Team Fortress 2 Megathread - winter is the most chill time of year

[left sand]

gold rush

hm

[jagged pawn]

clearly you should never play payload

[left sand]

okay

we found one infestation

okay got badwater and no bots

[fleet kite]

honestly maybe thats just my region but its still not as bad as it was back in the SaveTF2 days

There are bots yes but I dont often run into situations where a bunch of them join and they become unkickable

[jagged pawn]

for me it depends a lot on time of day

they seem to all swarm around 9pm in my area

[left sand]

4am peak queue hours for washington

[jagged pawn]

makes sense lol

[left sand]

i dont think it is

but yeah, even at 4am

i mean

[fleet kite]

isnt nature beautiful

[left sand]

this isnt to discredit all the bad stuff the bot hosters do

and like

yadda yadda

dont clip me saying this

[jagged pawn]

no I agree, it's bad but also overstated

[left sand]

but come on people are saying a bunch of vile shit to valve

over a 17 year old game

[fleet kite]

gottem

[jagged pawn]

get her ass

[fleet kite]

SHe said bot hosters did nothing wrong omg!!!

[left sand]

its mostly a mild inconvenience

[summer steeple]

can't believe valve would want to work on newer more popular games

[left sand]

i could definitely see it killing new player interest though

[summer steeple]

SMH

[left sand]

but

idk

[fleet kite]

I get people wanting valve to do more, but the whole "savetf2 did nothing" isnt true at all

[left sand]

its not like tf2 had a great time with new players

i believe in 2015 the median playtime was 4 hours

[jagged pawn]

also true!!!! it really bothers me when people say this

[summer steeple]

i can't believe valve did 5 updates which improved the bot issue and thats IT

[left sand]

while the mean playtime was like

500

lol

[fleet kite]

Valve makes games?

but yeah given the updates they did on (checks notes) passtime, if they could have "easily fixed it by adding a captcha" they would have. Not to say that they cant do more effort, its obviously still a ROI problem

[left sand]

special delivery payload 5cp

[summer steeple]

honestly a passtime fix is a miracle

valve literally can't do anything to passtime

in 99% of ways

[jagged pawn]

when will they fix it by making it fun

[summer steeple]

how dare you

[jagged pawn]

how true is this actually

I've always assumed it's urban legend

the whole bad robot legal thing

[summer steeple]

they don't have the rights

[jagged pawn]

but do we know this

or is it just assumed

[summer steeple]

yeah people emailed eric about it

[fleet kite]

Im still mad they picked passtime over rd_asteroid

[jagged pawn]

oh interesting

wild that they fucked that up

[left sand]

passtime update will be coming with the half life and portal movies

[small siren]

*passtime update will

be coming with the half life

and portal movies*

- mcoms

[fleet kite]

Im going to host 24/7 rd_asteroid soon for copium reasons

[jagged pawn]

if I say asteroid is genuinely very fun will people say it's nostalgia bait

[summer steeple]

i won't

[jagged pawn]

ok huge asteroid is so good

[summer steeple]

I think RD is better CTF

[jagged pawn]

FULLY AGREE

[summer steeple]

so its a shame that there's like 0 RD maps

community or otherwise

[fleet kite]

RD and PD are my favorite gamemodes, they always have cool gameplay features. "gImMiCKs"

[summer steeple]

its CTF but it fixes the biggest issue which is engi nest holds causing the game never to end

i know some people like that but i don't :)

i also like powerhouse having a timer fight me

[fleet kite]

-flashbacks to having to complete a contract on 2fort-

[summer steeple]

my hightower contract took me years to complete

[fleet kite]

every map should have a timer honestly

[summer steeple]

yeah

[fleet kite]

if you dont want me to cap on a CAPTURE THE FLAG map then go play highertower

where I will still try to cap

[jagged pawn]

yeah exactly rd fixes the issue of having one objective in one location in a game that uses staying in one place as a balancing downside lol. it just clashes so much with what tf2 is, and rd actually makes it work

[summer steeple]

like tbh part of ctf's issue is map design

[fleet kite]

I know CTF is bad but I actually really like turbine

[small siren]

*I know CTF

is bad but I actually

really like turbine*

- goodoldjack12

[summer steeple]

but rd also just like... prevents that from even being an issue

[jagged pawn]

no no you don't get it the flag has to be right next to or behind spawn always, it's funny

[fleet kite]

this is art

[jagged pawn]

the best ctf map is frosty and valve is evil for putting it in the christmas rotation

#fixtf2 but it's about the map pool

[summer steeple]

i never even played frosty because i just didn't play tf2 during that smissmas lol

shame

[jagged pawn]

damn

[summer steeple]

there's always this year

[jagged pawn]

genuinely do think it's fantastic

[fleet kite]

My exclusions from the map list:

• CTF
• KOTH
• Dustbowl

I like basically everything else

[jagged pawn]

for reference I think pelican peak is second, if that gives any idea for my ctf taste

[summer steeple]

i like pelican peak too

it made me actually enjoy ctf

[jagged pawn]

my map rotation is all of the core modes except ctf, plus then also most of the misc maps

[fleet kite]

and invariably if I forget to exclude them I get sent to 2fort

[jagged pawn]

lol do you not just save it

[summer steeple]

why don't you have it saved

[jagged pawn]

so real

[fleet kite]

I forgor every time

[jagged pawn]

the only reason I don't queue for pelican peak is because of the bug where you queue up for a map and it puts you in right as the vote is happening so you end up on a map you didn't queue for

I very rarely queue for individual maps because of that, because it doesn't actually work a lot of the time lol

[fleet kite]

also #fixtf2 but bring back vote scramble

[jagged pawn]

ehhhhh

[half rose]

bot detection suggestion: how about pop up captcha when detected abnormal gameplay

[summer steeple]

i have a suggestion, materialize gun out of computer and see if player has reaction

[fleet kite]

https://tenor.com/view/spongebob-meme-spongebob-spongebob-squarepants-squidward-how-original-gif-20004154

[fleet kite]

the sweaty sniper that has a gaming catheter and literal tunnel vision:

[half rose]

are you human?

[wild grove]

Bot detection suggest: make the bots...
https://youtu.be/Wd-O5wqzVz0?si=yZoE7SQ9E67FsizD

[fleet kite]

Literally just make tf2 a randsomware virus that works on linux

[rare creek]

valve should make bots that kill the cheater bots

[half rose]

terminator-terminator?

[fleet kite]

random crits but they damage your character instead

[half rose]

[kind falcon]

very china of you

[wild grove]

DO A 500 PIECE JIGSAW PUZZLE NOW!

Oop your mouse movement was too fast, now you have to beat a game with 0 deaths!

[fleet kite]

bruh

[mystic turtle]

hm, #killhalflife...
should we go get r/halflife to declare war on r/tf2?

kidding ofc

[kind falcon]

dont fight with us halflife fans,
we have a family at home we care about

[rare creek]

yes

valve is likr the combine from half life 2

breen is like gabe newl

[next nymph]

the moment bots become indistinguishable from good human players is the moment I stop caring about bots

might raise the overall skill level, but if I can't tell the difference then there's no difference to complain about

[kind falcon]

if everyones killing you in the 50ms after you peek, thats the way to live

sit close up to your monitor and let your purest reaction do the job

[next nymph]

i just need to get better then

[jagged pawn]

they never should've promoted the github on the blog bro 😭😭

[slender nexus]

I used to play asteroid a ton in summer 2014 and I really liked it

[slender nexus]

☠️☠️☠️

[cursive peak]

The cheaters being subtle about it are less intrusive at the very least. I've mostly seen that kind of super subtle behavior in community competitive. What incentive is there to expend all the mental energy toggling and such in a pub?

[rare creek]

one of them has aimbot

[hidden gyro]

GitHub moment

Is it really github if someone doesn't make a huge wall of text in an issue every once and a while

[tough locust]

i remember some servers would require you to enable html motd or you'd get kicked

[slender nexus]

skial because they have reserved slots

[wild grove]

that moment when I played on skial's trade server so much, I have enough points to remove the server logo.

[high current]

That moment when you can remove it by cutting off a hud element by like 40 hud units

I think it’s HudMessage, but I could be mistaken. It’s easier with logos on the bottom of the screen, because those are the only hud messages that go there. Logos in the top left are protected by MGE’s hud message.

[misty plover]

Skial still does this

[tough locust]

actual slop

[mystic turtle]

strange, Skial never did that where I am

[hidden gyro]

https://youtu.be/aJ6XewRmtYU

[misty plover]

If it fails it fails

Again I'm still not exactly sure what they want to happen

[spare obsidian]

do you think they even know?

[misty plover]

Considering they follow MegaScatterBrain as a leader of the movement I don't expect them to know anything about the game

[hidden gyro]

Bots fixed

How? No questions!

[misty plover]

Real

I still basically never encounter bots

Like maybe five times this past month?

And I normally play casual at peak bot hours

(late night/early morning)

[hidden gyro]

It's more common to see if you're a full party

Since the bots also are a full party usually

And parties usually get matched with parties

[misty plover]

N-no?

[kind falcon]

who?

[misty plover]

And no?

The bots don't party up hardly ever

[kind falcon]

bots never queue in parties unless theres a nolifer who gets them into a party

then you see the guy with an aussie sniper and three stacked unusuals

[small siren]

*then you see the guy

with an aussie sniper and

three stacked unusuals*

- robert of shenzhen, china

[hidden gyro]

Odd. It always seems like they all leave at the exact same time

[misty plover]

That doesn't mean they're partied the bots just leave on dumb simple logic

[small siren]

*That doesn't mean they're

partied the bots just leave on

dumb simple logic*

- undefinedbhvr

[mystic turtle]

which region are you from, btw
I also never really run into bots, and it seems as though they're confined to certain locales only

[misty plover]

I get matched to LA and Virgina

Though I usually dc on Virginia servers because I frequently have weird issues on the server

[hidden gyro]

Yeah, Washington, LA, Virginia

Occasionally Europe

[kind falcon]

me when im a bot hoster and im unable to serve everyone equally

Presents! :D

[spare obsidian]

bruh

[unborn pecan]

r/reddit assemble!!!!!!

[hidden gyro]

WE DID IT REDDIT

[misty plover]

[Wholesome 100]

Everybody liked that

[kind falcon]

have a reddit platinum kind stranger

[misty plover]

That's my 69th

[misty plover]

[spare obsidian]

you know how tf2 players are so delusional that the supposedly "real" tf2 subreddit is has dumb has the other one says a lot

[cursive peak]

r/truetf2 was much better at one point.

[livid oracle]

what is this sentence

stroke sentence

[misty plover]

Usually the places who have more restrictions on the spam of memes are more sane to interact with yeah

[cursive peak]

The old weekly threads for how everyone's HL/6s matches went were nice.

[unborn pecan]

Yup

[crisp cedar]

we aint helping tf2 fans

[grim parcel]

why tf are people review bombing hl2

maybe they should do overwatch next

[jagged pawn]

so true

[rare creek]

what if valve is just fatass who cant run on treadmill

i hate valve!!!!!!!

[limpid panther]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOsU5Sc-DUA&t=547

(timestamp)

[sterile ferry]

he on to something

[drowsy marlin]

What if we made cheating illegal. That can solve it

[hidden gyro]

OW

[hidden gyro]

Entire Valve Office Found Dead Once Realizing Breathing is Treadmill Work

More at 11

[orchid sorrel]

this guy has 200 tours by exclusively just afking until the mission is over

[hidden gyro]

Slot machine go brrrrr

[orchid sorrel]

and because mvm doesnt soft ban players kicked from a server anymore he can just keep rejoining

[tough locust]

get the noobs to play on community servers
that is all

[orchid sorrel]

good luck with that

[hidden gyro]

Valve Selects UncleTopia as new Official Servers

Tryhards on bleeding ear watch

[tough locust]

SLOP

[high current]

Uncletopia is fine

[high current]

They’re mainly at low MMRs so you can basically out rank them. They also seem most common on badwater/upward maps, so if you don’t queue for those and have more experience you basically avoid the problem.

Source: I made an any% speed run of queuing into a server with a bot

[tough locust]

casual is designed to queue you in with a couple players with bad mmr, a couple with okay mmr, and a couple with high MMR. I may be bad at the game but they can take over like 20 percent of matches and will pop up at least once in like 90 percent of matches

[high current]

Maybe it’s entirely map selection then, or maybe bots have high mmr so I end up filling a slot they could also occupy?

[hidden gyro]

Do you play 2fort

They're there a lot

[uncut spear]

I don't get why you'd play 2fort unironically 😭

playing community servers on that map is already hellish enough

I can't imagine it with bots

[spare obsidian]

unicode moment

[mystic turtle]

finally I find one guy that gets it
https://www.reddit.com/r/tf2/comments/1cwn0sq/quake_players_opinion_on_the_tf2_playercount/?chainedPosts=t3_15duueu

I know I don't usually use reddit, but finally

[mystic turtle]

I only play 2fort in hopes that I'm less likely to find sweaty players there
My worst experiences of getting put on a shit team to "carry" them have all happened on KOTH and Payload, sometimes 5cp but it's real rare to queue into those types of maps

[uncut spear]

LMAO

2fort is noob central

so valid

legit playing that one 24/7 2fort server (literally just called that) the only actually good people are the snipers

and most of the time you can just charge from one side to the other and kill them as demo knight lol

got that bridge charge on lock

also those years of surfing pay off

[wild grove]

No one should care about it, talking as a Worms player. As long as it aint 0 most of the time, you good.

[uncut spear]

it's nice too as well having a small community like that too

cause you can get to know people you'll play with often

[mystic turtle]

funny thing is, Asian servers are a real center for sweats
so even going to 2fort often still matches you against pretty relatively skilled players anyway

[wild grove]

Worms Reloaded fort games are no joke, it serious business but I am straying away from TF2 or am I? >:)

[mystic turtle]

I'm pretty sure I've told this story before, but one extreme case I recall was a team of a bunch of players, including me, and 4 battle engies on badwater offense. The enemy team? The most cracked a team could ever get: there were cracked Scouts and Snipers farming killstreaks, and I later heard from RED themselves that one of their players is in an invite league

[uncut spear]

sweating on 2fort 😭

[uncut spear]

me playing siege where my whole team is bronze at beast, no rank at worst and the other team is fucking diamonds bro 😭

[mystic turtle]

y'know, I don't even mind straying away from TF2, it helps keep one's sanity
the problem is that the TF2 fanbase won't branch out, hence they're all up in arms thinking they can get Valve to descend from heaven to save the game
come to think about it, not branching out from things often leads to people generally getting a bit worse, ranging from children getting sucked into content farms to Omori fans (not all of them ofc but a lot) making themselves look like a bunch of dummies

[summer steeple]

shrimply play competitive mode

[mystic turtle]

and then get dunked on your team for coming to the party with a 4G tower connection

(in all seriousness I'm basically stuck with it for the next few years, though, so I've gotten sorta used to that low bar)

[uncut spear]

I will cast a spell on me that expels glass out of all my face holes before I ever played ranked on siege

[spare obsidian]

you love waiting games don't you?

[summer steeple]

if you're just waiting you're doing somehting wrong

[spare obsidian]

i clearly did something wrong then

[high current]

Naw. If I want an infinite length match I go to Hightower.
Idk the appeal of 2fort. It’s cramped so you have no real fun movement options. It’s basically only fun if you want to sticky jumper to harass the snipers on the battlements or if you want to pyro shark. As any other class it’s HIV positive.

[mystic turtle]

I find that 2fort is most fun when there's less players around and there are as few engies as possible
then you can run around and wreak havoc as bfb scout or tomislav heavy

Engies basically can defend most of the base with a single sentry placed between spawn and courtyard, and when that happens you basically have to force the whole team to switch to power classes and meds while having a few engies to watch the briefcase
which is why maps like doublecross and pelican peak are based, they're more open and give you actually usable options

[fleet kite]

I admit to loving playing turtle engineer on ctf_sawmill

That's the only thing I was good at back in the day

• internet issues

[burnt dragon]

tf2 bot hosters are racist

theres bots in EU

but not as much in US

[kind falcon]

yippie

[kind falcon]

you can always help the cause and host some more

[burnt dragon]

I actually have a server with enough power to host around 100 bots

I can prolly help the cause if you want

[rare creek]

wrong?

[burnt dragon]

I keep getting bots in Frankfurt servers

[rare creek]

there's bots in every region..

[burnt dragon]

equal amounts?

[high current]

Probably not

There’s probably some deeper sociological explanation for why different regions have different quantities of bots. But at the end of the day they’re stinky and that should be punishable by swirly

[burnt dragon]

russian servers are cheaper for lower uptime and quality

[kind falcon]

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1048061789713215518/1248262162347196448/Honse.gif

[high current]

I think Russian servers are also in a jurisdiction to where Valve has no real course of action to stop bot hosters (other than make functioning anticheat). Because if you tried to sue Russian bot hosters they’d just go “your court is joke”

Not that it’s relevant because Valve isn’t going to stop bot hosters anywhere. But if they were going to Russia would be kickin back sipping on some vodka

[eternal haven]

What if valve just only allowed residential addresses to connect to casual servers

That would make life a lot harder for the bot runners

And probably only hit like 1% of real players

[kind falcon]

no one is hosting bots on dedicated servers

it’s always reused old hardware

[high current]

I host bots using my Minecraft Redstone computer. Each music disc is a different bot

[kind falcon]

good for you

[eternal haven]

How about limiting the number of players in casual based on IP address in conjunction with that

[high current]

This. They probably just have an old laptop they don’t use any more or they bought one from a thrift store for dirt cheap and even a piece of dookie laptop can host like 50 spin bots on it.

They can just use a vpn

[potent wolf]

How about valve just does magic and fixes everything

[eternal haven]

(In conjunction with blocking datacenter addresses)

[high current]

And/or hardware spoof of hardware ID bans is a recommendation

[kind falcon]

they already (kinda) hardware ban people

not in tf2 of course

fuck that game

[eternal haven]

In what

CS?

[high current]

I think they should just copy+paste the code from one of the many super basic server plugins that is capable of detecting spin bots because no human can do 1080 degree trick shots with near 100% accuracy.

[kind falcon]

dota

[high current]

Do hardware id bans even do anything to virtual machines? Can’t you just be like “oop my virtual machine has blah hardware, oops now it has blah+1 hardware”

[kind falcon]

then bots just shoot into walls while walking towards the enemies

[kind falcon]

no one’s hosting virtual machines for bots

[eternal haven]

HWID ban in conjunction with effective virtual machine blocking like valorant has can actually be like almost 100% effective at keeping people banned

[high current]

A bot being forced to miss is a bot that’s not shooting a person🤷‍♂️

[small siren]

*A bot being forced

to miss is a bot that’s not

shooting a person🤷‍♂️*

- peachestv

[eternal haven]

There are so abundantly many hardware identifiers that you can't really ever hope to spoof everything

also you have to more or less reinstall windows every time you get banned

[kind falcon]

riot games sux tho

[high current]

Hardware ID spoofing circumvents that. And whoever told you valorant blocks virtual machines is mistaken. You can quite literally entirely bypass the requirement for Vanguard to be running with a single line code edit on a virtual machine’s OS.

[eternal haven]

LOL

[high current]

This literally happens all the time

[kind falcon]

❓

[high current]

Riot Vanguard is just a good deterrent, but it’s not perfect by any stretch. If someone wants to cheat they absolutely will with relative ease. It’s just if you want to cheat in a game, Valorant has more hoops to jump through when you could just cheat in CS2 that has a joke of an anticheat or TF2 that essentially doesn’t have an anticheat.

Anticheat isn’t about stopping all cheaters. It’s about making people who just want to cheat in some game go somewhere else with worse anticheat. Which unfortunately Valve is pretty much the bottom of the barrel as far as anticheat goes…

[eternal haven]

True

Valve is basically stuck in 2005 when it comes to anticheat

Which is nice because it's not invasive or whatever, but it's not really effective at preventing any cheating

[eternal haven]

If it's so easy, try it yourself

You will not be able to run valorant in a vm

Even if you spent 3 months at it, you wouldn't be able to

[high current]

In fairness though the concept of VACnet being an AI driven anticheat is actually a fairly good idea, we’re rapidly approaching the point where that’s basically going to be the main way to detect cheaters as they essentially move to non-software cheats.

But Valve’s implementation is just ineffective against anything other than spin bots. Idk if they just have it tuned to be overly passive or if they just generally ineffectively implemented it

[high current]

Bro you can probably watch some guy do it live on twitch rn. Or look up a YouTube video on it.

[eternal haven]

Nope

You could probably count the number of people in the world who have figured it out on your hands

and soon riot will ban them

[high current]

I’ve literally seen a guy in real time edit the code of a virtual Machine’s OS, launch the VM, then queue into a ranked game of Valorant. He didn’t cheat during it and basically immediately abandoned the game after loading in so the game could /remake. But he proved the point

[eternal haven]

Maybe 2 years ago

not today

[high current]

Okay

[burnt dragon]

that's bad for places like college domes where 500 people live in a cramped tin can

valve should let everyone on earth create an account and then close account creation

then if bot hosters want to host bots, then they have to make kids

which wont happen since that requires a woman so yay!

[next nymph]

what about when the bot hosters develop cloning technologies to annoy valve

[burnt dragon]

cloning would be awful in general for cs2 too

imagine having 20 clones just dropping cases all day

with different accounts etc

so Im sure valve would find a solution to that

[eternal haven]

I wonder how many people it would really inconvenience

Tf2 isn't that popular, I bet it's pretty rare to have more than 5 or so people ever playing casual from the same address

Plus most CGnat / university networks use multiple public addresses, it's not like it's just one single one usually

[cursive peak]

Yeah, the university I went to owned the entire 151.141.x.x address block. Pretty sure every single device had a unique IP.

[high current]

There is a collegiate TF2 league. And with the rise of esports, more colleges have dedicated practice centers for teams. Idk of any that specifically made practice centers for TF2, but I’m certain there are TF2 teams that benefitted from practice centers.
Source: I ran a collegiate esports team and negotiated varsity team status, player salaries, and the construction of an esports center.
Fun fact: all of those negotiations were accepted, and went into effect the semester after I graduated😢

I also co-founded the collegiate TF2 league.

[fleet kite]

That wouldn't apply to casual anyway though. Large events like that wouldn't queue for casual

[high current]

Yeh but a lot of collegiate teams end up just hanging out in their practice center. So 6 college dudes queuing from the same IP wouldn’t look very different from 6 bots queuing from the same IP.

[broken haven]

tf2 college espots

[misty plover]

Not many, realistically. Its easy to make exceptions for college ips and such upon request

[high current]

I feel like an IP restriction would be super easy to circumvent. It’d be as effective as banning the bot accounts. Momentarily useful but circumvented the moment the host realized

[eternal haven]

Not really, if you only allowed residential addresses

[misty plover]

Not in the slightest.

[eternal haven]

Residential proxies are fairly expensive, fairly laggy, and usually only support http

No udp gaming really

unless you pay out the ass

[misty plover]

You're coming from the mindset that there's an approach that bans everyone

[small siren]

*You're coming from the

mindset that there's an approach

that bans everyone*

- undefinedbhvr

[misty plover]

YOu only want to make it annoying enough that most don't do it

[small siren]

*YOu only want to

make it annoying enough

that most don't do it*

- undefinedbhvr

[eternal haven]

I think it would definitely make it more annoying

combine it with some automated or manual banning and it's suddenly a big hassle to run bots

[paper sluice]

Double haiku is crazy

[misty plover]

I wish I could tell this bot to fuck off honestly

[paper sluice]

😭

[eternal haven]

Same

I feel like every other message I type is a haiku

[misty plover]

Its just spam

[paper sluice]

@small siren I love u

They don’t heart it ☹️

Ban this bot

[crisp cedar]

just block

🥲

[hoary geyser]

Moderators please ban this user

[hoary geyser]

and please revoke this user's moderation privileges

[misty plover]

Nuh uh

[left sand]

then latam will be banned

[left sand]

what do you mean by that 🤔

[high current]

They use the literal ban hammer. They’re strapped with the hardware like Home Depot🔨

[unborn pecan]

are all tf2 servers really on ipv4?

[misty plover]

Yes

I actually don't know if any variant of srcds works with ipv6

[unborn pecan]

wtf

that's so stinky.....

[misty plover]

Yep, no version works with ipv6

[unborn pecan]

wtf

[eternal haven]

I think it's more surprising that you expected otherwise

[unborn pecan]

i mean

ipv6 was first concieved in 1998

so

¯_(ツ)_/¯

fiendp6

[summer steeple]

fun fact the reason why the whole fake ip system exists is because it was easier to do SDR through that because the servers and clients expect an ipv4 address

[unborn pecan]

i can't wait for the day everything is ipv6....

[summer steeple]

same

[eternal haven]

Does SDR work on ipv6 only?

I've never tried it

I'd imagine it probably should

[summer steeple]

idk how exactly it works

[eternal haven]

Well I mean does it work if you use an ipv6-only connection

[summer steeple]

but valve’s documentation says that the fake ip system was a workaround for codebases like tf2

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/multiplayer/steamdatagramrelay

[unborn pecan]

https://partner.steamgames.com/

wtf I never knew about this website

I gotta read all of this now

thanks fiend

[left sand]

SDR just uses the fixed valve.net IPs

well, some regions don't have a valve.net but yeah

ipv4 only

usually youll have a gateway on an "ipv6-only" network to access ipv4 sites

[misty plover]

Won't happen, ISPs move slower than molasses

The only reason were seeing any adoption is because we're literally out of ipv4 addresses to assign

[unborn pecan]

one day

[misty plover]

And are also run by complete idiots who think cgnat should be used still with ipv6

[unborn pecan]

ew

[burnt dragon]

kid named non static public ip

bot hosters ip gets banned, oh well let me just unplug replug the modem!

[eternal haven]

Limit per IP

[rare creek]

just use a botnet to play tf2

billions of ips to choose from

[cursive peak]

Wonder if you could use the mobile authenticator to make running the bots too annoying. Have to punch in the code from the authenticator after a random number of casual matches.

[rare creek]

no

https://github.com/Jessecar96/SteamDesktopAuthenticator

why do people think of every way to fix this issue other than just moderating the damn servers....

[cursive peak]

Because Valve prefers automation.

[rare creek]

fuck what valve prefers

what valve prefers is what lead to the bot problem in the first place

[cursive peak]

That's useless for getting them to actually implement ideas.

[rare creek]

intercontinental ballistic nuke

[cursive peak]

And that's why you have 0 value.

[left sand]

moderation doesn't scale

[rare creek]

does it need to in a dying game

[cursive peak]

Also seems like that unofficial desktop authenticator should be dealt with, too.

[rare creek]

uhhuh and how do you think valve would do that

[spare obsidian]

valve didn't stopped workshop downloaders after they started to re-appear again

[misty plover]

More likely would make the game inaccessible in a way that causes people to quit in large volumes

[rare creek]

moderate casual or dont have casual at all

[misty plover]

Moderate how?

[rare creek]

with human beings instead of dumbass robots

[misty plover]

Valve doesn't use robots to moderate TF2 though?

[rare creek]

they use robots for cs2

they ban you if you move your mouse too fast

[burnt dragon]

cs2 anticheat sucks lmao

[misty plover]

Wrong

[burnt dragon]

I check an account occasionally that literally admitted to cheat

still not banned

like dude shows where I am behind walls in duos competitive

[rare creek]

valve's anti cheat is the worst anti cheat of any anti cheat other than really really old ones like punkbuster or whatever the fuck

[burnt dragon]

VAC used to be scary

[misty plover]

Walls are near impossible to detect. So if they're using something who's signature isn't known by VAC there's literally nothing that can be done.

The same as its always been.

That's why systems like overwatch were in place.

[burnt dragon]

✨ so it doesn't work

[misty plover]

No anticheat works then

[rare creek]

were until cheaters abused it

[misty plover]

👍

[burnt dragon]

they also had aimbot

[rare creek]

[burnt dragon]

dude cs2 anticheat doesnt work I played it enough to know it

thank god casual doesnt have too much cheaters

[potent wolf]

Team Fortress 2 Megathread - Valve should just...

[burnt dragon]

all the toxicity goes towards rank grinding in comp

[eternal haven]

I think one person could implement sufficient protections against the bots and occasionally repair them when they're bypassed

[misty plover]

Cheating is an impossible problem to solve. Especially on f2p games.

[eternal haven]

you probably wouldn't even have to pay them very much to do it

[burnt dragon]

I play in prime enabled

[rare creek]

ive only encountered 1 cheater in valo sooo

[spare obsidian]

https://tenor.com/view/shock-shocker-shocked-black-guy-gif-27526370

TF2 Players realizing killing bots is impossible

[misty plover]

Valorant players aren't particularly intelligent fwiw so even if they were cheating you couldn't tell because they're too busy trying to efuck eachother

[burnt dragon]

worst comeback of 2024

[rare creek]

the one guy who was cheating told me they were cheating lol

they got banned after only like a couple minutes

[crisp cedar]

armchair anticheat

[rare creek]

vanguard apparently worked so well they're backporting it to league of legends

[spare obsidian]

so well that people fooled it

[misty plover]

I mean the big reason you don't encounter cheaters would be the barrier to entry is higher, moreso than vanguard being good fwiw

[rare creek]

https://xonotic.org/

[burnt dragon]

RuneScape also has bots lmao

[crisp cedar]

day 1201 of talking about what dumb solution valve can introduce to save tf2 from bots

[burnt dragon]

its huge amount of economy is run by bots

[rare creek]

ok but jagex actually tries

[burnt dragon]

nah

[rare creek]

instead of sitting on their ass and doing literally nothing

[burnt dragon]

several jmods are knıwn gold sellers

and runs gold farms

with unknown size of a botnet

they are kinda a part of the problem

[eternal haven]

I wonder how many people run groups of tf2 bots

[misty plover]

Which the barrier of entry is way higher, since the way to go detected is to either be on dedicated hardware for cheating, or to operate at kernel level too. And they issue HWID bans, which prevents makes the barrier of entry higher. Especially since it bypasses most traditional spoofing methods by, once again, being kernel level.

[eternal haven]

and if it's been the same people the whole time, or if people get bored and new people start

[burnt dragon]

ah shit cant mention his nme

the drama shitting tf2ber has a video over that

some botnets with 10k~ similar/same names

[eternal haven]

It's also somewhat puzzling why they even do it

There's nothing to gain by doing it

[burnt dragon]

theres a second market for it

[spare obsidian]

HWID Bans are also easy to bypass lol

[eternal haven]

Certainly the funny moments xd of people getting mad at the bots or whatever stop being funny after a few years

[burnt dragon]

shitton of refs and cases

[eternal haven]

I bet the bot hosters literally only continue because the community is so vocal about the bots

If everyone just ignored the bots they'd probably stop

[misty plover]

Not if your AC is operating at the kernel level, as I said.

[burnt dragon]

possible

[spare obsidian]

didn't cheaters are also relying in hardware cheats nowdays? @misty plover

[misty plover]

Anyways, on the subject of Vanguard. Here's an article from Riot's own senior engineer about how much of a pain in the ass anticheat is.
https://twitter.com/ItsGamerDoc/status/1796233961720422533

GamerDoc (@ItsGamerDoc) on X

Anti-cheat is a battle of attrition

Twitter · May 30, 2024, 5:35 PM

[burnt dragon]

thats how anticheats work yes

[misty plover]

DMA isn't infallible, its not impossible to detect. But it is way harder.

[burnt dragon]

whoever digs deeper wins

[eternal haven]

Anti cheat seems so much easier than cheating

[burnt dragon]

not really

cheating you know the limits

[eternal haven]

To cheat you have to spend all this time finding undetected methods only to have them probably fixed

To anticheat, all you have to do is search for something you already know exists and fix it

[misty plover]

You lose the battle by doing that alone.

The best anticheat is one that makes it harder to even get started with cheating.

Not the one that's the most up to date.

[wild grove]

CLEARLY NOT! Otherwise instead of talking about and participating in a movement that won't do jackshit, this thread would be way more inactive

[summer steeple]

dying game when player numbers consistently rise

ok

[unborn pecan]

I think tf2 should be removed at this point......

[eternal haven]

I guess

I'm sure it's quite challenging to design the former

[misty plover]

Yeah, it is

But the investment is worth it

If you raise the barrier high enough eventually you get to the level where free cheats are basically never a thing pushing out 99% of cheaters entirely.

[spare obsidian]

"umm well you see voldemort says the numbers are fake because bots!!!!,,, 🤓 "

[misty plover]

You cannot say that name!!!

You doomed us all!!

[crisp cedar]

should i get out of bed to play tf2

[high current]

Kinda. A new-ish technique was called “arduino cheats”. Basically you have an arduino cheat for you, then send usb signals as if it were a mouse being moved, and so you cheat without actually having cheats on your computer.
Very difficult to detect, but apparently Vanguard was recently updated to be able to detect those. Idk how they do it, but it sounds wildly impressive and I’d like to know how, but they probably won’t say since that makes it easier to circumvent.

[hoary geyser]

Do we actually have any good estimate on TF2's actual player count?

[spare obsidian]

wait until mcoms release its website

[high current]

Enough to play however much you want in casual or community servers. Beyond that who cares.

[misty plover]

Mcoms is cooking something up

[spare obsidian]

which ain't gonna stop voldemort of complaining by saying the website is wrong

[crisp cedar]

nvm ill get out but not for tf2

[misty plover]

I have faith in their work moreso than any youtuber, even though they use the worst viewmodel fov known to mankind

[spare obsidian]

wdym fov 90 is pretty good lol

[eternal haven]

I'm quite curious about what she is going to come up with

[broken haven]

mcoms sniper gaming

[high current]

That’s not vm fov 90. That’s like vm fov 15.

POV: you don’t know which eye to close when looking through the scope

[misty plover]

I'm waiting for the era the cheating war goes so far that games start requiring you to run their own proprietary OS

[crisp cedar]

valorant is not worth instaling JinxOS or whatever theyd come up with

[high current]

80 with minimal view models is pretty nice. Though minimal view models are cursed on soldier.

[hoary geyser]

custom bsd distro

[misty plover]

Subjective, I actualy didn't like it

[next nymph]

didnt that guy get arrested (for other reasons)

[eternal haven]

I think fairly soon it will be accepted to require hardware with a unique key in a secure enclave that no end user could possibly change or read and that you have to sign things with to do certain actions

I'm not looking forward to that but I can see it happening

[misty plover]

My aiming fundamentals are really solid, I climbed hard when I played, I just didn't enjoy the game

I didn't feel like I was being challenged or forced to do anything interesting

I'd enter autopilot constantly

That's not what I meant

I meant that I wasn't really being challenged in the game when I played it, people were... as egotistical as it sounds, not at my level, so I got bored and moved on

[high current]

I played collegiate valorant and now I don’t touch that game with a ten foot stick. Viper+astra meta made me want to flush myself down a toilet.

[misty plover]

I like to throw myself at a brick wall and bash it down

R6 was pretty fun back in the day but the game kinda lost the plot in terms of balance

Counterstrike I also didn't enjoy though, slow games aren't really my style in general especially if the only skill is just pure aim

[high current]

They weren’t particularly fun to play, they were abysmal to play against, they were just so blatantly OP that they had a 100% pickrate for like a full year.

[tough locust]

play tf2 in bed

[high current]

Sponsored by steam deck

[left sand]

i use 54 like robin walker intended

[crisp cedar]

never playing this game in bed

[small siren]

*tactical shooters

are dynamical, maybe

try Ready or Not*

- forgottenashess

[misty plover]

I am going to throw you out a window

[high current]

No shot that was vieemodel fov 54.

[left sand]

that was 20 as a joke

[high current]

Ay I was pretty close with the 15 guess

[misty plover]

Yeah I posted the sc without any context

They got made fun of by Rayne for using bad fov so they made it worse

[left sand]

im glad i can make at least one person happy 😊

[small siren]

*They got made fun of

by Rayne for using bad fov

so they made it worse*

- undefinedbhvr

[misty plover]

"sweetie"

My most despised word

[left sand]

pookie

[misty plover]

STOP

[high current]

https://tenor.com/view/that-what-a-simp-would-say-pewdiepie-simp-gif-20150978

[misty plover]

Sweetie gaves me the same cringe reaction that the word moist does.

It actually gives me physical pain to read and hear

[left sand]

swedish

[high current]

Sweetie just sounds like I’m being talked to by an old woman about to give me sweet tea

[left sand]

baby gronk

[high current]

Grog

[misty plover]

I know people who think Adam Driver is hot. Some people just have fucked up tastes

[left sand]

adam walker tho,,,

[high current]

Mcoms a baseball fan?

[crisp cedar]

sweetie is nice but it probably depends on who says it

know the work rules

[misty plover]

True, it really does depend

[high current]

Hi I’m your HR representative, can we have a chat

[crisp cedar]

i don't think id feel anything

[misty plover]

She threw a beer can at me and told me to get out of the way of the tv :(

Can we cancel them?

[high current]

Did you catch the beer can?

[crisp cedar]

good one

if i wanted to pass as a cis woman i should change my pronouns to she/they

just she/her makes it too obvious

what

idk

joke: a lot of cis women change their pronouns to she/they

[misty plover]

Yeah that's true actually

Most cis AFABs I know use she/they

[crisp cedar]

and if that's the case then most people using just she/her are trans women

thats the uh joke

text flavor so there is personality and quirk to my messages

[misty plover]

Sorry my masculinity is my entire personality I'm going to have to give you a 12 hour mansplain rant on why you're wrong /j

Wait is mansplain still used?

[misty plover]

Where's the hidden goku how am I supposed to laugh at this

[left sand]

i love getting invited to baseball club seats and then the game is so boring they have to use constant music and food to make it interesting

[rare creek]

didbreakingbad predict the ps5

[crisp cedar]

my favorite kind of post is like

sports event scran and its the worst food imaginable

[misty plover]

Nah its fine dw I sometimes call people "love" just to mess with them and annoy them

[crisp cedar]

https://twitter.com/FootyScran/status/1751949255055495193

Footy Scran (@FootyScran) on X

Cheeseburger at Chesterfield FC (@ChesterfieldFC)

💷 £5.50

Twitter · Jan 29, 2024, 12:43 PM

[left sand]

idk i feel like ive seen plenty of trans people use she/they kind of like giving up and leaving gender

but still wanting to be seen as fem

[crisp cedar]

leaving gender is the ultimate level of ascension

i like to think of myself as a caterpillar

they eventually turn into butterflies, no

i guess

[left sand]

i think what will end up happening is society will end up basing everything off sex in the end if gender truly gets abolished

and then we will have momentary equilibrium

and then sex based burdens will engrain our society with prejudice and bias again

and gender will become a thing again

i feel like a lot of people dont fully realize the full spectrum of human experience

[misty plover]

Tbh I think the big issue is there's not really adequate words to describe every identity, nor even come close to doing so

[crisp cedar]

i think having gender abolished for any time at all would be an insane event

[left sand]

it takes a lot of effort to walk in someone elses shoes

[crisp cedar]

because that hasnt ever happened unfortunately

[left sand]

anyways

[crisp cedar]

its been this way since forever and it sucks

[left sand]

#competitive-digging-archived

[drifting sleet]

I'm not familiar with TF2's code base, why did Sixense support and VR mode break in the 64 bit version of TF2?

[mystic turtle]

I think that was my message? Mentioning a Quake player's post on r/tf2 and noting how putting everything into one game leads to pointless optimism

And crazyass behavior, from rather innocuous fandom quirks to things like the TF2 community showing that they're doofuses on the Source 1 GitHub tracker?

apologies for not responding for a bit, internet's being slow as frick

like, I brought up the Omori fandom as an example of more innocuous action
as sometimes folks would be so brainrotted that they'd overhype the game and, er, just be kinda annoying to be around
not necessarily bad but I'd rather keep my distance
I know this is sorta a bad comparison but what if TF2's general fandom also suffers from this disorder of thought, so to speak
everyone's huffing copium, overvaluing the game and making fun of Valve for being scared of working on something that would've already died off by now
and they're complaining loudly and some are even being assholes about it
Until those bastards get the cops called on them the bot hosters are basically profiting, as they know Valve does nothing about them and they can even swat people and defame them with generative AI voices

I hate to be cynical here but I'm just tired of this whole farce, it's been so long and yet nothing constructive happens
Why wasn't the answer to leave Casual for dead and invest in actually worthwhile community servers

not pathetic jokes that spoof ping, run rtd plugins, and remain half-empty much of the time

[cursive peak]

Because investing in a community is harder than push button, receive game.

Not to mention everyone is too wrapped up in one million layers of irony to actually form a community.

A lot of these nerds never really played anything without matchmaking. It's a totally foreign concept to join a server and see the same faces daily.

[left sand]

🤔

[cursive peak]

And there's the whole cultural concept that online spaces aren't to be considered special.

[rare creek]

mastercoms singlehandedly saves team fortress 2 once again?

[cursive peak]

It's seen as taboo to get emotionally invested in online people and spaces.

[tough locust]

you're cooking, you're cooking

this with a system to choose the amount of buddies that you're playing with so that your friends can join off you too without the server being full

[rare creek]

didnt teamwork.tf havr community quickplay but people didnt use it

[tough locust]

0!!!! maybe someday

probably like 500 hours in hammer with nothing to show for it

[rare creek]

it does https://teamwork.tf/community/quickplay

[mystic turtle]

weird, tbh
heck the fact people join discord servers makes this more confusing, unless people just shut each other out

[summer steeple]

just like me fr fr

[misty plover]

Can I write a desktop app version?

[rare creek]

i couldnt imagine a more sad server

[tough locust]

actually wait i have a gmod map on the workshop but that's it https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3182734242

[cursive peak]

If all you do is meme and shitpost on discord, are you even really considering it a community?

[tough locust]

this one still isnt quickplay though its just a better server browser

[mystic turtle]

then I look through and the only options are 200 ping Skial 2fort, 200 ping 32-player Skial 2fort, and a full Uncletopia
and a buncha empty servers
/hj, I'm not really taking back my point as much as pointing out one thing that must be tackled before going through mass community server adoption

[rare creek]

the only community servers that exist nowadays sorry

there are probably over 100 ugc servers

[mystic turtle]

maybe it's just experience, then; I usually camp around small servers
even in large discord servers you have a ton of people lurking or people only interacting in a vapid way
and then a small "community" of the people that actually chat
that's fair

[mystic turtle]

we found uncletopia's evil twin

[rare creek]

the furry pound if it was evil

[misty plover]

Its really not quickplay in the slightest

And they basically don't moderate the servers on the list

See: 4chan's racist transphobic party /v/an server being listed lol

[mystic turtle]

and to tack onto this
I have 1600 hours in TF2; I still don't have much to show for it
it takes years of effort to make a prodigy, and even the gifted must hone themselves over time

[misty plover]

Its just a worse server browser

[cursive peak]

It's more dependent on how you spend those 1600 hours. 500 hours of 24/7 2fort is worthless.

[mystic turtle]

nah, I'm using it in a more general sense
and IIRC I've seen prodigy being used to refer to someone who just dropped a high-skill bombshell with the audience not knowing about the training that preceded it.

[mystic turtle]

hm, true
especially since I only have around 100 hours each on my most played classes

[cursive peak]

I've got 10x that on Pyro alone.

[mystic turtle]

oof

[summer steeple]

there's tons of resources, valve develeper community, tf2maps (and its associated discord), TopHattWaffle and UEAKcrash's videos, hell even 3kliksphillips old CS:S vids still are helpful

there's more but those are the ones i can think of off hand

one benefit of source is that its been around for so long that there are TONS of resources for most of the tools it offers, and most of them still have valuable information even if they're over a decade old because things don't change that much

especially because uh, if you want to get something into the game valve needs to be able to compile it with their tools

but a lot of the knowledge carries over between source games, which is nice

[unborn pecan]

Masterchef cause you are cooking 🔥🔥

[cursive peak]

See, I think it's moments like this one that just aren't possible in matchmaking. Everyone on the mic in this clip was a regular, so we were all just comfy with each other and joking around while playing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1sFKcYCt9o

[next nymph]

https://tenor.com/view/mercy-overwatch-come-here-gif-14280244

electron

[misty plover]

No

I will write it using my own proprietary UI library

[rare creek]

(electron fork)

[misty plover]

No

Its literally just a game ui lib I wrote that uses flexbox as its layout system but otherwise is just rendering textures

I do have some very lazily made styling options but its not really that good yet

[rare creek]

(based on chromium)

(js library)

[misty plover]

Sorry I'm not a fivem dev I wouldn't embed chromium into my games

Html and CSS is the best way to write uis but I do not want chromium

[next nymph]

thems be fightin words

[misty plover]

It's true though

[rare creek]

jquery is the best way to write ui

[next nymph]

(the first part, not wanting chromium is fair)

[misty plover]

Like it is genuine cope to think otherwise

[eternal haven]

Easiest maybe

Best is debatable

[next nymph]

if your UI is basically just a styled up form then fair game, though I mean most UI tools are suited for that. If your UI is like a game or something then no. Different use cases require different tools.

[misty plover]

There's not a better way to do it that's been invented, it's simple enough that I can teach anyone to do it, expressive enough that you can make basically any design, there's nothing that comes close.

Like it's straight up the best. The rest of the web is stupid bloat but html and css are solid

[rare creek]

vgui is better

[misty plover]

Vgui is a mess

[rare creek]

(hudpilled)

[misty plover]

In a lot of ways

[next nymph]

there is no game ui system that's actually good. But HTML+CSS is an even worse fit there

[rare creek]

minecraft java's hud system where everything is a hardcoded mess and in a giant atlas is better sorry

most superiorest hud system

[misty plover]

Agree to disagree then. Cause nothing comes remotely close in my eyes.

Flexbox is godtier. Html/Xml are the most readable/easy to write way to describe a tree based layout. CSS is a simple language for actually adding styling. You don't need the full fat web.

[next nymph]

I'l say there's a reason why you look at webgames and most of them render their UI straight into a canvas. They could've used HMTL+CSS and in fact have the perfect environment to, but it's really far from the ideal use-case

[limpid panther]

tell that to Garry Newman

[next nymph]

I'll tell a lot of things to Garry Newman

[limpid panther]

(like, please do, no joke)

[misty plover]

They don't do it because it's a pain in the ass to have to write your UI in html with a js callback into the game. Not because html and css are bad for uis. The rest of the developer experience is just dogshit.

[limpid panther]

https://wiki.facepunch.com/sbox/ui-razor

[next nymph]

making a decent workflow for this would be 10x easier than building a new UI system from scratch, but the standard practice is to do the latter

[misty plover]

I think you're coming from the mindset of using it for the web in its entirety, not just using it for just describing the layout and basic styling

[left sand]

web tech is probably the single ui library which has had the most technical development and engineering put into it on the planet

its features for layout and styling are very good for the most part

HOWEVER

you would need to do a lot of work to make a game UI library for it

[misty plover]

Yep, there's a reason most modern ui frameworks, even game uis, take inspiration from the web

[eternal haven]

Isn't web kind of overkill for most UI tasks

For desktop apps you basically have to ship chrome or use system chrome I guess

Even if you strip it down as much as possible there's just all of this extra garbage that you probably don't need for your specific application

It's also not really that fast on low end computers

[misty plover]

I advocate for starting from the foundation of html and css, the rest of the web sucks mega balls. Electron is awful, Tauri is just as bad. Do not use nor ship full fat web shit.

[eternal haven]

Well enlighten me on other options for accurately rendering modern css

apart from just using a modern browser engine

[misty plover]

I said the foundation. Not the entirety.

[eternal haven]

I guess

[misty plover]

They're simple languages that are easy to parse. Don't implement everything, transform it into what you want it for.

[eternal haven]

But does anyone actually do that?

[misty plover]

I did

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[livid oracle]

my favourite part of when casual ppl complain about community servers is when they say that nobody plays on uncletopia because all the servers are full all the time

[eternal haven]

I mean I wouldn't argue with that

[cursive peak]

What about the ones who complain about Uncletopia being nothing but tryhards?

[eternal haven]

If you're implementing things from scratch, html and css seem like as good of choice as any for how you do your layout and styling

[misty plover]

That one's even more funny

[livid oracle]

my second favourite especially right after i close tf2 after i kill like 3 people by sneaking behind and tauntkilling them

[eternal haven]

Uncletopia players don't really play that differently from like the upper 50th percentile of casual players

[misty plover]

Uncletopia has a history of banning competent snipers, and I see more memery and shenanigans on the server than anywhere else.

"Uncletopia is so sweaty"
They go to dustbowl and upward for the 3000000th this week

Like if you think it's a tryhard server you just simply haven't played there

[eternal haven]

I do know someone who's a good sniper who got banned for cheating

I don't think he cheats

[cursive peak]

I think some who complain about Uncletopia being tryhards just want to pubstomp little Billy FreshInstall

[misty plover]

I have seen way more high skill players on skial servers than UT ones

[grim parcel]

why else would you play tf2 in 2024?

[misty plover]

I would put UT players around 40th percentile

[grim parcel]

i need clips for my frag movie

[unborn pecan]

uncletopia is not that tryhard

it's a pretty fun server

[misty plover]

Just because you're not used to fighting anyone near or above your skill level doesn't make it tryhard 👍

Nemu's servers way back in the day were more sweaty than what I've ever seen out of UT

I wonder what happened to those actually

[eternal haven]

It looks like they may be back

[misty plover]

Are they?

[eternal haven]

I guess maybe not

The website is up but servers perhaps not

Also this

2018

[spare obsidian]

i guess that party never went through

[mystic turtle]

I honestly don't even mind if I pubstomp or not
I just want to do decently well, even if I lose and get pissed about it
what's not fun is when the enemy team is so skilled that Team Fortress 2 becomes a walking simulator where you watch yourself die over and over again

then I just change servers and requeue, no use trying to get meat from a rancid carcass

[languid haven]

I still think they have the ugliest default player model i've ever seen.

It looks like a rejected rick and morty side character.

[fleet kite]

perfect for gmod 2

[languid haven]

Guess that means i've been protesting for 2 years

[jagged pawn]

LMAOOOOOOOOO

protesting is when you write a negative review on the internet

[languid haven]

Slacktivism is modern activism.

Btw anyone know why tf2 wont go above 60 fps? I have a 75 fps monitor and vsync off but i have no idea what it's doing.

[grim parcel]

as should also protest outside of valve’s offices

[languid haven]

Also did mcoms come back from hell? that server icon looks spooky XD

[fleet kite]

If you aren't waterboarding valve employees you aren't protesting in a meaningful way

[summer steeple]

LMAO

[livid oracle]

Enforce minimum FPS

[summer steeple]

this is just like:

• harms legitamate players
• stupid
• either doesn't affect bots or bots can just... fake it

like imagine enforcing minimum fps

how would you do that

[summer steeple]

its the like

ask the player if they're cheating

all over again

cl_ischeating 1

[livid oracle]

-ischeating launch option

[summer steeple]

lmao

[fleet kite]

Not having textmode imo is like an alright suggestion but even then tf2 uses very little resources anyway

[fleet kite]

I mean I wouldn't be mad if they removed sniper entirely

[summer steeple]

the thing is removing textmode does nothing because there is nothing stopping bot hosters from re-adding it or using an older client

they're still using the x32 client

[livid oracle]

not rendering is such a trivial thing to do

on linux, it's harder to render the game

[wild grove]

what happens if you tell them this is a horrid idea?

[burnt dragon]

LETS MAKE THE GAMEPLAY BAD ENOUGH THAT PEOPLE STOP PLAYING!

I suggest reverting all tf2 builds to team fortress classic

[languid haven]

i don't see any issues with this except on servers with 100 players

[languid haven]

i've seen what happens to a client when there's a sudden update out of nowhere. it's surreal

[uncut spear]

dawg I'll just do this without cheaters

[tough locust]

honestly just try fiddling around with hammer and see what you can make, it's pretty easy to get started messing around since it uses the brush system that's been around since Quake. I'd suggest learning about scaling first because otherwise it becomes a nightmare if you start working on a map and it becomes too big or small. UEAKCrash has TF2 specific mapping tutorials and 3kliksphilip and tophattwaffle have lots of regular hammer tutorials for stuff like gmod. Making maps for gmod is a fun place to start because you don't have to think too hard about gameplay, you can kinda just make whatever you want and it'll be fun to spawn props in regardless. For TF2 maps I've been trying to make them for like 9 years now and I've been coming back to this same project for like 5 years, ive restarted it from scratch at least a dozen times and just now am i feeling confident that it plays well all these tries later. some people have a good innate sense for what plays well but I was not as blessed

[tough locust]

yees these I didn't even notice this lol

[tacit flare]

https://vxtwitter.com/valveirony/status/1799216063063732697?t=AFK0yUhpDk2pYZCHwzTIQA&s=19

[high current]

Is there any reason why textmode is able to connect to secure servers? I don’t really understand why it isn’t like the -insecure (or whatever) launch option that just opts you out of joining secure servers.

I know that wouldn’t really stop cheaters beyond just requiring them to make a new git push. But it always struck me as weird that textmode works in the way it does.

[high current]

Wait people are unironically asking to de-optimize the game? WTF.
Imagine working hard to release 64-bit and implementing optimizations, only for the community to go “gAmE rUnS 2 gOoD”

[high current]

I’m hearing remove Linux support (meme)

[cursive peak]

If I were to change the client, I'd also update it so it breaks network compatibility with older versions. At least make the bot creators have to work a little bit harder at fixing it.

[left sand]

theres only so much you can do with making that hard

[left sand]

alleged message from steam support

[burnt dragon]

let me report 20k accounts rq so steam checks none of them

[cursive peak]

Given that every solution is going to get bypassed, isn't doing nothing the simplest solution?

[burnt dragon]

yes

[left sand]

i think reports do have evidence of working

especially the in game ones

[burnt dragon]

really? I kinda gave up at somw point after people telling me it isnt even on

thats neat

[cursive peak]

I've seen action taken on reports on the Steam profile for things. Reported a lot of item names with slurs on them. Found them removed when I checked later.

[kind falcon]

https://tenor.com/view/what's-this-barn-owl-robert-e-fuller-what's-here-this-is-unfamiliar-gif-17821474186565185401

https://tenor.com/view/bitch-little-littlebitch-yourealittlebitch-bit-gif-24069832

@crisp cedar

[crisp cedar]

https://tenor.com/view/dota2-gif-25424186

[kind falcon]

https://tenor.com/view/fish-waterslide-goodbye-see-you-later-my-people-need-me-gif-26860500

[misty plover]

Valve does act upon manual reports quite often

There's this ragehacker that's been following and harassing me and a friend for over a year now who we've gotten the account of banned like 7 times now.

Though tbh the bans were meaningless because they have a pending trade for all their items constantly which lets them escape the trade restriction once they get their ban

[kind falcon]

User is suspected to be on an old Android Discord client

[misty plover]

?

What

[glass pollen]

That's wild... Regarding that thing with pending trades, have you reported it to Valve as abusable? Any way to make cheating a little less attractive for seemingly legit (as in high value) accounts would be nice.

[misty plover]

They know, unsure if it's been fixed yet

[glass pollen]

I hope they lose interest in you at some point :/

[burnt dragon]

wish I also mattered enough to someone to be obsessed over

today is a sad day

[radiant merlin]

I had a shower thought

What if valve helped some communities to host their servers?

Expecting of course they are "vanilla"

Imagine a community who want to host vanilla servers but the host bills are somewhat high for them, so they pay valve a few bucks and they host some of their servers. The prices should be low enough to be cheaper than renting servers from other companies

Then imagine valve improves the server browser and adds some sort of community quickplay. Valve hosted community servers can always qualify to be promoted

[cursive peak]

Back in the day, there was a community created server blacklist floating around. Why can't we create a list of good servers and just play those? Patreons and such can help with hosting bills. None of that requires Valve to do anything.

[radiant merlin]

It could help reduce hosting bills

[cursive peak]

Valve wouldn't even throw $1 at community competitive. What makes you think they'd throw even $0.01 at servers they have 0 control over?

[radiant merlin]

I didn't mean 0 control

Valve could always check what they are running

[kind falcon]

valve alerts the community of major events

thats enough to keep the game alive

shorely

[misty plover]

I want to make a server list that excludes scummy community servers that do shit like fakes players and fake pings

[cursive peak]

That's what I suggested like 3 lines up.

[misty plover]

I'll throw up a proof of concept with cloudflare workers at some point

[languid haven]

Fuck asia servers with 200 ping. Told me it was 20.

[wild grove]

depends, I know for sure that when VALVe announces a new mvm community event from moonlight or potato.tf, the players on the servers increase.

[high current]

I’ve been debating starting a server. I’d have to do a ton of research though because I don’t know much about hosting a TF2 server and I wouldn’t want to royally soil it.

[heavy solar]

@high current has leveled up! (18 ➜ 19)

[wild grove]

Not as hard as you think, the hardest part is the bills for keeping it running and advertising.

[glass pollen]

What would you focus on? Wacky maps, vanilla experience, cool custom maps, etc?

[tough locust]

hammer++ is way better since it has tons of bugfixes and extra cool features like the physics tool, a preview of the actual lighting for the map (since regular hammer doesn't let you see what the lighting will look like before compiling a map which is INSANE) a better particle browser, and also a better map compiler that doesn't crash and force you to leave your PC while a map compiles. It's drag-and-drop to install for TF2 so I'd suggest using that one

[tough locust]

https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Windows_dedicated_server only takes a few hours tops (most of which is spent downloading the server). If you know how to install mods for TF2 getting sourcemod for your server is pretty trivial too

also requires port forwarding so depending on your network situation it may or may not be possible to host a public server

[tacit flare]

https://vxtwitter.com/AChevyWolf/status/1799676403702809061?t=Do4ivgRSzFLJN28XjH5rxg&s=19

[high current]

Probably Vanilla and/or Vanilla+.
I’d definitely have the cookie cutter stuff: no random crits, no random spread, no random fall damage. I’d also probably have some high quality custom maps, nothing super experimental, but things like the map from the Frontline community campaign or the Jurassic community campaign.

The maybe included things would be a balance mod, but not a shitty YouTuber one based on my personal opinion. But stuff generally agreed upon, like tuning down the wrangler a bit, making scorch and detonator afterburn duration scale with splash damage, maybe making crossbow affect by crit heals. Pretty minor things in the scheme of balance mods.
I think that’d realistically be the main draw of the server, because everything else would basically be uncletopia.

If I had more than 1 server I’d probably also have a no-elo MGE server. Elo in a practice mode is cringe af, and most no-elo MGE servers do some whack shit that makes your game laggy until you restart.

The other main draw would just being a better quality experience than other servers. I wouldn’t have weird donator perks that lag peoples games like skial. Wouldn’t have that weird lagginess like UGC. It’d just be a decent server that I’d probably lose money running🤷‍♂️

[broken haven]

i used to be a mge lord bro

i got that 2500 elo

[left sand]

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=2825-AFGJ-3513

is there anyone that has any archive of this article? or remembers what it said?

it is the TF2 Quickplay FAQ

[tough locust]

my only problem with the rebalance servers is that it's basically impossible to see what the rebalances are at a glance and which weapons have been cha ges

[cursive peak]

https://web.archive.org/web/20210302211648/https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=2825-AFGJ-3513

[misty plover]

Damn

[left sand]

it doesnt load for me

[misty plover]

Yeah its not loading parts of the page

[left sand]

so i mean like

it literally doesnt load the page when i visit

oh

it works on chrome

[cursive peak]

https://web.archive.org/web/20150318015633/https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=2825-AFGJ-3513

There's another archive date that doesn't have that blank 7 and 8.

[misty plover]

Quickplay required accurate ping, player, and bot reporting

[eternal haven]

Can you spoof players or is that not possible?

[cursive peak]

The thing I typically saw was bots copying loadouts and names from people who had previously connected.

[eternal haven]

Obviously for a2s queries you can but for reporting to valve's master server

I know it's supposed to use steam to authenticate each player or whatever

[misty plover]

Yes, and you're supposed to get blacklisted if you do lie about it

[small siren]

*Yes, and you're supposed

to get blacklisted if you

do lie about it*

- undefinedbhvr

[misty plover]

But Valve never enforces it

[left sand]

they used to

[misty plover]

Its been forever since they did

Then again those servers who break the rules are their biggest ones now

And I don't think Valve wants to deal with the bad PR from nuking Skial or GFL or Wonderland

[high current]

Yeh I’d try to make it clear in some way. In an ideal world they wouldn’t feel massively different to use, but would feel much better to play against.

I also think rebalance mods tend to “overcook” changes. In that they overcomplicate things way too much.

[spare obsidian]

plus rebalancing stock weapons is kinda silly

[high current]

Yeh. I wouldn’t rebalance any stock weapons. Honestly there’d probably be like 10 weapons total I’d want to tweak. If that.
And sniper would remain untouched, not because he’s fine, but because I don’t know a good way to balance him and neither does anyone else.

[drowsy marlin]

When is valve removing the Heavy ramp up nerf

[tough locust]

when the heavy update drops in summer 2018

[drowsy marlin]

When are they adding Dragons furry but for heavy

[tough locust]

replace heavy's gun with a giant ship cannon that shoots cannonballs. boom

[high current]

I hope they never add dragons furry

[languid haven]

I rather they add a non-minigun primary. It's about time heavy got something

[spare obsidian]

i would rather if they put all stats a weapon has instead of making the players go to the wiki and reads them

[burnt dragon]

if you want I have a machine, I cant guarantee 100% uptime because yk, tornadoes and shit

[left sand]

We get huge value out of good server operators. While we do want to control
new players first impressions of the game, the goal is to have new players find
all the diversity out there and get into a community so they can kill each
other in the way they most enjoy. Having a set of servers with known
characteristics is good, to ensure that if you want to play you can always find
a server with a good ping, etc. But keeping all the traffic on generic servers
that we have to maintain and host is not really a huge win for us.

[burnt dragon]

but if you want a beginning point, I would be glad to help anyone here

(:

[spare obsidian]

outside of the obv issues with quickplay, quickplay also failed because of servers abusing the system?

[burnt dragon]

I dont think quickplay failed

valve wanted to test stuff

tf2 was the board

now we got this half complete system that for some reason cancels queueing automatically

then issue gets fixed few days later on my side

[languid haven]

Honestly i just joined official valve community servers than use quickplay.

It was never a good option but a valve server was always populated and always a map outside of a 24/7 2fort

[cursive peak]

It's just official Valve server, not Valve community server.

[burnt dragon]

about this, it doesn't have to be tf2 as well, I can help whoever that needs it, better than wasting extra ram staying idle

[burnt dragon]

can you join valve tf2 servers with direct IP nowadays?

you could be able to in quickplay time

[languid haven]

Well they run servers differently now that's why i said a valve community server cause it was hosted in that way.

[cursive peak]

"Valve community server" makes no sense. "Community servers" are servers ran by the community instead of Valve.

[spare obsidian]

didn't valve pushed a change to the server browsers to separate community servers with official servers? some .res files suggest that existed

[summer steeple]

official unofficial servers

[languid haven]

Using "retry" doesn't even work on MM servers

[spare obsidian]

according to the string text those servers are "official"

[languid haven]

Matchmaking you need to be queued to join. A community server doesn't have that restriction which is why i mentioned them in the way i did.

[cursive peak]

The distinction comes from who's running them, the community or Valve, not how you connect.

[summer steeple]

i think its better to just distinguish old valve servers and new valve severs by saying "valve matchmaking servers" and maybe something like "valve quickplay servers"

idk

[eternal haven]

This isn't true, if you type retry you'll get joined back in

I don't know whether it's the auto rejoin thing or the connect that causes it

but it 'works'

[languid haven]

That's the thing i never touched quickplay. I just joined the pubs.

[summer steeple]

idk there's not really a good way to say it i guess

valve servers just sounds generic

valve matchmaking servers works for the current servers, but valve quickplay and valve community are both inaccurate

[languid haven]

I think they used to name them "valve pub servers" or something.

[cursive peak]

Quickplay was only pubs.

Pubs are just PUBlic servers, aka not passworded servers.

[summer steeple]

looking at an old video, it was just valve "gamemode" server

[small siren]

*looking at an old

video, it was just valve

"gamemode" server*

- treacherousfiend

[summer steeple]

this is a screenshot from 2013

[languid haven]

Weird

[cursive peak]

Collectively, they were just Valve servers.

[eternal haven]

What do the numbers mean after srcds

They still have those today

[summer steeple]

version number maybe? idk

[eternal haven]

I don't think so

[cursive peak]

Probably something that only meant something to Valve.

Maybe one was the physical machine and the other was server instance on said machine.

[summer steeple]

yeah thats kinda what i was thinking

physical machine or datacenter maybe

probably the former

[eternal haven]

Here's the current valve servers

[unborn pecan]

valve so have servers in texas

[summer steeple]

certainly much higher than 147

[unborn pecan]

WE NEED MORE TEXAS SERVERS

[summer steeple]

although interesthingly these ones more seem like id numbers

[unborn pecan]

huh

[summer steeple]

1010, 2010, etc.

[unborn pecan]

I never knew valve had servers in India

[summer steeple]

i believe the ones listed on steamstatus are all the regions valve has servers in

anything marked as N/A for CS2 seems to also apply to tf2

although i don't see any texas servers?

at least not game servers

[unborn pecan]

Lame

At least since I am in the middle of the country

I get like

40 ping to both LA and Virginia servers

and 60 to washington

[summer steeple]

for US its like, Virginia, washington, LA

ok here's an interesting thing

the 3 letters after the srcds id is the shortened region name

with a few weire exceptions seemingly

like washington being eat instead of sea

but CS2 apparently has chicago and texas servers, but tf2 does not

[eternal haven]

I was gonna say it looks almost like a bitfield for flags or something since you have a lot of 1013, 2013 type stuff

but it's decimal so that doesn't make any sense

[summer steeple]

it could be bitmask portrayed as dec who knows

[eternal haven]

then you wouldn't have numbers that change in that pattern

Idk I'm sure somebody has figured out what the numbers mean

[small siren]

*Idk I'm sure

somebody has figured out

what the numbers mean*

- mysterious_eagle_46873

[summer steeple]

I mean 2013 and 1013 are pretty similar
0111 1101 1101
0011 1111 0101

[left sand]

This is a problem we're obviously aware of.  It's definitely not that we don't 
care.  However, it is essentially an arms race that is provably unwinnable by 
Valve.  Furthermore, any change we make in the name of security will almost 
certainly cause a disruption of legitimate service, due to bugs on our part, or 
usage cases we're just not aware of.  It is a classic conflict between security 
and accessibility.


Hopefully those two reasons help explain our reluctance to address these sorts 
of problems through technology.  They will create an ongoing arms race, in 
which we can possibly limit this activity and make it harder, but probably 
never eliminate it completely.  Furthermore, this benefit comes at a cost of 
taking resources away from adding features and fixing bugs, and also disrupting 
legitimate users.

When we can do simple and safe things to make it harder to do these sorts of 
things, we will.  We have some protocol changes that will make it harder to do 
this sort of spoofing, which have been beta tested for some time now.  We'll be 
rolling those out in the next couple of months.

Crowdsourcing using the abuse reports helps us stay out of the arms race, and 
it's the safest and simplest way to deal with this problem and many others like 
it.

Your humble servant,
Fletch

That doesn't really work.  I don't want to get into the details on this public 
forum, but I can guarantee that the result of what you describe is that the 
problem would just be escalated higher, meaning more convincing bots with 
avatars, with valid steam accounts that are logged into steam, etc.  A few 
weeks (or maybe even a few days) later, we'd have the same problem, only the 
avatars would be fixed and it would be even harder for a human to recognize 
them.  This is exactly what I meant by an arms race.  We would spend all that 
time, and maybe some people decided it was too much effort for them, but likely 
many would still continue to do it.


The delusion that the problem is trivial or that there is magic bullet is only 
enabled by ignorance of what people are able to and the lengths they go to do 
this sort of thing.

- Fletch

[summer steeple]

idk i'm probably looking for a pattern that isn't there

[spare obsidian]

tl:dr

[left sand]

interesting messages from fletch from 2012 about server spoofing

it kinda applies to the bot crisis

[eternal haven]

I believe they upadted how the master list works since then

Before you used to just send udp messages to some server

Now you send it through steam