On 21/10/2013 16:46, 1nsane wrote:
It did happen. There was a noticeable increase in hackers, especially on
servers that don't have admins on all the time. Such as valve's own.
Valve's EU servers are certainly not havens for cheaters ime.
There are a few cheaters but it's a tiny percentage.
It's not even one cheater per server. If it was then I wouldn't be able
play the game
(i.e if a cheater joins I find another server. But if every server had
just one cheater on it
then I couldn't do that - there'd be literally nowhere to play)
And that has never happened. I've never had to search for a server that
didn't have a cheater on it.
I've never even done something like jump to 3 or 4 different servers
because they've all had
cheaters on. Most days I don't see any.
So, if we focus on 24 man servers for a second we can conclude the number of
cheaters on 24 man servers is probably less than 1/24 of the player base -
and I would argue significantly less than that.
See, I don't think people care about it that much. In most activities people
generally want to get better at it. You see a group of guitar players
or pianists and they want to get better. People that draw pictures
usually do it to get better at it. Gamers, in general, are not
interested in getting better. They crave mediocrity.
If you're below mediocre, to them "you're a noob" but
if you're better than average they'll hate you for it.
Why would anyone with that mindset cheat? And it's the mindset, I'd say,
of at least 90%
of the TF2 pub community. They are happy being crap at the game
and will often say things to that extent like "I only play for fun" or
"No one's
interested in capping the point / capturing the intel / what the score is"
They want roughly to be on par with the other players. They want to blame
the weapon / class / lag for every death and they want everyone to
crave the same level of mediocrity they have reached and then stopped
at once they reached it.
As a few of you have noted cheating is cheap (it's always been cheap,
it's just cheaper now) and it's trivial
and easy to do (to the point where calling it hacking seems ridiculous.
That would make someone who flushes the toilet
after having a dump a hydro engineer or something)
Yet, self-evidently, few choose to do it. Indeed, you want this feature
because you want
to ban what is effectively the same guy creating lots of accounts for
himself.
That in itself suggests that cheating is not rife.
Because if lots of people cheated then it wouldn't matter if you could
stop one person
from creating numerous accounts or not. It would be like banning a bad
driver from
the roads. Which makes no real difference because there are literally
millions of incompetent drivers
and more join the roads every year.
If there was a high percentage of cheaters you may
as well just switch all the servers off (of course, at that stage, if
you really do
have tens of thousands of cheaters you have to ask questions about the
game, why people don't
want to play it to get better at it, but more importantly why they care
about pretending to be good at it
which is, as I've said, certainly not the case for the vast majority of
TF2 players)
That said, maybe I'm lucky. My current stats say I've played 92 hours in
the last
2 weeks, of which around half are TF2 (it's usually more than half but with
family sharing I've been playing a bunch of other games) so I play a lot
but I still only experience a small percentage of servers.
As I said some of you may be attracting people who want to grief and
cheat or wind you up
specifically but I can't imagine how such an erudite and polite group of
people could have upset
anybody, can you? So that can't be it.
I think perhaps it's partly cultural too. Especially the griefing thing.
As for child predators?!?! I can't see how that works. TF2 doesn't have
any way
of talking to one person on the server does it? Steam does I suppose but
game bans won't really help. Do Americans really join TF2 servers and
broadcast in chat
or over the mic "Hey, anyone want to see some puppies?"
--
Dan
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