TF2 General Chat and Speculation Station V13 - Heavy times - Games

because it's false and you're denying a reality in a desperate attempt to make valve seem like they're doing a great job with VAC

Do you play official servers much? I haven't seen any cheaters there myself in a while besides one during Halloween.

the only difference between MM and custom is there's zero chance of the cheater being dealt with. It's only logical that the older a game gets, the more it has problems with cheats though. valve isn't entirely to blame with their subpar anti cheat system.

Ooorrr there are different number of cheaters in different regions and saying people are 'denying reality' because they're not living near Hellmet is rather silly

you are being insanely hostile for no reason - as always. as Ive said before this is based on my personal experience and general observation in forums, communities and friends - in the EU. I just wanted to know if fellow Europeans seemingly constantly meet cheaters or if perhaps it's mostly an NA thing, given from what I have seen the amount of cheaters drastically decreased after Blue Moon. Constantly saying "nu-uh, you are wrong" like a 5th grader doesnt move the discussion anywhere

I personally don't see cheaters as often anymore on Valve servers and the people I report for cheating usually get matchmaking banned pretty quickly (I believe Valve is probably using VACNet now for people who get a lot of reports/kicks for cheating).

Personal experience (obviously) but like I've said before, I've never had a game in my entire 10 year career of playing where a cheater A. was in my server, and B. lasted the entire round before being kicked. If cheaters are common, then US East as a region must be blessed. I just get all the creepy weebs that talk way too much

i also have seen some cheaters in harvest and sometimes even suijin but i would expect them to pop up at the more popular maps.

I regularly run into one guy on CTF Doublecross servers that goes by the name of StruggleFart. He was actually banned from a community that I have since left. He was previously ridiculously good at hitting pre-buff Panic Attack loaded shots as a Heavy and would frequently rack up kills and doms like it was nothing, and everyone was certain he was doing something to enhance his actual ability. A wallhack if nothing else. These days he mains Sticky Jumper, Loch n Load, and Eyelander and will pre-fire Loch projectiles on enemies that haven't yet entered his line of sight, and then run in to get an easy melee kill. His actual aim isn't suspicious, but the fact that he always seems to be able to fire a projectile at an enemy not yet visible (and never just at random) and hit them the instant they become exposed with a pretty high consistency is pretty suspicious in itself. However, he's the only cheater that I run into that isn't completely blatant about it these days, with a few exceptions. The Pyro with an Unusual Shotgun getting crit shots every other shot was suspicious as hell and typically a normal person doesn't go on the offensive saying "you must just be really bad [to die to these generally-unpredictable-instant-deaths]". I reported them in any case and they got a matchmaking ban.

Well, let me paint you how the Sa community has developed over the years so you can have a clear idea. for the longest time there was no oifficial support for servers in SA(until like two or three years go, i believe), therefore most if not all of the gameplay you could get from TF2 was tied to community servers. this led to groups that developed both ingame and outisde it, by means of funding and/or actively taking roles in management of said servers. This led to an often quick action agaisnt all kinds of exploits and servers, wich in turn made it pointless to screw around in said servers since admins would take care of reports and deal with hackers in a short ammount of time. of course, this meant that hacking as a whole in SA servers was almost pointless since at best you'd get an hour or two of <fun> before your account was permabanned out of these servers. of course, as soon as valve servers were implemented in the game and people could actually play MvM at a decent ping community servers began to fade away as there was no need for them anymore. this didn't saw a raise in hacking since outside the free ones (like lmaobox) most require you to pay for them, and for the most part script kiddies and shitheads do not have access to either paypal or credit cards to pay for actual hacking tools. so in resume, for the most part you'll rarely see a hacker in SA either because nobody in SA can afford hacking tools, or knows how to use them, or simply doesnt care about them. most of the hackers you'll see in game nowdays around here are from brazil, since basically nobody gives a fuck about anything over there. I haven't even personally seen the old bot-based teams around here because i sincerely doubt anyone has the infraestructure or the resources to run these around here.

So, Trading Confidantes of TF2, help me out. I just decided (on a whim) to liquidate all my strange weapons, primarily over my anger that certain stranges like Kritzkrieg and Machina, cost so much. However, I have a bunch of skinned stranges, and I have absolutely no idea what they're worth. Here are links to them in my backpack: Smalltown Bringdown Tomislav (FT) Bamboo Brushed Brass Beast (FT) Nutcracker Detonator (FT) Quack Canvassed Air Strike (WW) Manana Peeled Reserve Shooter (WW) Civic Duty Shotgun (FT) I know a majority of them are worth at least more than a dollar and can assume they're worth more than their base variants, but beyond that, I'm clueless. So, any help would be appreciated, even if it's exploiting my lack of knowledge on strange war paint weapons to get a sweet deal from me.

Last cheater I saw was quickly kicked outta the match. The cheater scene in TF2 ain't that popular, they mostly focus on L4D2 (at least on my experience). I usually tend to avoid brasilian servers due to language differences, so I don't know too much about them.

Why would anyone hack in L4D2?

For... Fun? Game isn't that big, but has community/shitty servers and you can find a match almost any day and time of the week.

versus? SI ghosts, headshots, autoshove. there's a ton of mechanics that rely on human reaction/skill that basically makes you invincible if you let a robot do it for you.

Short answer: No. Full stop. No. Longer answer: lmaobox premium got detected by VAC three times in a year long period. The first detection was in the spring 2016. This was the first detection in two years, and it resulted in many expensive backpacks getting banned, including JCapps and his burning TC (plus a bunch of other really expensive stuff.) Jcapps swears he did it on purpose. Also, a woman who collected circling hearts unusuals and had a bunch of super rare ones (including a Hazmat Headcase, which is insanely expensive got busted in this banwave. The spring 2016 detection also claimed the account of the Tomas Curda, the primary lmaobox dev as well as a number of his cronies who were using experimental builds. A couple infamous, attention whoring brony rage hackers got taken out as well. The next two lmaobox banwaves were far less eventful. There were no expensive backpacks that got taken out. The significance of these two detections was how quickly they appeared (fall 2016 and spring 2017 IIRC.) lmaobox premium has not been detected since. That's a year and a half of no detections. I should mention at this point that lmaobox is $20 for a lifetime subscription. Even small children can afford it. Nullcore was undetected from launch until the end of 2017. When it got detected, a bunch of expensive backpacks got taken out, though nothing like in the spring 2016 lmaobox bandwave. The most notable item lost was a Frostbite Team Captain, which is a rare and glorious hat. To my knowledge, Nullcore has not been detected since. Nullcore is considerably more expensive than lmaobox. I think it's $80 for a lifetime subscription. I recall the dev (who is Russian and a egregiously cretinous asshat even by the standards of people who code paid cheats for TF2) put NullCore on sale some time in 2017 after lmaobox got detected a third time as part of some "neener, we're immune to VAC" sale. That didn't work out so well because NC did get detected later that year and his high profile rage hacking account got banned. CatHook, which is linux only, has never been detected. In a broad sense, it cannot be detected by VAC. Depending on how skilled the user is, the code for the cheat can be compiled into the kernel itself. Unix has fully protected memory. VAC cannot access kernel RAM, full stop. Fortunately, it's nontrivial to set up cathook, so the cheaters who use it are comparatively rare. Valve has made some efforts to curb linux based cheating, but most in CS:GO and via machine learning, NOT direct detection. I do not think that TF's VAC has the same machine learning function as CS:GO. There are a legion of other, undetected private cheats. There's an infamous heavy main I banned from my servers years ago who had some function that let him do burst damage with his minigun. He could ramp up his damage to something beyond even what Heavy does at point blank, and get a lot of "late" kills, where his victim was behind one or even two walls. On really close inspection, he also had a shitty aimbot. A friend of mine with comp experience spectated him on an alt for quite some time. His aimbot was rudimentary in that it worked, but it got confused if more than one enemy was in his reticle. He gave his cheat to a friend of his who has been using it for 2 1/2 years with a strange energy orb minigun (that's a $200 weapon, minimum.) I cannot fathom how people cheat with anything they care about. That said, I've run into this motherfucker on SouceOP a number of times recently. He is FLAGRANTLY wall hacking and probably aimbotting, with a $500+ inventory. If you are able to play Valve's casual mode and not run into cheaters, I have two things to say: #1 You're lucky, and I envy you. #2 You're probably running into more cheaters than you think and not noticing them. Subtle cheating can be difficult to detect. I have been a server admin for nearly 5 years. I've spent the majority of that time battling cheaters. I'm not an expert, but I've developed a skillset at noticing suspicious behavior. As I've mentioned previously, at one time I ran the only populated Doublecross server in TF2. I've had the good fortune to spectate some of the best snipers in the game, like Jbird. Watching them taught me a lot about the difference between how an insanely skilled sniper players vs someone relying on cheats. TF2 is, in my carefully considered opinion, riddled with cheaters. Rage hackers are considerably more rare these days at least in casual mode. "Legit" hackers who tried to hide their cheats, are more common that ever. Valve have stepped up their game with matchmaking cooldowns, which is basically the only thing they've done right with regard to dealing with TF2's cheating problem in the last year. Casual mode still doesn't allow players to move to spectate, because some mythical "team balance" is more important that checking out if a player is legit for a second.

I usually play on the normal mode, but I can see why people would do that. Still makes it pathetic to hack in L4D2 of all games.

Some french dude is streaming TF2 https://www.twitch.tv/squeezielive For a casual amount of 60k people https://i.imgur.com/y2e2sfC.png save this image it isnt real

One tidbit, however minor. A bit over a year ago a dude showed up on my server when it was barely populated (as it has been since MyM). He was clearly cheating and had a game ban in GS:GO. He told me it was a private cheat made by a friend of his. He also said that it was really easy to port a cheat from one Source game to another. He was cocky enough to post a link to a screenshot of the cheat's menu in text chat: https://i.imgur.com/8qr0CIr.png I do not know the name of this cheat (or if it even really has a name.) I just checked and he's still not banned in TF2. Now multiply this data point by ...a hundred, and you get some idea of the TF2 cheating landscape.

I live and play on the VA servers and haven't really gotten cheaters all that often at all since MYM personally. The few that I stumble uppon get kicked pretty quickly when they get called out and identified as a cheater too. I do occasionally run into the rare soldier aimbot ( who is again usually easy to notice when they do ), reflect bots for pyro's who are sometimes a pain to identify and a few others that aren't as noticable. But they're also usually not as much of a problem as. I know area plays a big role on wither or not you get frequent hackers or not. Not to mention map, as I generally stick to a few game modes game modes specifically. Which might be why I don't run into cheaters frequently. But I rarely ever do see hackers in games.

Breaking News: More people watch some guy stream TF2 than actually play the game. Maybe the French will save TF2 as a wave of thousands of French players join in, compelling Valve to finally buff the Spy and nerf Pyro yet again.

This guy is kinda the pewdiepie of France, he do a lot of video similars to pewdiepie, but he is way less meme y. Of course, he is still a videogamer. Cool that he played TF2.

isnt the spy from belgium?

what the shit

You know, you might be right that there are cheaters I haven't even noticed, but at the same time the experience isn't nearly as godawful as it was years ago, because the cheaters are actually trying to disguise themselves by not turning their absolute most broken cheats on. For example, I haven't seen a single obvious aimbot sniper in nearly a year, because obvious aimbot snipers singlehandedly dominated an entire enemy team and can camp literally any place on the map. I have seen a few scouts that might have been hackers (just saw one today, in fact), but while they seemingly never missed a shot, they didn't singlehandedly win the game for their team, nor could they counter more than a couple players at a time. As bad as cheating is, subtle, less gamebreaking cheating is at least preferable to the blatant rage hacking on throwaway accounts that ruined so many games for me back in the day. I haven't been locked in spawn with my entire team because of a ragehacking sniper or heavy in a long time. And that happened a lot years ago. Like seriously, they didn't even try to disguise it. They had miniguns that killed you with a single bullet, and sniper rifles that charged instantly. Those days are long gone.

I disagree completely. In my observance, rage hackers are a completely preferable opponent to "legit" ones. First off, it becomes apparent in short order what one is facing. I don't have to spend half a game to figure out if that sniper just knows the sight lines of the map and peeks out fully charged. I don't have to wonder if this scout just prefires corners and has a gift for meatshotting. Secondly, it's much easier to get the enemy team to kick rage hackers. With a subtle "legit" hacker, it can (and in fact usually is) nigh on impossible to get a bunch of Valve pubbies to kick their top scoring player. "He's just good." "But we're winning!" "You're just salty." To put it succinctly: I lose far more games to teams with subtle cheaters on them than I do to rage hackers. I don't like losing games to a team with a cheater present.

Have you not checked on backpack.tf?

I saw a rage hacking Heavy on Hightower the other day. I still managed to kill him every time as Heavy myself before I realized he was a cheater and banned him.

odd, i was sure that at some point in the past it was mentioned or pointed that he wasn't french due to his accent or something. must be my imagination anyway.

Scout cheaters are becoming more and more common lately. Not even the subtle ones either. A player running around like usual, but landing pixel-frame perfect meatshots without turning at all. Literally hitting shots from behind him without turning to aim at the enemy. I believe someone in here posted a video of a cheating bot script of them observing the Scout. How it'd run towards invis spies to 'pretend' to reveal them and hitting players without even aiming at them. All the while shit talking in chat as if they're achieving anything, I don't really get what they're trying to prove.