Slander, extortion and doxxing - beneath the surface of TF2’s bot crisis
Slander, extortion and doxxing - beneath the surface of TF2’s bot crisis
Behind the aimbots that have plagued Team Fortress 2, a far more sinister story of harassment has unfolded - and it's only getting worse.
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I wish Valve had some sort of monetary incentive to fix this. If this happened to the cash cow that is Counter Strike this would have been fixed already. It's sad to see this going on especially with the resurgence TF2 has been having lately.
Counter strike is run over with bots and cheaters too so I doubt they care at all
It's likely they care but it's such a cat and mouse game. Within a week or two any new patch will have a work around by bots and cheaters anyway.
People are being harassed and doxed by a group of people that have turned one of their most popular games into a fucking cesspool. They need to either throw in the towel and drop support for TF2 or wage war on these losers.
Hire a dedicated team, involve the police, I don't fucking know. The current state of TF2 is an absolute disgrace, it's fucking pathetic.
I didn't know it was that bad! I never really played it but that sounds rough. People suck.
And yet they really don’t do anything about it, I have yet to see evidence that they engage in the cat and mouse game. A lot of cheaters have full inventories of skins and have been cheating for many years at this point with the same cheats
If you don't think Valve is banning anyone from their games then I invite you to take a trip to the VAC steam forums and see all the posts from people proclaiming their innocence and complaining about their ban. Always a good time.
I didn’t say they weren’t banning people, I said they aren’t really playing the cat and mouse game. VAC is a known system and it doesn’t actually affect cheating in any meaningful way since the game is free, steam accounts are easy to create, and time between VAC waves is extremely long.
Go play a few matches of CS2 on competitive without buying the premier and tell me that they’re doing anything at all that is effective. It’s gotten so bad that playing on non-premier games I will get a cheater in the lobby about 75% of the time. And premier isn’t immune but it’s about 20% of the time.
Most of what needs to be done is that their servers need to clean up and stop sending so much data to the client and also the servers need anti-cheat. There’s been some suggestions of this by people getting banned for moving their mouse to fast repeatedly, but that’s about all they’ve done of note.
If you think that the company who has almost entirely abandoned TF2 and left it to rot to cheaters is doing much with CS, I think that’d be a bad assumption.
The fact that they're letting this shit happen to one of their own communities is extremely disappointing. They should take it personally that a group of people are using their game as a tool to harass people, but they don't give a fuck.
I have lost so much respect for Valve over their handling of TF2. I've gone from a fanboy to a hater.
It's a 17 year old game, how long do you expect them to support it?
Till they stop making money off skin/etc sales.
I will buy the explanation that the game is too old to continue to support when they stop adding new microtransactions every six months or so
As long as it continues being one of the top games on steam by online player count, and/or it continues to make them boatloads of cash?
I don't think the age of the game is really relevant. If the game is active and you're making money on it, you support it.
That's precisely the problem; they continue to support the game, in the state that it's in. Honestly, an appropriate move would be for them to officially discontinue support for the game altogether (even if that means not having a new IP to replace it with). This means turning off their official servers, and removing the ability to buy/sell inventory items on the Steam Marketplace.
Right now, Valve allows people to sell items for real money (which they take a cut from) in a game that is overrun by bots. They need to either fix the bot problem, or stop taking people's money.
Up until they release the intellectual property into the public domain, alongside the source code and hosting tools.
Corporations are not to be trusted to maintain and preserve our culture. They have enthusiasticly proven again and again they are irresponsible and cannot handle this task.