Team Fortress 2 Community Up In Arms Over Massive Bans

Despite being out for over 10 years now, Team Fortress 2 has only a loyal player base - but also a [...]

By Liana 'LiLi' Ruppert

team fortres 2 catbot

Despite being out for over 10 years now, Team Fortress 2 has only a loyal player base - but also a large and active one, as well. That same player base is now in a feud with Valve, which came to head over the past weekend. The source of conflict? Cheating. We are talking about an online game here.

Except, in this case - it's not actually about cheating. At least not all of it. The team over at Valve have been banning massive amounts of players that are found using a very popular cheating script. Their algorithm for finding said players though seems to be a little wonky, because many players are reporting that un-justified bans are also taking place, and that Valve's anti-cheat system casts too big of a shadow and innocent players are caught stuck in it.

It all started when one GitHub user submitted a report that Valve was issue permanent bans against perceived cheaters using Catbot. That being said, the Anti-Cheat System (VAC) is targeting players that have any rendition of 'catbot' in their usernames. According to him, any players that have 'Catbot' anywhere on their player profile, including their usernames, will automatically be hit with a ban. Time to retire that "Ilovecatbotanduseitallthetime" username, sorry kiddo.

Many players responded to the original GitHub posting stating that they have been hit with these bans despite never having cheated in-game. One user even stated, "I never cheated and I do not associate with cheaters and this is very sad that this is happening." Of course, there were also those that questioned why anyone would want a known cheat name in their username at all and ... fair. That's totally fair.

Both Reddit and Steam forums for Team Fortress 2 blew up with player complaints about how aggressive the anti-cheat system was and how it's not thorough enough in its over thoroughness. Many were calling out Valve as well for failing to update an outdated system, which is attributed to unfair banning.

Valve employees have begun fighting back by threatening even more bans, "In general VAC issues are not handled on Github in any capacity and further issue reports on this may result in being banned from the Valve Software issue trackers." Below is the full message:

"Hi! Valve employee here. The bug report is incorrect. VAC will not ban you for simply having catbot in your user name (either your steam profile or on one or more of your linux accounts).

The bug report--and I suspect many of the posts in this thread--are a tactic employed by cheaters to try and sow discord and distrust among anticheat systems.

VAC has many different types of detections and we cannot discuss what they do publicly because doing so makes them less effective. However, one thing I can disclose is that all detections require that the detection occur while a user is actively cheating and connected to a VAC-secured server.

Linux historically hasn't been a problem for cheating--the base rate of cheating is significantly lower on Linux than it is on Windows. Unfortunately, a "healthy" community of cheaters grew up around catbot on linux and their impact on TF became large enough that they simply could no longer be ignored. Those banned users are very annoyed that VAC has dropped the hammer on them.

Kisak moderates many of valve's github bug repositories for us in an attempt to keep the bugs high quality and actionable. The VAC team asked him to close the issue in question and to indicate that github was not an appropriate location to discuss VAC bans. He did so, and we support this action.

For proof that I am a Valve employee, you can check my posting flair in the other subs I post on (/r/CSGO and /r/tf2) or a mod can message me and we can work on confirmation using my work email and PMs."

Which then turned into some of the player base turning on other players and the whole thing is just messy. Many long-time players are reporting that the anti-cheat has never been this bad and that this is a very negative turning point for the game and the company behind it. So far, Valve has yet to issue a direct, company-wide, statement.

Trending Now: