good.gif
This explains why I get killed so much… right? Right?
Yeah! Me too! It’s all the cheaters, not my complete lack of coordination, speed, and skill.
It’s the damn cheaters!
git gud (at blocking cheaters)
Cheaters being banned? What?
OMG thank God, finally VAC is working??? The cheating was getting so bad. I kick and report people as much as I can but it felt like it never did anything.
Knowing this, I am not as upset about getting caught in the crossfire the other day. VAC flagged my game session after like 2 seconds and I had to reinstall completely.
I should go read some of these cheater forums and maybe talk a little shit. Little fuckers.
During a GDC conference held by John Macdonald (Engineer largely in the data side of Valve’s affairs), he stated that the training of VACnet was largely a “war of datasets”, and he expected the quality to improve as time went on and Valve labelled and processed more internal data for their anticheat.
Considering the leak for “referring to your training manual” for the employee-access version of Overwatch match reporting for CS2 might be an indicator that they were labelling the data the whole time with contractors. Now seems to be the release moment :)
I really hope valve can get VAC into a good space so it can be an example of doing anti-cheat well without having to be a rootkit. Looks like we’re heading towards thst point. Hopefully this change will last
John Macdonald is cooking the best fucking server-sided anticheat with all that compute power in Bellevue. Lets see him become a master chef!
I’ve been thinking for a while we need more server side stuff. No worries about infringing on the consumers computer then. Hopefully that ends up becoming something good!
and they need it for the steam deck too. win-win.
I wonder if that is actually their long-term goal. I feel like anti-cheats are like the last obstacle in making some highly popular games straight-up unplayable on Linux; with how much stake Valve has in the success of Linux gaming (Steam Deck duh) maybe they want to make it so that eventually all games with anti-cheats can run on Linux
I mean, to me, this is amazingly obviously the goal.
Games run better ~5% fps better now on Linux (when using a distro configured for gaming) than they do on Windows.
As you say, last technical obstacle is kernel AC rootkits.
Solve that, anyone still gaming on Windows is a MSFT fanboy, afraid of change, whatever.
But they have very little actual solid reason to remain on Windows.
Start getting people outta Windows for home PCs, it becomes basically just a shitty corpo OS.
Rather, not OS… but ecosystem.
I’d actually imagine for non-Microsoft properties, they would have all the more reason to run away from Windows to linux as soon as the anticheat issue is resolved.
I’d imagine they would come to the same conclusion that Gaben had with Win8: Relying on Microsoft “never restricting” the installation of software outside of the windows/Xbox store in the future is a huge gamble. Better to avoid the risk entirely.
The problem is the arms race escalates forever - cheat developers will just regroup, analyse what the new VAC is doing, and start finding new exploits.
Not saying Valve should just give up; quite the opposite. The war never ends.
That’s not the problem. The problem is people hacking software.
Why do you hate property rights?
I’m not defending cheating in online games or interfering with Valve’s service, but if you think the solution to stopping them is attacking “software hacking” in general as a concept, that juice ain’t worth the squeeze. “Software hacking,” fundamentally, is nothing more than modifying the operation of your computer, your property that you own. It’s no different than buying a physical paper book and then writing notes in the margin.
If you’re proposing disallowing people from doing that, you’re attacking the concept of property rights itself.
That would be absurd for me to suggest. I was not claiming that all “hacking” no matter how you define the word, as bad.
I was just stating the source of the problem here. Everyone is really sensitive about the fact.
Re-read your original comment, m8. If you really didn’t want to condemn all hacking, then you did a good job stating the exact opposite.
Context collapse strikes again! Assuming my statements won’t be taken to their extreme is exhausting.
That’s not the problem. Hacking software rules. The problem is griefing shitheads who ruin games for other people.
I regularly hack single player games to cheat especially after I have a “legit” run and want to try playing op or if it’s just a game I’m not super invested in the mechanics of and want to power through the story. Who gives a shit if I do this? 20-30 years ago this was a cheat code or a game genie thing. Now it’s “bad”, which I get if it’s multiplayer and I’m ruining balance (unless literally the only multiplayer aspect is a meaningless leaderboard), or it’s still there but it’s monetized and that’s just scumbag shit
The problem is shitty parenting creating shitty children.
The problem is people existing.
The problem is existence itself
Go tell that to existence then
dude i spend enough time yelling at clouds
Ugh. People. What a bunch of bastards
Hell fucking yeah.
Wauughhh!
Uaughh!
Ahahaha!
Cry some more, kernel anti cheat stans!
… cry some more.
I’ve yet to meet one that can outsmart bullet
Brrrrrrrrrrrrzzzzzzzzzzzzzzraaaaaaaaaarahahahahahaugh
Not sure if this was intentional but your comment reads like classic Halo Elite death screams. I love it. Fits perfectly with imagining execs at denuvo seeing the success of VAC.
Close.
It costs $400,000 to hire me as a ghost writer…
… for 12 seconds.
I’ve often thought that the cheaters should be simply shadow banned, and only match with other cheaters. Let them play against the other cheaters and see how well they do.
GTA Online does (did?) this, most cheating wouldn’t get you banned and instead just placed in cheater lobbies.
Rockstar botched that system, I can attest as I used numerous different mod menus on GTA V Online, most well developed menus will let you alter yours (and others) in-game reputation by spamming the commend/report functions.
Spawning in UFO’s an such was the highlight of GTA V Online for me, haven’t touched the game since I moved to Linux, I hear it’s broken due to the new anti-cheat.
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What reasons wouldn’t you play older ones?
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It’s escapism. If it’s not for you, that’s fine.
AFAIK why not add a mod that removes these things
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So that’s why you don’t play GTA. I don’t agree, but you do you.
To get back on topic, why don’t you play older games as you said. That’s specifically what the other user asked.
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heavy s-x and substance use
Did you just self-censor the word “sex”?
Bruh.
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GTA is a disgusting franchise
Because of this nobody noticed how woke GTA:SA was. If you depicted the CIA smuggling cocaine and weapons into black communities while the justice system imprisons young black men with wildly disparate sentencing 2025, the game would be canceled, by the kind of chuds who just see “cool violence!”
San Andreas was the wokest of them all, but GTA V is pretty woke too. Your main enemies are three letter agencies, the in-universe equivalent of Blackwater/Academi/XE (legit their GTA name has been consistent for longer than their real names at this point, might as well call them real life Merriweather) and you pull a hit on an asshole tech CEO, a tobacco company CEO, etc. But then, GTA V has also been out for over a decade now.
I hope they keep the theme going with the next one. Show it all as a bunch of “cool violence” while beneath the surface it’s critique of consumerism, government overreach and society in general.
They made it much easier to setup private lobbies for friends and crew. Haven’t played in public lobbies in years.
While private lobbies certainly help weed out the bullshit, if a modder was determined enough they could copy your Rockstar ID and use that to follow you from lobby to lobby regardless of its privacy restrictions.
Logging someones Rockstar ID might as well make them your friend, depending on the mod menu they could receive notifications on when you’re online/offline.
Here is a common mod menu that was popular prior to the anti-cheat update, I think they have shutdown now.
From what you’re saying, it sounds like you have to be in a public lobby first, then hop into private for them to get your id. Can they get your id without ever being in the lobby or any contact at all? Currently you can just go into single player and start a private lobby. Idk how the enhanced edition does, I’m assuming it’s the same. I haven’t played in a couple years, so getting into a private lobby might have changed.
it sounds like you have to be in a public lobby first, then hop into private for them to get your id. Can they get your id without ever being in the lobby or any contact at all?
This is not true, if you knew a persons social-club username you could search for the ID associated with it. I can’t find many tools online except for this one no idea of this works or not, I’m sure there are guides to obtain R*ID’s elsewhere.
That’s very concerning. It’s wild it even exist.
I’d love to play matches with aimbots.
I’m not good at games. Don’t care enough to git gud. Certainly wouldn’t ruin anyone’s experience by cheating. But it’d be fun to see what the game is like with everyone having perfect aim.
Cheaters aren’t only aimbots. In fact, most of the time they’re not even using aimbot because that’s one of the easiest one to tell that someone is cheating. Most of the time they can just see everyone through walls. But if it’s cheater vs cheater and they don’t care about being caught then it’s not fun or interesting because you just use aim + speed + noclip (I assume that’s possible) and just kill everyone the second the round starts.
Yeah…that’s why I said “aimbots”.
I think Valve should have only recorded which players were cheating for a few weeks, then ban them all at once. Would avoid them disabling cheats now they know and would also make it more difficult to figure out what exactly is VAC detecting.
I always thought there should be an “unlimited class” in the olympics where you can take anything you want. I want to see wildly drugged up athletes competing with each other.
That’s just the regular Olympics.
“And now the athletes are at the starting line for the hundred meter ketamine stagger. . . They’re waiting for the starters’ gun. . . Some of them have got confused and wandered off. . .”
"Oh, it looks Swerving Dan had a heart attack when the starting pistol went off!
That’s going to hurt his chances, Jim."
According to D’Souza, he created the Games because he believes that athletes are entitled to do what they wish with their own bodies
If that’s been agreed upon as the ruleset for their competitions, I agree
and that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is corrupt and not paying them enough.
Also agree, it’s the individual countries that usually pay their athletes to athlete and uh… Yeah, they get sponsors for a reason, don’t they. I know a few people who’ve competed at several olympic games and just being top 10 or something in the world in your sport doesn’t exactly get you swimming in money.
I always thought professional sports games don’t have enough good ol’ gladiatorial bloodshed. If youre getting paid tens of millions per year for sports you damn well better be doing more than moving an object around.
Look, all im saying is any sports game can be made more watchable by giving players a side-armed melee wepon and allowed one swing per play iteration with no redcards. Put back in some selective pressure to turn those middle aged pudgy players and coaches into real athletes and tacticians.
Caaaaaarl, that kills people.
Don’t worry, you can still be buried with the medal if you win
Cheaters also are part of why I like coop games so much more. Join a random game with a cheater, doesn’t matter too much and you can leave. Play with a group of friends and that also goes a long way to eliminating them.
I can only hope this affects TF2 as well. I used to play competitively and the line between cheater and god-tier is so blurry sometimes, especially with how hard it is to spectate now. The one and only time I was certain someone was cheating was when I tried to rocket jump around a corner and got killed by a prefired airshot from a direct hit, aka they couldn’t even see me when they fired and still hit me 50 feet in the air the same instant I came around the corner.
And of course their team wouldn’t kick em because people still think it’s impossible to cheat with projectiles :(
I’ve seen shockingly few TF2 cheaters. Some people are just cracked as hell at that game
It’s been 18 years after all…
Me when I hit the noscope 720 bhop noclip accelerated wombo rocket jump market landscaper triple crit combo
“200% skilled airshot.”
Propane Nightmares starts playing
I’m not saying they definitely weren’t cheating, but I have definitely hit some shots in my time that seemed impossible. If you fire enough rockets at corners that you think someone might come around, or in games with snipers that penetrate cover, take blind guesses through walls, you’re going to get lucky eventually.
Edit to add: just saying, the line is blurry indeed. But I think if I got kicked over it, I’d be a good sport about it! “Got kicked for cheating because I was too l33t” would be such a good story. I’m sure some people have had it happen.
A buddy of mine had many bans on CS: Source servers for cheating. He’s computer illiterate and gamed on an IBM T42 at 640x480, but paired with headphones he was a monster. I know for sure he didn’t cheat, he was my roommate and I seen bans happen with my own eyes.
Dude couldn’t look at a titty online without windows needing a reinstall, there’s no way he could download a cheat.
I played 1.6 competitively way back in leagues. There were spots where you learned to shoot at like 20-30 seconds into a match. If someone ran from the “other” start you knew they would be coming around certain corners.
Oh, getting kicked even when you’re not cheating has definitely happened, it’s even happened to me. But that cheater was suspicious even before that shot, that one is just the one that sealed the deal for me. Using the direct hit is also part of the evidence! Projectile cheaters like using it because the rockets move faster so the cheat engine is more accurate against people who can airstrafe. also it was citadel (a new map, the good prefire airshot spots are far from clear) and they would have had to be randomly firing rockets up at the sky for no reason. I get owned plenty often, this was not that.
I was never at the top of the comp scene, but I’ve spent my fair share of time playing pugs against the best of the best and not even soooapymeister hits shots like that person was.
It’s probably more difficult than you think, Shounic (Youtuber) explained in several of his breakdowns on the bot crisis about how far removed TF2 is compared to simplistic (mechanically) shooters like CS2, making much harder to create a VACnet style solution.
It’s believed that the update that removed the bots was more of a manual approach.
i hope the same thing with dota 2, the game is already hard and made it harder with scripters
Ha! Get fucked, losers. Cheaters ruin the fun for everyone, so I hope every last one gets permabanned.
You cannot permaban a cheater for the saame reason you shouldn’t have death penalty, people need to be able to challenge the decision which should trigger a process
As a piece of software, I highly doubt there isn’t a single bug in VAC that would cause a false-positive
I agree, they should instead do a 10 gazillion year temp ban. I expect people would change by that point
/j
Why not both?
Bro touch grass. Seriously likening a VAC ban with the death penalty?! You can just email someone, if you’re on death penalty you can’t just phone the judge and ask him to recheck once you’re dead lmao
Judges should be using ouija boards to communicate with people killed by death penalty. “So you were guilty, right?” To make sure everyone gets a chance to appeal the decision.
You surely can permaban a cheater, and should. It doesn’t mean the process can’t be challenged.
In the worst case scenario offender can just create another Steam account, so permaban is fine.
When you suspect someone of being highly dangerous you put them in jail even if they are not convicted yet. And when it turns out they are innocent they are released.
A ban is like jail not like a death sentence …
Not a bad analogy, but there is a major problem with pre-trial detention being abused in the US, leaving people in jail for years at a time without having a trial. So maybe not the best thing to compare it to.
More like getting kicked out of a club, you can still go to other clubs.
And you can contest the ban and potentially get it lifted and return to the same game.
I said cheaters, not suspected cheaters. I know that’s unrealistic, because no anticheat software is perfect, but I still want it.
shadowbanning to cheater-only servers sounds like nice middle ground to me
Fall Guy did that. The consequence was a lot of videos with everyone cheating.
so…it’s a win/win?
Sometimes it’s a nice perk if you want to play modded coop with your friends ie those from mods.
If, to you, not being able to play one game in the sea of many many many games is akin to death, maybe you need to see someone about addiction.
If you cheat in a game, you’ve burned your bridge. It’s like taking a piss in the cereal isle of Kmart, you probably won’t be welcome in that Kmart any more. Or hey, maybe you’ll end up like an acquaintance I knew who was banned from a Kmart, maybe you’ll be hired on as staff without them checking the binder of banned people. I think I’ve lost the plot of this analogy.
Yeah, I have a very thoroughly ingrained suspicion of anticheat stemming back to when I got banned many years ago from an online game for supposedly running a script.
I had so much lag on my dialup connection, that a backlog of all my commands hit their server at the same time, so from their perspective it looked like I’d entered over a dozen commands in under a second. Insta ban, no appeal.
Found a cheater
Meh, no process is perfect and sensitivity and specificity are often enemies. Basically, in a lot of cases the more sensitive you make a test to detect something, the more likely it is to accidentally catch false positives.
Sounds like they’ve vastly improved it’s ability to detect, hopefully that didn’t come with false detections for people running unusual hardware or software combinations.
This is certainly one of the comparisons of all time
Consequence of sentencing the wrong person to death: You killed an innocent life in an irreversible action.
Consequence of permabanning a player from an online game: The player can no longer play the game. The action is also reversible since “permaban” just means to say “we’re never unbanning you unless something extraordinary were to happen”.
Hypothesis: people who cheat in video games are scum bags in other aspects of life. I wonder if anyone’s done a study on that. I feel like the kind of person who has to cheat in video games is a broken sad sack.
I used Roblox cheats when I was younger because I was bored.
When I was a little kid and I ran into cheaters in Halo: Custom Edition I still hated them and would never do it. I don’t think being a bored little kid is an excuse.
That said if you don’t do it anymore that’s a little more excusable at least you stopped.
A big part of the boredom was the fact there was other cheaters ruining the same game.
But yeah, I wouldn’t use cheats now
It depends if you’re only talking about multi-player or including solo too. I see no harm in customizing one’s experience with cheats in single player.
I would further argue that it’s a bad behaviour only if one cheats in competitive multiplayer games.
Almost a decade ago, I was having fun playing Left 4 Dead 2. There is this survival mode where you and your human teammates play against neverending waves of zombies. In one stage, there was someone who invented a way to defend yourselves on a bridge by all four players strictly crouching and shooting straight to the front, at the far end of the bridge. If anyone runs out of ammo, they walk a few steps to pick up a new M4 and come right back. Cooperation is the key in surviving for more than 15 minutes, and everyone must strictly obey this play style.
Anyway, the way to communicate between players were limited. It was hard to tell everyone what to do by typing. I downloaded a mod which grants us infinite ammo, that way, nobody needed to get up to get a new gun. In late game, there were three Tanks spawning and charging at us, that even with perfect timing it was hard to defeat all three. The infinite ammo absolutely helped, and I think I just created an new way of playing this stage which depends more on one’s knowledge than skill.
I ended up had a great time with those strangers who played with me, who unlocked the gold medal of that stage, and way beyond the survival time requirement.
I think that the (only) relevant factor is whether everyone else knows and wants it. Suppose your mod affected only yourself (so other players wouldn’t know about it) and you played in a way that was mostly reasonable, but providing a little bit more covering fire than should be possible. Your teammates might still have fun while they’re playing, though only if you don’t overdo it; but even then, they probably wouldn’t be too happy to discover your cheating once they’d already finished the map. If you give everyone infinite ammo, and tell them about it then that’s fine, but because they know about it, not because they benefit from it.
For that matter, cheating in a competitive server set up for that purpose can be fun (though it can also be wildly unbalanced, especially if the game is asymmetrical)
Yeah, if everyone is in on it then it’s not cheating, it’s “house rules” as they say for board games
HvH can be some of the most fun nonsense. Cheating in and of it self is not a problem. It’s breaking of the social contract everyone is assumed to be in place.
Nah, if someone on my PvE team is cheating/exploiting that still ruins the experience. I play games like that to get better, the skill improvement is a huge part of the experience for me.
Yeah, one of my friends had a random person join his game and give him like 1000 account levels, whatever they were called. Basically finished a huge chunk of the end game progression for him, and we never found a clean way to undo it, since it was account-bound progression.
I don’t consider single player changes cheating. For something to be cheating, you need to break the rules agreed to by the players. If you’re the only player, you presumably can’t break the agreement you make with yourself.
Sometimes i turn off hardcore mode when i get overwhelmed. I def agree in principle though
Shit, I play in easy mode. And I sometimes look up hints online. But yeah, I only play single player stuff so I don’t feel like I’m cheating anyone.
It really depends on what you think about as cheating. I mod my Bethesda games and Stardew Valley heavily to the point that mod file sizes are way past the game file sizes themselves, but some people consider that as cheating, as I’m not playing the original games, I’m not experiencing the original spirits of them. Some people heavily against this. Is altering games only consider as cheating in online games or in all games?
I believe actual cheating requires there to be harm done to another player be it due to unfair advantages, theft of time or other malicious activity.
I think people who get angry at cheating/modding single player games are not to be taken seriously. Probably children.
I’ve never heard anyone but you call modding a Bethesda game cheating.
I hope everyone is talking about online only. Most single player games have difficulty modes so you can play casually or hard as desired. This thread sounds like anything but the hardest is cheating though.
Modding an offline sandbox game just to improve in-game quality of life is not the same as using cheat mods to get even at another and farm all the achievements for everyone to see.
Here’s my definition of cheating: The use of any 3rd party software, not allowed by the developer, that gives a material in-game advantage to the user against other players without their knowledge or consent.
So mods are not cheating. Purely single player hacks are not cheating. Optional 3rd party overlays or in-game aids like RuneLite for OSRS or the many external deck/stat trackers for games like Hearthstone or Genshin Impact also aren’t cheating.
Using Aimbots, wall hacks, infinite health/ammo/lives, and similar in online comp play is cheating.
Grey zone stuff would be things like unapproved in-game overlays.
I don’t care what people do in single player. Hack and mod as much as your heart desires, it doesn’t hurt any other players. The worst thing that can happen is you “cheat” yourself out of a personal challenge, but that’s your own call.
I will accept this as truth without further examination. It’ such selfish, antisocial behavior that there MUST be something wrong with them.
It’s possible that Adwaita for Steam causing VAC issues now. I suddenly started getting VAC warnings on CS2 and it didn’t go until disabling Adwaita for Steam.
Yet another reason gnome is awful.
How is this related to Gnome though? Adwaita for Steam is a third-party Steam client theme that only modifies CSS. This might be a coincidence but I don’t know at this point.
Nice.
The cheating bastards need to git gud.
And they did it without installing root kits on our computers.
Exactly
You love to see it.
