I have several thousands of hours logged in CS:GO since it was released in 2012, and Valve's lack of concern with this particular exploit seems to mimic their inattentiveness to so many other aspects of the game. With the massive following that the Counter Strike franchise has and the boatloads of cash they continually bring in from digital cases/keys/skins, they most certainly have the resources to put out these types of fires immediately. Instead, they have taken a bare minimum approach to community outreach and maintaining a game that touts a 26 million player count each month [0]. The cheating situation is the most prominent example of how little focus the game earns from its developers. Compared to how other popular FPS titles (Valorant) handles anti-cheat, CS:GO is years behind. It's not uncommon to face at least one or two players a day who are using some form of cheat (some more obvious than others). Reporting the player does nothing, and when you visit their player profile on Steam and see accusatory comments about cheating going back months or years, you can be confident that your report will have little-to-no impact -- chalk it up as a loss and hope for more honest opponents next time. I've even seen exploits in the wild that can be used to prevent anyone else in the server from reporting a cheater in the game's UI; spinbots that can kill an entire team with perfect aim accuracy within a couple seconds; bunny hop scripts that allow for movements rates that far exceed what is normal when running -- basically things that some basic AI/ML should be able to detect with relative ease. Fortunately, other third-party services have built large player bases by offering their own in-house anti-cheat software and matchmaking service which is far more effective, but I digress. It's unfortunate to see something with such great potential get so little TLC from a company that is more than capable.
I think Valve's ineptitude in regards to CS:GO becomes easier to explain when considering their history with Counter Strike.
The game that became 1.6 wasn't even their game. It was a mod for the original Half Life and they hired the modders after it got popular.
Then CS:Source came around the same time HL2 did. That is to say it exists only because HL2 did, and Source is just HL2 with guns (lol). It was very divisive in the pro scene and the majority of professional players rejected it.
GO's history is even worse. It wasn't even meant to exist at first; Hidden Path were porting CS:Source to consoles and Valve decided that it could live as its own game. They release it in 2012 and, by all accounts, it sucks. Nobody plays it. Things begin to change when they create a virtual economy (skins) and admittedly do actually improve the game a fair bit. It's only when the game sees those improvements (2013-14?) that the pro scene finally moves from 1.6 to GO.
So the situation in 2021: The most popular game on Steam is a game which, according to Valve themselves, shares 75-85% of its code with a game released almost 20 years ago (Half Life 2), and which everybody knows is a complete and utter mess under the hood (thanks in part due to the source code getting leaked, also thanks to ex-devs sharing their stories of their time working on CS:GO). This along with Valve being notorious for just not having the internal incentive structures to get bugs fixed (hence GO's spaghetti code)... it's easier to understand (but not excuse!) Valve's attitude for serious security flaws like these.
I am similar to you in that I have about 1000 hours in CS:GO, and I've spent many 1000s of hours watching the pro scene. I love Counter Strike, but with Valve the way it is, I don't see how these fundamental flaws will ever get fixed. Look at how they're allowing Valorant to decimate the North American CS scene, just like they allowed Overwatch to take from TF2's player base back in 2016.
> just like they allowed Overwatch to take from TF2's player base back in 2016
Overwatch isn't really taking TF2's crowd though. On the surface they're similar, but mechanically they are worlds apart. Overwatch is highly polished; TF2 is downright clunky by comparison. But it allows custom servers and player scripting/mods. Blizzard is far too tight-fisted for that to realistically happen for Overwatch. TF2 also has all kinds of interesting movement mechanics due to the source engine, that overwatch just really doesn't have. Overwatch's format of merely 6-person teams means you can't really goof around like you can with TF2's 12 and 16-person teams.
I'm sure a lot of players checked out overwatch but didn't stop playing TF2 as they're simply very different games. TF2 also did release major updates albeit infrequently until the jungle inferno update back in ~2017. Now it's just radio silence apart from small seasonal updates.
I'm not as familiar with CS (only played a few dozen cs:go matches), but just from playing both that and valorant I feel like it's going to be a similar situation. Valorant is more polished but it just plays wildly different due to the player abilities.
Valve is neglectful regarding these games (look at how DotA 2 is treated by comparison), but I doubt trying to compete would've helped very much.
There were people from TF2's competitive scene which is also 6v6 who left to go play Overwatch since there was actual money to be made since Blizzard was funding prize pools.
Almost whole competitive scene (already dying thanks to Valve) of TF2 migrated to Overwatch the moment it was available. When the pro players migrated, so did the casuals.
Overwatch can be a different game now, but when it started it had a huge community that resembled TF2 at the start. It wasn’t at all about the mechanics.
Anecdotally speaking, I stopped playing TF2 a few months before Overwatch came out, and playing Overwatch has killed any interest I might have in getting back to TF2. I don't think I'm an outlier.
Is there an alternative of CS 1.6 that runs on Linux and newer MacOSs and doesn't need a quantum computer run (I mean relatively moderate specs :))? I think CS:GO was made unnecessarily heavy without any substantial improvements over 1.6.
I also liked Project IGI - simple mission game. I am not into gaming really. Sniper Elite is like this by any chance?
These were the only games I liked and I'd like to try something like that again. I like normal/realistic game plays - no extra/exotic powers or sci-fi cartoonish elements to a game.
pure speculation on my part, but I also suspect the people at valve have simply never liked counterstrike. they didn't come up with the core gameplay (nor did they design the most popular maps), and compared against the rest of the valve portfolio, it really isn't their style to begin with.
I'm sure it's a major main to maintain and occasionally add features to such an old codebase, but imo the apathy runs deeper than that.
I agree, this is essentially what I was getting at in my original comment. Counter Strike is not Valve's game. They picked it up when it got popular and since then have done less than the minimum. And despite this they generate hundreds of millions each year off of it? Perfect.
Direct TV created a gaming league called CGS that played CS:Source because it had better graphics than 1.6. It was the first time pro CS players in the US could get contracts (25-35k a year? It wasnt much). This league forced all of the top talent in North America to move to Source. The game was buggy, trash with horrible hitboxes, netcode, audio issues, cluttered maps (with actual trash in them) and unpredictable, overly-complicated physics.
At the time, many 1.6 players still had single/dual core CPUs and source would run at 20-80 fps, when gamers were just starting to get 100+ hz monitors. There was no mass migration of players, due to gameplay and performance issues. The game really wasn't ready for eSports level competition (and never improved to that point)
CGS failed after 2 years, and most of the pros retired afterwards.
During that time, the European 1.6 scene was flourishing. The death of the NA scene was a huge blow to international play. The compLexity roster that was drafted into CGS could have been one of the best NA teams of all time.
I sucked at CS at the time so couldn't tell a difference. After getting decent at CSGO though I can see how a game with certain changes in gunplay would be a turn off. I enjoyed source casually though and switched over completely.
Yeah it’s mostly 2nd tier players who can see a salary bump from switching or have been banned from CS for previous rule violations.
I hope Valorant kicks Valve into gear a bit. I have played many hours of both and CS:GO is a much better game (simplicity, balance, opportunity for individual skill) but we will see...
An interesting thing from an esport perspective: Riot tightly controls Valorant matches, whilst Valve will let anyone run and monetise a CS tournament. I think this will make CS a more healthy scene in the long run.
Yes, top players really are leaving CS for Valorant, though this is mainly limited to the NA scene afaik (two examples who were on top teams: Ethan[0] and nitr0[1]).
Other than that, it is mainly those washed players leaving, yes. Which still isn't healthy for the scene, and means the NA CS scene effectively doesn't exist any more (this isn't hyperbole, there are only two good NA teams right now and both were flown out to Europe by their orgs to compete there instead).
As with most things in life, those that are at the top have little reason to switch to something new. When everyone else moves on and new talent comes up, that is when you see things change. I wouldn't be surprised though if both games and pro scenes co-exist successfully.
While valve is indeed quite neglectful, the reason they're "behind" on anticheats is because they don't run extremely invasive ones like EAC (Easy Anti-Cheat) or Vanguard (what Valorant uses). These operate exactly like malware/rootkits that you just have to trust. Blegh. Even if I wanted to run those (I do not), they don't work on linux anyways.
So I'll stick to cs:go and tf2 community servers, thanks.
> Anti cheat developers do not deserve anyone’s trust until they are open.
As in open source? I can't imagine that would go too well—my impression is that anti-cheat is almost entirely security by obscurity (because they have no other option; trying to beat the owner of the computer you're running on is a losing battle).
This is certainly true for client-side anti-cheat, but there's little reason server-side anti-cheat can't work just as well. They've been incredibly successful in chess and (from what I've heard) virtual cycling. These are generally based on statistics and while they can't catch the very subtle cheaters those generally aren't a problem outside of actual tournaments.
While I would never want to use a malware of an anticheat, you're not quite right about Linux. EAC works on Linux, however it does not work through Proton. The developers must release a Linux build themselves if you want to use it. The effect is the same because they frequently don't bother to do so of course
I understand it’s a security conscious person’s opinion to prefer non-invasive anticheat systems, but I personally would prefer to have a choice. Run two versions, one with invasive anticheat and guarantee for no cheats, one less invasive but more cheat prone.
I real cost of hours spent with cheats on cs:go for me is too high.
The funny thing is that you cannot "guarantee for no cheats". It's just software that runs on the players computer and there are cheats for both Valorant and League. So your choice is more between the two versions a) less invasive but cheats and b) installing a kernel driver and maybe a rootkit but cheats.
As someone who also has thousands of hours in counter strike, you are either playing up the number of cheaters in the game (many do this, because they don't like to admit when someone is simply better), or have been extremely unlucky. I'm assuming here that you are talking about prime matchmaking, I don't have much experience with non-prime.
Valorant anti-cheat is a throwback to early 2000s malware, not really years ahead.
TF2 is exactly the same. It's a great game, tons of people still buying items from the store, just slowly being choked out by developer neglect.
I guess they're just printing so much money from the steam store that it's hard for anyone to care any more. I'm curious if we will ever see a great game out of valve again.
I enjoyed Alyx but ... I wish there were more AAA VR games that were not horror (scary) games. I almost didn't make it past chapter 3 of Alyx where you're in the dark with zombies and a flashlight. And, I think I played most of the game from that point on with the sound turned way way down. It's just too intense for me.
I don't know what to suggest. Even Boneworks which is not "horror" is too scary for me. I walk through it with my tension level at 11. I made to chapter 7 before I decided it wasn't worth it to continue.
I don't find there to be much replay value. I played it once, speedran it a few times, and then played it with the developer commentary. I am looking forward to their next VR game and hopefully they don't shove smooth locomotion it last second like they did with Alyx.
I absolutely loved Half-Life: Alyx and always recommend it when talking about VR games. Still, I see what they mean about replay value.
I've played Alyx once and fully intend to play it again with developer commentary. Valve's commentary mode is always a treat. But beyond that I don't see myself coming back to it often. Just like with Portal.
On the other hand, I have played through Half-Life 2 quite a few times. Of course, there are also open world games like Breath of the Wild or Skyrim where I have many hundred hours of time spent.
lol this is true, I guess they meant they didn't replay it as much as they'd like to, or those replays weren't as fun, but to me it seems that playing a single player game multiple times over, doing different things each time, seems like pretty darn good replay value.
I’ve put hundreds of hours individually into most of the Fallout games. There are so many side quests and crazy things that can happen, character options, things to explore, ways to accomplish goals that I can keep going back.
I played Final Fantasy VII Remake twice, because they made the game so you can’t get everything by going though just once and I also wanted to get the PS trophies. So I replayed it, though I found it tedious and annoying at times. I don’t remember how many hours I spent but certainly under one hundred.
I’ve replayed all these games, but I wouldn’t say the latter has replay value.
I have thousands of hours in TF2, but less than 50 in Alyx. A game with good replay value has me coming back to play it day after day. A single player game like Alyx is going to have worse replay value, but that doesn't mean I think the game is bad.
I think smooth locomotion is an unfortunate reality of current VR hardware; If most of your userbase gets uncomfortable from non-smooth locomotion, it makes sense to design for the smooth locomotion as a first-class experience.
BTW you are backwards smooth locomotion is where you move around with a joystick.
Most of the user base doesn't get sick from smooth locomotion though. Maybe teleport was better back when the project started in 2016, but in Q1 2020 especially after boneworks which came out in Q4 2019 people would see Alyx as dated. Smooth locomotion wasn't even in the game from a Q4 2019 build of the game. Continuous turning didn't even make it in until after the game was released.
I looked into what was going on with CS:Go after trying to get back into it a few years ago, and noticing just how horrifically bad the amount of cheating was.
The most damning thing for me wasn't just the subreddits dedicated to just indexing valve's lack of attention, or the way they appear to genuinely make money off of the cheating ecosystem.
The worst was when I learned that VAC (their anti-cheating platform, IIRC) was so bad (at the time) that it appeared to only ban exact binary matches for detected cheats.
So if you wrote a cheat, that eventually, ages later did end up getting banned by VAC, all you would have to do would be to go back to your source, rename a few functions and files, recompile to a new binary, and you'd be good to go again.
As a sidenote, I just attempted to find the article that documented what I said above, and I found github repositories like this instead: https://github.com/danielkrupinski/VAC-Bypass The fact that things like this are front page google responses to phrases like "VAC Ban" (what I typed in google), really demonstrates just how abysmal Valve's performance is here.
That VAC Bypass is rather crude... but I guess it works.
When my friends and I wrote some cheats in the past we used to hook VAC so that when it wanted to run we'd unload our hooks/cheats and let it complete scanning as normal, then once VAC was completed we'd re-hook and re-load our library/hooks.
This also allowed us to iterate on development by having live-reload of the .dll on disk by unhooking, reloading dll, and rehooking.
This was back in the days of Counter Strike: Source, when it first came out.
The day it was first released on macOS was fun too... Valve forgot to strip debug symbols on their macOS, so we were able to dump all of the debug symbols and get a much better idea on what to hook/look for and what the various structures were used for!
At least in the past, admins on servers had the option to intervene and ban people (although they could be bypassed as well). Nowadays games opt for having entirely managing servers, sadly.
I've played CSGO and ran amateur LANs for years. People online talk about how bad cheating is but I've barely run into it. Admittedly most of my time has been right in the middle of ranks so maybe cheaters are mainly at the lower and higher ends and I'm using on Prime matchmaking.
Usually when someone accuses another player of cheating they are just tilted and reacting to getting out aimed or seeing something suspicious due to how netcode handles lag/ping differential with interpolation, which is adjustable.
Try making a new account, that isn't eligible for Prime matchmaking (because you haven't played the prerequisite number of games or whatever yet), and see if you can even get into Prime before quitting entirely out of frustration with cheaters. Or at least that was my experience. 12-13 games in a row of being headshotted across the map through walls or by spinning guys in the sky was enough to get me to swear off the game.
On the other hand, I cheated once (I was bored with TF2's new gameplay, and a teenager) 11 years ago , and got a lifetime VAC ban, while most die-hard cheaters would probably laugh it off and create a new account (especially now that it is f2p). Lifetime bans hardly seem proportional if you are on the receiving side.
The solution to cheating problems isn't necessarily technical, it's also social, and I think it reflects a bigger issue in our society, also present on social platforms. When anyone can interact with strangers and behave however they want, there's going to be trolls and others, motivated by the feeling that they can't be held accountable for ruining someone else's fun (or, just not realizing they are not having healthy interactions).
Lots of online platforms have developed lots of ways to cope with this, from karma systems to moderators, to social credits, to ID verification. Couldn't games take a page from that book?
It sucks that developers only crack down on cheating when it hurts a revenue stream. I'm sure if people figured out how to clone hats, valve would hire an entire independent team to come in and work overtime for a blank check until its fixed.
Rockstar only cared about cheating in GTA5 because people were duplicating in game money that Rockstar was trying to sell you for real money. They didn't care about cheating in GTA4 because it didn't affect any potential revenue since it only affected people who had already bought the game.
I had a brand new computer that i built at the start of the year. 100% new hardware. Brand new install of windows. Installed Steam, installed CS:GO. And I was unable to play because Steam flagged my system for cheating. The fix was to run some random steam exe found in the steam install directory. I guess it caused Steam to re-scan my system?
Not the same level of frustration as a permaban. But I was pretty annoyed that I had to jump through hoops on a brand-new system. Really weird.
Steam is terrible software. It's been losing track of my games lately, so every time I want to play something I have to wait around for 5 minutes or so for steam to rediscover the local game files it had already installed. Download management is terrible too, frequently coming to a crawl or stopping entirely. It's not my ISP throttling me, either, because this only happens with steam and not when I am downloading other massive things from other places.
I've recently broken into GN ranks on CSGO and am watching suspected cheats ... I can only think the first dozen videos are a test of me, because algorithmically spotting the cheating seems like it would be super easy. About half of mine so far only look at the floor, get only awp headshots. I mean, really?
I guess scammers money is just as green.
There are loads of farming accounts that just walk in a circle. Why do they put those players in matches with real players. If you're not going to ban them then at least honeypot them.
Yeah, and annoyingly the paid platforms (like, FACEIT) have way fewer obvious cheaters - but also (due to the increased competition) a lot of subtle ones. Part of the problem is also related to the game going free-to-play, instead of taxing cheaters through time & cash, it's just time.
Faceit AC is technologically superior, it's not just the payment on-boarding. The cheats for faceit cost $200+ and are all private. There are free, open source, undetected cheats for CSGO that are VAC undetected for 4+ years. The difference is staggering
Agree on all counts - I'm just saying that if you dislike losing to obvious spinbots, then FACEIT is much better - but still have many (less obvious) hackers.
[On the topic of cheating, and as a comparison to CS:GO ... ] What's hilarious really is how common and in plain sight the Dota 2 cheats are: there are loads of cheat engines which people can even write their own Lua scripts to manage: and are hosted on Github. They have VK pages, customer support, registered companies, online reviews ... zero legal action taken against any of these companies that I'm aware of - and very limited work done to make the cheating more difficult.
Yeah, valve just doesn't care in the slightest, it doesn't require a kernel AC, but the slightest of changes could get tens of thousands of people banned using a free public cheat....
Faceit is essentially the gold standard to be honest. definitely it if you want a higher level of gameplay without cheaters. Wish there was a faceit for silvers, though
An unknown number of overwatch matches are not recent games, but landmarks for behavior. Indeed you are being tested far more than you are training the system.
It's always unfortunate when a presumably valuable asset - CS:GO brought in over $400M in 2018 [1] - does not receive the attention it deserves, nonetheless requires, for continued successful operation.
We see this with other games as studios spend more time preparing "future IP" and less time preserving their existing. One example is Bungie's Destiny franchise. Studios need to continue monitoring - and interacting with - their playerbase to find a middle that satisfies all. Bungie made a decision a few months ago that has been reversed, per community feedback about the massively negative impact said decision would have on the game and its playerbase.
Studios like Valve, Bungie, and others truly need to step up what is essentially customer service, especially as the digital entertainment market only continues to grow and open up even more opportunities for success than before.
They also do little for scamming and impersonation. People send me and I've even randomly come across profiles that have cloned my own name/picture/profile page in an attempt to scam people by impersonating me (using my inventory page to lure them in, hoping they won't notice the URL).
Virtually every friend I have met through CSGO that has skins has gotten scammed out of at least $100. Any time I give friends a knife to borrow or to have, they immediately get dozens of friend requests from scammers. The first time I gave a friend a knife it was stolen within two weeks by a fairly sophisticated scam.
Wasn't their 'solution' for this to eventually allow private inventories? Feel like at some point the number of scammers adding me dropped rapidly and I think it was for this.
That helps a bit but actually it gives another way for the scammers to trick you. They have private inventories and give some BS reason for having it private. People that actually actively trade and invest never have private inventories because otherwise how would you trade? Also most other people don't set theirs to private either if they have anything nice because they want to show it off.
I bought one for $90 a few years ago. It's truly wild how many video games I could buy if I sold it today. I'm not sure if I'll ever buy that many video games again in my life.
Valve fixed the cheating problem for me with the latest operation. In “Broken Fang Premier” mode with high trust-factor, I would get back to back games with friendly players, none of whom appeared to be cheating.
Now they have made that mode free and it’s garbage once again. Oh well, it was great while it lasted...
I tried Face It to escape this, but it was even more toxic than match-making. No obvious hackers though.
You are absolutely right. This lackadaisical attitude towards their games was present in CS:S as well. Security, gameplay, performance. All of it takes a back seat to milking the cow.
[0] https://blog.counter-strike.net/