2016 VAC Wave, and the Aftershock

Originally posted at: http://www.thespire.tv/2016-vac-wave-and-the-aftershock

A mighty VAC wave recently swept like a tsunami through the TF2 community, ripping UGC Highlander teams apart and scattering sniper mains' bones far inland. The ban wave, whilst mostly confined to the lower echelons of play, has affected the competitive community in more ways than simply removing a few dodgy players from the game. It shows that Valve are committed to reducing the cheating problem in order to make matchmaking a success. But it has put reputations of some AC teams and leagues into dispute, potentially causing knock-on effects for the future of these leagues.

The most recent VAC wave was the largest ever. It hit the most popular and long-standing premium TF2 cheat “LMAOBOX”, and as such gave us an interesting sample of how bad the cheating problem is in TF2 leagues. Over 550 accounts were banned from TF2Center, over 200 from ETF2L, a smattering of players who played in ESEA, and more than 450 users from UGC. This of course doesn't factor in how many were active players, nor how large the numbers are as a proportion of the league user-base.

TF2Center, more than the others, is forced to deal with the brunt of the problem. As an open lobby platform and the gateway from public play to competitive, it is frequently the victim of cheating and abuse. It has a small AC team who attempt to deal with the complaints from legitimate users, but with nothing on the line and the ease with which one can set up and alt account and suffer no consequences, they fight an uphill struggle. For the most part though, this doesn't matter. There is no incentive to cheat in TF2Center beyond the puerile amusement of those who do, and only time is wasted when encountering such a player. This does not apply to the leagues however.

For ETF2L, under 20 of the 200 accounts were active league players. Of those, 5 had experience above Open, two of whom had played in High (including the previously banned cheater azn). Roughly 0.25% of ETF2L accounts were caught in this ban wave, and the active cheaters comprised around 1% of the active player-base. This does not seem an unreasonably large proportion of the players in Europe's home league, and indicates that the AC team are doing a fairly good job at keeping on top of cheating within the league. Without an AC client, which would cost far more money than ETF2L has at its disposal, and with ETF2L's unwillingness to run plugins on all servers used for matches, this is the best they can hope to achieve. Their volunteer AC team, though occasionally courting controversy, have never shied away from banning Premiership players or making sure the rules are enforced. At the end of the day, ETF2L is a community league with no money to speak of. Whilst the addition of AC plugins on match servers (operating in a similar way to previous forms of TFTrue) would help the AC team, expecting ETF2L to invest in a functional AC client is an unrealistic expectation – not to mention there are many more important tasks to be dealt with before they can consider themselves any more than a casual community league. Europe's upper echelons are left, as they always have been, with a broke volunteer league desperately attempting to build a reasonable home for them. They should be happy, at least, that the security guards are on duty even if alarms and locks are beyond the budget.

The one league in TF2 that does claim to have a functional AC client is ESEA. Whilst the numbers are more difficult to find, mostly because the league hasn't batted an eyelid, it appears that around 5 active players in ESEA have been VAC banned. Whilst certainly a small amount of users, these 5 players make up 1% of the active players, and all were reasonably experienced players in the broad scheme of the scene, with Open/IM experience. This can be roughly compared to the 5 players caught with Mid+ experience in Europe, suggesting that neither scene has a significantly larger issue with cheating. However it does say some interesting things about the AC differences.

ESEA requires all of its users to play through the ESEA Client for matches. The client is required in order to control player connections, feed details about the players, collect stats, occasionally facilitate bitcoin mining, and the client also claims to feature an anti-cheat system. ESEA has never caught or banned a cheater in TF2, despite banning many in CS. Nobody has ever, to my knowledge, publicly admitted to using cheats while on client, and defenders of the client have previously postured that a fear of being banned by ESEA and wasting premium/league fees has acted as the ultimate preventative. It seems incredibly unlikely to me that not a single player has ever tried cheating on client, and reports of other players cheating on ESEA client (however dubious “hackusations” may be) are not rare. It does seem reasonable to suggest however that players would not use a blatantly obvious free hack, expecting some level of basic functionality from the client.

ESEA's AC is a huge selling point for the CS side of the league. Their advertisements focus around playing with the best players and playing in an environment totally free from hacking. This is why CS players use ESEA, and this is how ESEA think they can best appeal to their target audience. For TF2, we use ESEA because it brings legitimacy and a good prizepool for the top teams. In recent years though we have lost LAN, been forced to use set maps for playoffs, had no coverage on the ESEA twitch streams, paid as much (before this season's increase to $19k) into the league as it pays out, and we don't even have a functioning AC client. There is a problem here, with no way to resolve it other than for TF2 to get big enough for ESEA to care. Without manual bans for ESEA, they appear to have only VAC and a big fat bluff to scare away the cheaters.

That tactic appears to have worked more effectively than UGC’s AC system however. UGC had a very large amount of active accounts banned for a league with a supposedly competent AC system - over 25% of those banned were active players. These players extended all the way to the very top levels of Highlander with cheaters in teams which won their divisions in Silver, Gold, and Platinum. UGC is not a league that could possibly claim to house the elite 6v6 players, and even those banned in Plat 6s are not notable players in any sense. The same excuse cannot be used for Highlander. Some of the players banned were division winners in Gold and Silver; these are the players that you cannot afford, for the league's reputation, to be found cheating by sources outside the league's AC team. UGC suffers from an innumerable list of flaws, both in the ways it fits into the economy of the scene and the product it offers to players. The only thing that separates it from matchmaking is a division system, medals, and a semblance of fair competition. This recent ban wave casts doubt over the latter. Whether the AC team is to blame or the system that appears to stifle AC requests, UGC and Highlander will be hard-pressed to maintain legitimacy after the revelations of this VAC wave.