Out of loop. What happen?
TF2 is in a near unplayable state. Valve has neglected it and as a result it’s not hard for people to bypass the anti-cheat. This has resulted in bots overtaking the game. This has been a problem for years, but there have been some recent pushes to get Valve’s attention. First was #savetf2 which resulted in Valve tweeting that the “heard us” and had things planned. Well nothing happened and now we’re trying again. #fixtf2 is the newest push and has come with extra steps from the community. Many people, including myself, have switched our reviews of TF2 to negative to hopefully get Valve’s attention.
It’s not that VAC is now trivial to bypass, it always was and is kind of by design. VAC is not an active adaptive anti-cheat, it literally just checks for predefined parameters and if anything trips then you’re flagged and will later be banned.
What happened here was that a source-code leak of the original 2007 TF2 revealed an exploit that allows clients to run in a no-graphics mode that still works on modern TF2. Someone found out that you can program a script to interact with the no-graphics client and make it do stuff like join public server queues and interact with the game world. So they made it run around headshotting people. Since the client is running without graphics, it’s very trivial to run tens if not hundreds of these from cheap machines.
I also want to give some insight because I see a lot of people wondering why the fuck they’re doing this at all but it’s actually very simple. It’s the thrill of the cat-and-mouse game and they’ve been winning it for years. I’ve developed cheats (in cooperation with the developers, it was a whole thing) and I understand it. There’s an element of fun to the puzzle game of trying to work around systems deliberately put in place to stop you. That’s all there is to it, they’re just enjoying this chase. A lot of them definitely also enjoy ruining fun but that’s not the primary motivator.
Now they’ve moved to review-bombing other Valve games since Valve isn’t listening.
Not a great look for the community.
Community in question has been eduring this for at least 4 years now. Id wager to say that taking matters into their own hands via activism and demanding change with whatever methods they can is a very good look actually.
It’s. A. Video. Game.
