The problem is simply cheaters. Cheaters have plagued this community for far too long and there was a certain time in our history in which we didn’t have as much to fear from them and there was some integrity to be found in the scene. When we were in doubt, we could check it out.

The time of peace in our community was during the brief reign of Punk Buster. There was tremendous power granted to server operators and the community at large. There was at last integrity to be found in matches, pubs, and scrims. If you suspected someone, you could simply take a Punk Buster screenshot at any time and see exactly what the player saw. This was an extremely powerful tool that was the instrument of many cheaters downfall. Locked cvars from it took its strength much further eliminating speculation about people using illegal values.

This product brought out the fiercest code we had seen in cheaters to try and circumvent the system and continue to proliferate their cheats. This was simply a challenge to the Punk Buster team who in turn was ready to rise to it. The biggest stumbling block in that defense effort was the game maker itself. Punk Buster could only do so much without access to the inner workings of the engine to detect, block and prevent cheats from being used. Once the Punk Buster team was stopped and unable to do more they simply gave up the ghost and moved to other games which they could do things as needed. (See Call of Duty as an example).

So here we sit years later in the same situation and the same stupid and elaborate cheats are prevalent in today’s scene. I had at first thought with the release of source that things would be different this time around. I had hoped Valve had nailed the cheat issue as they had been mentioning bringing to an end. Then without much delay myg0t started in and cheaters started appearing. These were more than just good players being called cheaters. These were blatant speed cheaters, teleporters, etc.

I don’t typically fall into the whole “That guy is cheating” paranoia, which I see so often from someone whose ego was just crushed because they got killed. I tend to be more reserved in my accusations and evaluations. What I do see quite often is much more sinister and harder to detect. Quick toggles are the devil and lead to stacked sites and undetectable advantage to any team and player. I also see way too much of the stupid cheats that are meant to be blatant and obvious.

While I am not a programmer and I don’t really have a solution, I can only hope that Valve can at least somehow consider our request and enable the bare minimum of cheat protection and afford us a little more integrity when we are playing. We need and deserve some sense of stability and even ground when in matches. Allowing any forms of cheats to go on hurts legitimate players as well because they are then accused of cheating, which in turn becomes a vicious cycle and ego’s come out.

As a side point it would be quite nice to get some basic fixes into the HLTV so that spectating matches would be more viable. Currently in its current form its abysmal and forces me to watch my team scrim by typing /kill at the start of every round. We lose countless scrimmage opponents because the other team leaves the server refusing to let us “ghost” them. We have never ghosted from a 6th player or from each other when dead. We yell at each other for ghosting to prepare for CPL.

Another badly needed point is the force chase camera and fade to black. We desperately need this back in the new version so that we can have some integrity to remove ghosting and accusations of ghosting. I believe right now that this is a problem that ‘should’ in my eyes be quickly fixed, especially since its partially in and was in the previous version.

So while these points are slightly off topic it does go back to providing integrity and allowing people to not feel cheated. In the example above the other team will frequently get mad and leave the server after 3 or 4 rounds of getting pummeled and call us ‘lame’, ‘OGL’, and ‘Ghosters”, etc. If the HLTV that is now built into Source functioned better this whole issue would quite easily be resolved.

So what’s my point beyond complaining? I wanted to bring forth into the public light just how important VAC and Anti Cheat is to the game and community at large. I am asking for Valve to please consider bumping this up in precedence and secure the product we all specifically paid for to play. We deserve this and it’s not too much to ask for.

I also think that the best thing for the community would be for a 3rd party such as United Admins / Z Project / HLGuard / Cheating Death / Punk Buster or whoever to create an anti cheat plug-in and tools as mentioned above. I would also like to request a cvar locking mechanism to enforce league rules and variables to remove debate and allow everyone to focus on the game. To me, that’s all the “Pro-Mode” we need.

As I said before I am not developer, but I would hope that enough people are concerned like me who can do something about the game and community to help provide stability as we move forward. Thanks for listening to my rants and spending your time reading Amped. Have a great game and day, Take care.