bot problems (hearthstone is a good one), but I agree that no game as popular as TF2 is should be this bad. It is insane how far they've let it go, despite the revenue it brings in.
Great video, I especially liked the parts you show as examples to your points from in game.
Using a few of those ideas would raise the cost of cheating, I would be pretty surprised if cheaters are willing to pay over $30 each time.
That's what I'm thinking aswell. Adding captchas, hardware bans, phone verification and prime matchmaking alone would make it honestly expensive to host. At that point, ban any cheaters and bots that remain and they'll slowly die out.
That's the idea I thought of was the most useful, shadowbanning them, make the cheaters join servers that are for cheaters only, make them believe they're not banned, make them believe they're still annoying regular players, when in reality they're all gathered up in servers dedicated for them.
They get sent to these servers after getting kicked out of casual servers for cheating way too many times, or with machine learning like Steam Trust
@@NutsackParachute Well that's combining two things. If the system monitors behaviors not some sort of manipulable vote then it'd still function fine.
I think it's a good system because any algorithm based heuristic will inevitably classify some normal players as cheaters, so doing something like banning them as a result of that detection is always probably a bit extreme. Simply moving all the "cheaters" together into a server however makes it so false positives aren't punished as hardly, sure the user might join a game with all bots but at least they won't be banned, and maybe in time their score will improve by continuing to act like a normal player rather than doing things a bot would in such a situation. I wouldn't expect it to fix the problem in its entirety but to me it sounds like at least a decent thing to try to keep most cheaters out of games and improve the experience of most players.
@@NutsackParachute but like what if that makes it so shadow banned servers are full of humans lol
@@NutsackParachute i was making a joke
@@NutsackParachute Well the perfect system you're looking for is impossible and everyone knows that or it'd be implemented in everything. That option is probably the best there is, bots would not "easily" be able to manipulate the system like that as it'd be a black box and normal players will play the game normally anyways which implicitly raises their chances of being in a normal game. All that is certainly better than the current state of things where bots just run rampant which is about as good as you can do for something automated that isn't going to require a ton of manpower imo.
@@presentfactory The only reason it might even work is because the bots are mostly focused on killing people, most of the bots don't start votes on their own. If such a system was implemented the cheaters would then just make the bots more focused on kicking people.
One small suggestion to help a little bit: allow contracts to be done and exp to be gained on community servers, somehow. Yes, I know, plug-ins will allow people to farm stuff, but currently people are incentivized to play casual and not community because of it.
That's definitely true
It’s crazy how a nearly 20 year old game is still going strong
I disagree on the suggestion 4 issue, because player's computers receive a lot of information that isn't displayed to them during normal gameplay.
Cloaked spies aren't visible to real players, but bots shoot them regularly.
Fake cloaked spies would catch all bots that are willing to shoot cloaked spies. This doesn't remove the problem, but it at least softens it.
Bots also shoot enemies that aren't in their line of sight, so creating fake characters in random locations behind players could be a good way to force bots to either tone their cheats down, or be caught. Again, not perfect, but it's worth implementing if it's technically feasible because it restricts how bad a given bot can be.
On suggestion 8, I disagree entirely. If convictions aren't going up, and participation is skyrocketing, that would suggest that all the obvious cheaters are being banned.
With how blatant *all* of the problematic bots are compared to the very subtle wallhacks that some CS:GO players use, convictions would be absolutely sweeping.
The examples you gave are bogus, because it doesn't matter if they're bots or humans, because they aren't disruptive to the game.
The point is to get rid of the bots that are cheating, not emulating reasonable gameplay.
Sneakily running TF2 expert bots doesn't result in the shit we're worried about.
Realistic bots are a bit weird, but don't ruin a day. The hoards of spinbots are what makes casual unplayable.
Overwatch with an inexpensive prime matchmaking could cut blatant bots out almost entirely because they're just too expensive to run.
Yea
I completely agree with every word in this comment
Realistic Bots could mean they're really good, but just don't act like bots. If they made it indistinguishable from top competitive snipers, and the fact that they usually appear in groups, it could create a bigger problem in that since they're realistic, there would be many false negatives and teammates not banning the bots because they are realistic or worse banning teammates. All while the game still is unplayable since fighting 6 competitive snipers is just as challenging. And you still have to go through all that leg work. It could create bad actors that might use bots to automatically stop bots from getting banned if the overwatch system was implemented.
- Valve
I also disagree with his statement that legal action would be ineffective. Sure your average human cheaters would pop up, but if valve were to say sue Omegatronic the bot hosters would be fucked.
I’ve accidentally killed cloaked spies before. Would I be banned in that scenario?
i had no idea there was so much talk by valve on this topic, ive been conditioned to think that valve has been completely silent on the issue and since no media sources or anyone i know has been saying anything other than "valve is doing nothing" thats what i figured they were doing.
it actually makes a lot more sense and is really nice to know that valve understands the issue and has been actively working to solve it for some time, hopefully they come to a working solution soon.
CS:GO feels like their testing grounds for anti-cheat measures. Anything that seemed like a waste on CS:GO won't end up being wasted on TF2. At least I hope that's the case.
discourse about valve games is honestly fucking insufferable once you're informed
@@Plain--Jane Discourse about gaming in general is fucking insufferable once you're informed. There's examples of the Dunning-kruger effect in all walks of life, but for some reason its turned up to Eleven in videogame discussion.
@@steven.2602 It's especially egregious in source. Too many shmucks see shit like the load-bearing coconut on r/tf2 and are like "wow this game programmed so crappy! source engine terrible!" when they don't even know what makes it terrible.
@@nuclearpotato4073 the coconut is quite funny tho
1st interim solution: “Making the most out of community servers”
Me living in eastern asia: “what community servers….”
Something I don't think a lot of people realize/want to believe is; there is no singular solution, to solve it effectively we need a combination of several different solutions
Having a workforce of only 360 employees in a large gaming corporation is literally something else. It really makes sense in the scheme of things.
yeah and in valve they are spread very thin. aside from every game they still actively update which needs some kind of team.. some of them are going to be on steam itself, a portion the last 10 years are on linux software and gaming hardware development. so yeah that's why their games take so damn long
It strikes me as odd though that they don't expand, like I really doubt they don't have the money and to some degree this insistance on using AI seems like a case of classic Silicon Valley refusal to do anything that would even slightly lower profits. For some issues you do just need people, I mean I really doubt that Ubisoft makes about 15x more than Valve when Valve owns the single largest gaming store so I don't see why they can't scale up their team to what's needed.
@@hedgehog3180 because they don’t have a regulated workforce. Imagine having 360 workers switching constantly on their focus, now imagine 1,000 of that or 1,400, well disorder causes chaos and it would be difficult to get anyone.
That's some high-quality insightful video about the current situation. Yeah, this isn't an easy task.
But to be honest, Valve's acts against the problem so far were trivial. Pretty much banned f2p players' from playing the game properly, and added an annoying vote cooldown.
I would like to stay positive but after seeing all those pathetic band-aids, it's hard to stay like that. But still, I hope they do something properly in the near future.
Plus: It grosses me out every time I look into the cheaters. In order to fix the cheating issue entirely, I feel like the only way is to teach our newborns to have a proper morals.
ok
you do you
If we stop acting like we care about them, I wonder if they will stop? If a child is trying to annoy you but you act like you don't care they will more likely stop. Of course they could go the other direction in trying to annoy you more, leading to something like lag bots
Some people are born with a physical inability to feel empathy, have morals, or understand that other people matter. These people are called psychopaths. And they make up 99% of cheaters.
@@Sparkz1607 no, they are called jerks, people who are dumb enough to take their programming skills and use it to ruin peoples game and get people mad, which they get a kick out of. In some what of a way like stream snipers, but to the extreme.
The fact that anyone would even think of removing Linux support would hurt so much
I can't help but have a chuckle at the sentence "add Overwatch to TF2". I know we're not talking about THAT Overwatch, but still.
Valve has very few employees compared to other companies, but that is a self-inflicted problem. They have enough money to hire more employees, and enough creed in the industry to attract the talented ones, but they refuse to hire employees for specific games or projects. They have a famous work culture where employees are allowed to work on any project they want, which has its pros and cons. Because of this, many of their employees just work on projects other than TF2, and they won't hire someone just for TF2.
I don't believe that the treadmill problem would last forever. As long as you're not regularly adding new features to a software, then there is only a finite number of exploits, which will get harder and harder for hackers to find. Every other regularly updated software has their exploits fixed, hardening them over time.
Is there something actually stopping people from overrunning CSGO like TF2 has? Are CSGO's solutions better, or has no one just bothered launching a massive bot campaign against it, so there's only a small amount of bots? Also, if you can't confidently comment on Trust Factor and Vacnet since Valve is secretive, then you can't know whether they actually *would* be workable solutions that Valve just refuses to implement because they don't care or because TF2 doesn't make enough money.
Overwatch's conviction rate didn't go up past a particular point, but you didn't explain why. Because there's a finite number of cheaters, did this mean that the participants were simply managing to find every cheater in Overwatch, or were there still cheaters that either didn't get reported or managed to get past Overwatch?
Bots are incredibly obvious, and are a problem because they massively disrupt the game. If bots were to attempt to disguise themselves as humans, such as by playing Demo and missing lots of shots like suspect #2, then they're no longer disrupting the game. Even if you didn't solve the problem of finding all the bots to get rid of them, then you will have at least solved the problem of bots disrupting the game.
Using individual examples of cheating after cheatmakers were sued only proves that not every single instance of cheating was prevented by suing. It would be more meaningful if we could know if the total amount of cheating actually decreased after a cheatmaker was sued, but that data might not be publicly available. If it did meaningfully reduce the amount of cheating, then it would still be worth it.
There is a big problem that take down your hole argument, more workers dosent mean more work when it come to software development. So it dosent mean anything if valve has 20, 200, 2.000, 20.000 or more workers, as there is a cap of work a team can get done, every team has they way to develop a solution. Just because valve has 350 workers it dosent mean they cant do the same job or better than a team with 20.000 workers
The treadmill problem never ends, there will be exploits forever, because every little thing you change can make a new error or bring others back, you dont need to add a new feature to make a bug, with just change 1 line of code from 0 to 1 that can breake something
About valve not using workable solutions, your comment makes no sense, why valve would let the player have a bad experience and lost customers and money? It dosent make sense at all, they have no reason to let the games die and lose money, they are a company
About overwatch, even if they catch all the cheater they where never gone, so there is no solution, as you can make bot and they will be ban maybe in 1 day or 1 year because there are so many of them
You dont need bots to just cheat to disrupt the game, they can make ra**** comments, kickvote players, etc
About sue the cheat makers, as long there is a cheat there will be more pepole cheating so it dosent matter if cheaters go down for 1 day of the next one there are 2 new o 300 new cheats
I edit this comment to reply every point in a easy way for me, so i could go point by point and making the answer
@@NA-uz7co "There will be exploits forever" is an inaccurate statement. TF2 is a game where everything can be fixed, it's just a matter of finding the exploits and having a solution. There are not infinite exploits. It's absolutely finite.
@@qualityarsenic3922 you didint read my comment at all, exploits are infite as you can broke the code or pepole can bypass them
@@qualityarsenic3922 exploits are very much infinite, because every time they push an update it risks adding exploits. Every fixed exploit is a chance of another being introduced, that's why games like CSGO are still receiving fixes after 10 years of active development.
@Ictoan
That only applies to programs that are adding features. TF2 isn’t. Therefore, it is at least theoretically possible to close all the meaningful exploits.
all of the bots use a no graphics mode, which is what allows any stupid kid to run hundreds on a mid level pc. simply disabling this mode would decimate bot numbers and turn hundreds of bots into like half a dozen. even if every bot hoster still is encouraged to run so few bots, it would vastly improve quality of the game.
Eh not really, it'd make things more difficult but there's no way to ensure the gpu calls are actually rendering anything, they could just be proxied through something that turns them into no-ops (as is possible with something like Mesa for example).
An interesting idea would be using blockchain-style proof of work to ensure users are running on something more than a toaster (by essentially having users mine work solutions on their GPU while the game is running, this is how cryptocurrencies solved the problem of botting a consensus vote), but that might still not help all too much if botmakers simply start using better hardware and could make the game run worse especially on lower end hardware for actual users.
@@presentfactorythat is the worst idea i've ever heard, are you on something?
@@presentfactory Begone crypto loser
@@presentfactory Whew lad
@@garchompenthusiast No, you're just a brainlet who doesn't understand these things.
The tech Bitcoin was based on for example was a system called Hashcash which was devised in the 90s as a way to prevent email spam in much the same way as a modern day captcha (in fact a captcha can be thought as a human-centric proof of work function). Proof of work systems are employed in many things that you probably just don't even notice as it is an effective way to deter spam from multiple instances of something on a single device, or prevent many low end devices like IoT things from attacking a system simply due to the fact that while attackers can fake almost anything they cannot fake hardware without actually spending money on it.
Of course just making people pay money to play TF2 is another equally effective solution, but that might have a negative impact on the playerbase, so it's hard to say if that'd be a better option than just letting your computer work while it plays the game anyways to prove it actually is a real machine and not just some low end botting instance. Not like it'd completely fix the problem anyways though because botters can just run tons of hardware if they are truly dedicated, just as they can buy tons of accounts if TF2 was to cost money (but at least with the account thing they'd lose the money upon being banned whereas with hardware they can just reuse it on another account).
>valve cant do anything about it
>my community servers automatically ban bots when they try to join
why cant valve just do that
I really like this video, its well made. Thanks for compiling all of the useful information someone might wonder about when thinking about why the hell bots are in the game. I also appreciated the positivity towards the end w/ machine learning and such, i think that is very fascinating as someone interested in it in general.
With what I heard, Escape from Tarkov had an anti cheat system putting enemy hitboxes around random spots and hiding high tier items in unobtainable spots for normal players.
If a cheater would hit such hitboxes or loot those unobtainable items, their accounts would get flagged as cheaters and ultimately get banned.
It supposedly worked quite well until the cheat makers figured it out.
it works until it doesn't, then you as the dev either change it up a bit or give up. persistence makes the cheaters quit, remember, devs get paid for this
@@boldCactuslad some Cheaters are the kind who only do that shit to see the Circus catch fire or be a BOTHER to the Paid devs
All that dev time has now been functionally wasted, since you need to dedicate more time to come up with a new solution. i.e. the treadmill
@@boldCactuslad at a certain point, but it also makes them more invested in circumventing it. The existence of channels like DanielS and BubGames proves this.
More proof that cheats are an arms race.
I like the fact that the people who’re trying to destroy tf2 can’t even do it, due to how many people keeping the game alive
1. Bots are using TF2 as a playground to make better bots + there's no punishment for them to do so anyway.
2. Community keeps it alive because TF2 is hip, trending and free. There's a lot of new players, which is good, but lots of veterans gave up on it, lowering the standards of the community since most players only knew Jungle Inferno and nothing else.
@@crack4184 and Jungle Inferno was years ago too lol
some seem to be doing it so they can sell bot immunity, but if you're scummy enough to make money like that you're also probably scummy enough to just scam anyone who actually comes looking for immunity
Hey, really nice job on taking the time to actually analyse people's suggestions. It's very interesting, and clears things up.
12:30 Free Captcha solvers have accuracy issues, the one you listed here is also a Chrome extension so... The other solvers you listed here are paid services and done by other people.
Let's be honest here. People botting the hell out of tf2 because it is easy to do. Captcha wouldn't stop it 100% but would make it harder.
Community servers are also a really bad solution. I could go into a wall of text as to why, but I think this quote says it best: "Uncle Dane shouldn't have to carry the entire community on his back"
@@szymex8341 Not to mention that most of these "popular" servers are filled to the ass with mods and all kinds of shit.
It's almost imossible to consistently find vanilla servers filled with decent amount of players. *And then comes the arguement of "why play vanilla" which, sigh, don't even get me started on that*
Community servers in all source games are just stupid
Either too modded, or too stupid rules or too hard to find something good and for new players it will be a nightmare to keep up
@@Ultra289 Before Gun Mettle everything TF2 was about community servers and it was great and fonctional . . .
Community servers doesn't mean just Uncletopia.
I don't know about you, but I can find vanilla community servers by going to the server browser, excluding the tags "10x,10,trade,norespawntime,mvm,mge", putting "max players" to 24, and checking "not full", "has users playing" and "is not password protected"
@@bernardonegri5416 Yes, but your average joe schmoe who only wants to play casual without bots doesn't KNOW that. That's the problem.
24:11 the most cursed frame of the video :P
Very well-researched and well-put. I enjoyed how your review of the proposed solutions actually explain the reasons why a fix wouldn't work or be effective enough to warrant the effort. The issue is certainly much more complex than what it appears at first glance. And the avoidance of punishing legit players is integral to a game. One point you touched on but could have explained in more depth was how TF2 weapons function compared to other games. In CSGO, I believe every single weapon is hitscan while in TF2 projectiles are a whole different type entirely. This is common knowledge to most TF2 players, but perhaps not the ones that would be arguing for systems similar to CSGO.
Overall, though, great job at breaking down the actual issue and putting it in a way we can understand. I also appreciate the effort you put into diagrams of how a proposed solution would work or showing the tools available to bypass almost any measure Valve could use.
As far as i'm aware, this is one of the most researched and well informed videos regarding the trial and errors and "what if"s of the bot situation. There are a lot of channels who tend to harp on the same basic talking points that have been beat into the ground the last ≈2 years. Feels like everything has come to a stalemate. Easily understandable video for those new to tf2 or non tech savvy, but brief enough to not be boring.
Suggestion 4 has already been done by a minecraft server called Hypixel.
What they do is, If a player is doing too good, They will spawn in a bot that will spin around the player for a short amount of time. This works really well because players using hacks like aimbot or killaura will immediatly try to kill the bot, usually resulting in them getting banned.
code the bot not to shoot at anything spinning around the bot in a steady pace
@@noah4822 "just code lol"
@@s--b how do you think the bot got made? monkey and a typewriter?
@@noah4822 why dont they just code the invisible fake player to not spin at a steady pace
Its nice to a see a comment actually have a tangible reference for once, I think this is an actual implementation that wouldn’t hurt to see its effectiveness
Combining a few of these would definitely be beneficial. Overwatch in particular caught my attention, as it would enforce so many restrictions on how bots behave (Though full disclosure, I've never really played CS:GO, so I don't know what the system is like over there). No more spinbotting, no more chat spam, be it slurs, insults, advertisements, or otherwise, and bot owners would have to make measures to ensure their bots look less suspicious. If some sniper with no paid cosmetics is shooting someone's head the instant it becomes visible one too many times, that's not going to look legitimate. I know there are bots with cosmetics, and this would hurt really skilled free-to-plays, but there are ways to work around these issues without hurting anybody real.
Also if we could get some irl-but-not-illegal justice against the bot hosts and/or operators, that would be appreciated. I can't recall much useful information, but I remember watching a YT video a few years ago about a specific bot host (and maybe a Tacobot.tf member as well?) getting exposed for pedophilia. Reporting him to the police, IF he hasn't been already, would make for delicious revenge. I'd share more information if I remembered it.
I knew tacobot ppl were sad, but damn
You know what could help?
Make VAC bans ban you from tf2
But but but, Vac means Valve allows cheats 🥺
15 dollars is huge for the amount of bot accounts people are clearly making. Prime matchmaking seems like a strong solution. It would at least call out the botters on how much they're willing to spend per bot. It would also take time for enough people to get accounts with Prime that a significant portion of them were willing to sell those accounts at a discount.
issue is that by doing that, you just screw F2P players even further by throwing them into the bot's den while the people who paid get to have a better experience, plus, the game is F2P, it would make any new player would probably quit after finding out you have to pay to not deal with bots on a game that's supposedly free to play
It might help to reduce the scope of the issue, focus on "players" that play sniper exclusively, could there be demoman and scout bots? Sure, but they would be nowhere near as annoying as sniper ones
that issue has 1 thing, what about really amazing players for those classes, there is a pretty good chance they get banned imo
They should increase the sniper instakill delay, it’s insane even with real players
@@d4s0n282 They'll be forced to switch mains. Maybe a good thing
I have seen force of nature scout bots, they are scary at close range but not nearly as scary as sniper bots at any range.
Though sense the scout force of nature bots are perfect with there shots if you survive you go flying which is abit funny.
Remove headshots
I feel like if you implemented at least a few different “solutions” that you said wouldn’t work on their own, that it would at least cut down the amount of bots due to all the steps one would have to take to get past the barricades.
For a time, like about a month
Well first we need to understand where the bots come from. Who creates them? Why? How much effort are they willing to put into going over these barricades? Maybe these will be enough to deter them, even though you could bypass them by hard work.
@@swe223 I'm no hacker, but I do love programming and can tell you right now. I have no doubt that those who make hacks would most likely come up with a fix in less than a month, even if you implemented every fix possible at once. I doubt it'd stop the boys for than a few months.
The beauty of coding is that a good enough programmer can do anything with enough time. Sadly this goes both ways.
You have to think that Vale isnt even "updating" the game anymore. Plain and simple there is no new content.
So why would you put all these "band-aid" expensive (time of Valve programers) just to solve "maybe a litle, and maybe for a month" when YOU KNOW they DONT work even on other MORE popular games and with larger teams.
The TF2 "team" isnt even 5 people. last i heard was 1 guy, part-time.
Exactly, they just aint gonna hir no one or even waste money on "fixing it".
The "tredmill" is just an excuse to not act.
Captchas would still increase the cost per bot since the bot host would have to pay for the captcha service. That could make certian bots uneconomical.
Or manually solve if you're broke
@@TheLostPhoenixOfTheSkies Yes but you can only manually solve a captcha if you are awake. It would limit the active hours of the bots.
why don't they just block users running the game in text mode? no real player is playing via command prompt
0:14 "Team Fortress 2 is a game about shooting people"
That's an awfully weird way to say "War Themed Hat Simulator" 🤨
or "military millinery simulator"
What if we do multiple of these strategies to defend against bots, especially the ones that cost money to circumvent, as many cheaters won't pay $20 or more to cheat
yeah, the goal is not to have 0 bots forever, is to reduce the number of bots so they become unnoticeable, adding a couple of the strategies in the video should work for that
I want to introduce my friend to this amazing game. Your saying, that i have to tell her that she must first donate $10.00 to enable all the cool features?
Hell nah.
This was addressed in the video you moron.
Watch the suggestion 5 part of the video, jesus. Besides, CSGO had a shitton of hackers even before it went free to play so your point is mute.
@@skipmanghondarg Well, the ones that would be free if not automated, like the captcha.
This is a great video even for those unaware of Team Fortress 2 or games in general. It was a great watch altogether, and all the solutions / quick-fixes were presented in a good way, explained well, and demonstrated what could go well and what could go wrong. I'd love to watch more videos like this, and they don't need to be TF2-related either. Most people just end having the thought that "Valve makes too much money from crates so they should fix the bot problem already", but this was presented in a complete logical side without any sort of bias and / or unrelated factors.
The bot situation does affect money revenue, definitely, and keeps new players away from playing the game. I myself want to buy something from the store (cheaper than in metal, at least in my currency), which I haven't done yet due to bots showing up in the official Versus Saxton Hale.
Lastly, some of the quick-fixes mentioned in the video would be too much of a burden for regular players. A lot of players were very against Overwatch 2's requirement of a phone number. If we added so many layers just to queue up for Casual Mode, then it would be basically a desert town, either players not wanting to do so many things before being able to just play a game, or being against of sharing so many personal details like phone numbers, ID documents and stuff. And, with casual servers being a desert town, bots would migrate to the most popular community servers instead, and the whole situation wouldn't be resolved.
There's an easy solution to beat the Captcha issue.
It's called "using the in-client Steam internet browser to prevent use of addons like that." I don't think Steam's client is really built to have browser addons, so each time, even then human engagement is required- which requires managing virtual machines, and therefore the bot flow is far slower, and less bots get into matches. It's not a full solution, but it helps significantly by annoying these bot hosters, and depending on the systems they run the bots on, it could require more vram to have the shift + tab menus open, therefore allowing less bots in at a time. It's something you seemed to forget and thus I had to mention it.
Also, community servers are a bandaid fix. They are not meant to replace casual or act as a replacement to casual, therefore tons of people aren't really on-board with this solution that "eases the pain".
I noticed that the bot had a more snappy and “lock”y camera motion when ever it found a target. It would just pin the camera down on that target.
They can easily just interpolation the turn
When I saw that the video was 40 minutes long, I expected a less formal rant type of video that wasn’t as cleanly edited as your other videos.
The fact that this video has the same level of polish as your other videos is insane. I can’t imagine the amount of time it took to make this.
Great job man.
Just wanted to say, thank you for puttinf in so much time and research go make this video
6 months later and im still waiting for valve to do what they said in that twitter message.