Forum

There has been plenty of recent debate regarding ETF2L’s AC team; both in the way that decisions are made and also that there is no process of appeal for a player.

I would like to think that we are all capable of a positive and mature discussion, so I’d like to invite you to suggest your ideas and thoughts for how we can improve things for you. I promise that I will read and consider every single positive and constructive suggestion, and hopefully we can put any great ideas into action soon.

I have a few changes that I would like to see personally:

1) More staff from different levels of the game.

2) Improved communication through the different tf2 leagues, so that we might perhaps have bans running between leagues.

3) Creation and implementation of an AC tool. This is something that is important to many people and could offer some great benefits. The downside is that it will not be cheap, with the greatest expense likely to come with paying a developer to update it regularly. For us to consider this as an option we would need to draw up some sort of specification and work out how the project would be financed. Any ideas?

4) Shorter bans for players who assist the AC team by sharing with us information about the cheat they were using, similar to a system suggested previously by anakin. By owning up to their mistakes and helping the ac team to look at the tools that were being used, we can ensure that the level of efficiency stays high.

5) Better system of reporting a cheat. Currently cheats are reported on irc and then information is accessed through private forums. I would like to make actions loggable so if something is leaked, we will have the exact times and ip addresses of the users who accessed the information.

6) We are never going to reach a point where we will just be able to reveal the full evidence to th public, but one thing I would like to see one day, is a short video showing why the user was banned. I don’t know if this is feasible but I think it would be nice to have.

Right, so those are some ideas that I like already. Lets hear yours! :)

Note: This is a thread for constructive discussion about ways to improve the AC team. It is not to be used to flame admins or other users. Posts which are unconstructive or flaming others may lead to forum bans. You have been politely warned.

If theres one thing I’ve learnt in anything computer related, its that a smart person is always going to vastly exceed any automated system. No exceptions.

An AC system is pointless as there is always going to be more people working against you, so you will always be on the back foot and people will get around it.

I’m sure I remember you mentioning something about an AC training program being impossible. Personally I reckon that will be the only way to ever do it successfully. Just implement a system where there needs to be a majority (greater than 50%) agreement that someone is infact, a cheat and it should be fine. If you have enough people who know what they are doing, false positives won’t happen.

Also, I’d prefer 10 cheaters let off the hook than 1 injustice.

Quoted from Skyride

I’m sure I remember you mentioning something about an AC training program being impossible. Personally I reckon that will be the only way to ever do it successfully. Just implement a system where there needs to be a majority (greater than 50%) agreement that someone is infact, a cheat and it should be fine. If you have enough people who know what they are doing, false positives won’t happen.

Ahh I knew I missed something off my list. Sorry :D Was so busy typing that thread on my iPhone (fuck that by the way, horrible way to post), that I missed off that point.

It was something I mentioned in the Resupply interview a few months ago after I was made Head Admin. I would love to see a training system in place, as I am fully aware that there are about 20-30 people who have contacted me in the last month who want to help with the AC team, but who do not have the experience to do so effectively.

The problem I identified a few months ago is still the same problem that will stop that from occuring at this current moment in time. We do not have the man power at present for an experienced AC admin to sit down and create a series of tutorials that will help a new and inexperienced AC admin to spot cheats effectively. I would dearly love it if we could change this…

Quoted from klu

I’ve heard good things about http://www.easyanticheat.net in other games.

Might be worth a look.

Thanks Klu, I’ll try to contact them and ask them for some more information with regards to their system :)

Quoted from albert

have no idea how relevant this is, or if it’s the case already, but “findings” by the AC team should be submitted to a ‘box’ independently, so that the placebo effect (?) cannot occur where the first person to view the demo has already called the demo-ee a cheater, and then other AC admins are biased to that view – subconciously if not conciously

and after X time everyone’s findings are reviewed and a majority rule is used etc etc

That’s a pretty cool idea, I like that. So effectively what you’re allowing people to do is similar to an election? Everyone votes independently and then all of the comments (votes) are revealed and a decision is made based on that?

I like that by keeping the responses secretive for a period of time it would stop people from sub-conciously believing that a player has/hasn’t cheated already. Really good thinking – thankyou :)

Developing an effective anti cheat system is very difficult to do, and if it were easy then valve would have done something about it years ago. I would also like to point out that creating an “ETF2L’s AC team” or an “ETF2L’s AC Program” seems like a pointless exercise that has been done before, and if you speak with the people who created previous anti cheat programs or groups will tell you that there are many ways around them and they simply don’t work. Plus you also have to support multiple operating systems which can be hard to do. Its no use having something that only runs on 60% of peoples computers. Or is so cpu or harddrive intensive people don’t want to run it. In the end you get. “Well if you cant run it then just record a demo” which negates the whole point of making one in the first place.

If you are going to go to the trouble of developing an anti cheat application from scratch that works, then it would make sense to combine your efforts with every other Team Fortress 2 related event, whether it be cup/ league/ tourny etc. Or to go 1 stage further and create a generic source based cheat detection tool. But you would need to colaborate with many other other people to do that.

My advice to you would be to contact other leagues and create something similiar to the old tfc etac. Currently you ban someone for cheating on etf2l, then they just play in other leagues. If you get banned for cheating, you should just be banned from everything, not just etf2l.

What I would like to see from an anti cheat program, would be.

Design and development of an application, with the input from:

valve
people who develop, or have developed cheats
a combined effort from all tf2 admin bodies.
transparency with the players, who are under invesigation.

What, I would not like to see, is a group of people posting on comments of some demo that has been uploaded of a suspected cheater, with nothing to base their suspisions on but what they see in a demo.

Quoted from Sturmis

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Who said all the cheaters are smart? An AC program would catch the retards and scare away some potential cheaters.

But why waste vast amounts of money on that? A speedhack or a super-obvious aimbot will take about 30seconds of an admins time to confirm is a cheater. Heck, I’m sure 90% of the people in ETF2L could tell that.

I wouldn’t add something like aequitas- it makes so much problems and makes ma hate ESL…

Quoted from Typh0n

I think i already spoke too much about this subject and i got so many answers like “fuck off u whinner” that i won’t make the effort to take part in this debate today.

The only thing i wanted to say is that i think its a bit sad to see that when valve asked the competitive community what they needed to improve tf2 in competition, nobody thought about the cheating issues, i think this is the main issue we should all focus on solving instead of just crying about the broken weapons which can be easily banned etc.

Dunno if i made my point clear so i’m just going to sum this up : if only vavle could help a bit with this subject instead of adding useless gadgets or maps it would be great.

vac?