cs has money

I personally have a great dislike of invasive anti-cheats, and some of us run operating systems that have serious issues even running them. Also, this was before my time, but I'm fairly certain when ESEA ran TF2 someone snuck a Bitcoin miner into the client at one point. That's unlikely to happen with a hypothetical RGL client, but I'm still wary.

Really, I'm not sure why invasive anti-cheat is even needed in a relatively smaller league that supposedly has people reviewing demos weekly. There's not a ton of money on the line anyhow, I don't want RGL to get giga access to people's computers over it. Also, if RGL supposedly can't afford to host demos, they definitely could not afford to run a system like FACEIT.

The short answer is money. The long answer is that for an AC client to be even remotely effective, you need it to both be closed source (so the community wouldn't be able to verify its benevolence), and have *far* more access to your machine than a community league with no legal responsibility or fiscal reputation to uphold should have. Additionally, AC clients take ridiculously specialized skills that it's very unlikely anyone in the scene has.

etf2l has the same problem and based on my knowledge the main problem about having AC admins are:
- nobody wants to do this shit
- it's time consuming to watch demos carefully
- (afaik) no good tools to catch so most likely it's based on assessing player's behaviour manually
- if you ban a liked player in the community you are very likely to be harassed/doxxed/disrespected in the community regardless if the cheating was evident or not (sometimes)
- some people who apply to AC have questionable intentions, for example after AC have banned someone on ETF2L, cheater's friend sent an application to the staff email, this situation had place multiple times
- there is no incentive for people to apply other than taking a proper care of the way league works, people appreciate work when they see fruits of it and AC work is entirely behind curtain, hard to be transparent

offering money is probably not an option because idk how much money RGL has but ETF2L has no money and it barely lives on its own, it lives thanks to all donators and some money from adsense
also if you are supposed to get idk 20 eur/mo for many many hours throughout the month if you look at it purely financially it's not good unless ur a school kid

rgl ac full admin list isn't public, but the problem with ac exists in eu too; there are two ac admins where there are idk 700-800 people actively playing on etf2l, that means there might be a huge backlog of cases to go thru and it can be a problem here to take care of it properly

i don't say we can't say anything negative at ac administration overall; however when dealing with them you should take on account the situation as a whole

Idk if this is a reasonable solution but I personally think that decreasing the thoroughness of AC reviews to get faster bans out at the cost of false bans is way too big of a risk. A false ban would destroy the reputations of people and may sow doubt in the AC team's legitimacy if there are any "controversial" bans. I think that maybe a happy medium is if there is a good enough amount of evidence worthy of making an OMG thread for, maybe those players could be suspended pending final review, and that suspension can lead to a cheating ban or an end to the suspension if not enough evidence can be put together.

just let highlander players cheat and focus on 6s

This occurs already in etf2l where (iirc) their standard is similar to RGL. I trust etf2l AC team more than RGL because the people there (quintosh & co.) are extremely experienced, but recently there's been bans that a vocal subset of people are very upset about, dafuqwizat & jeven off the top of my head. Just look at this thread. So really at the end of the day if you're liked by at least some group of people + not blatantly cheating there's always gonna be people who make a fuss of things, regardless of the purported standards you uphold.

For the first part about destroying reputations, idk have prior cheaters even had trouble finding new teams? I honestly can't think of a single example; it's tf2, people just hang out with their own circlejerks anyway. I think it just boils down to the same point I made above, if people like you I think you'd be good either way.

Obviously throwing away all standards to the wind is a bad idea but at the current standard I just don't trust the AC team to actually catch a cheater that is even a little less-than-blatant without them ruining like idk 2-3 seasons max.

Unfortunately you're never going to get this in tf2. Most of the people that are best equipped to look at a demo and know what is and isn't legit are the top players, and the "random players" that are pointing out the evidence are people that play against a cheater. Something doesn't feel right in game, you download the STV, it confirms your suspicion, THEN you go and collect all the evidence and make OMG 11

and I get it, there is literally nothing satisfying about submitting a report on a website and hearing nothing about it and continuing to watch a cheater play. Its a complete contrast from a thread, where you can make as much noise as possible and watch as other people flood to the thread to agree with you.

but I think RGLs stance is pretty obvious. The best method of susing out who might be cheating in the league is to listen to the people that are playing in the league. Every single time this comes up they say to report people. To suggest that RGL should be banning these players before the players they are playing against figure it out is far too optimistic. Players in the server will always have a better chance to feel like something is off.
I count 92 teams in RGL this season. If RGL requires 1 demo per team per week, that's going to be at least 45 hours of demos a week. Its unsustainable to watch that many demos every week. The random demo pulls aren't so these AC people can sit down and watch them all and determine who is cheating. It makes it so that players know they might get asked for a demo from any match, you keep demos of players for use in future investigations, and you can "randomly" select people that you want more evidence for. Part of that system is eroded when the cheater knows that RGL is going to come knocking.

If you think RGL's AC team is so bad at identifying cheaters that you expect random players to do a better job just with the STV demos, then the AC team might as well be replaced with a monthly vote.
In ETF2L you can at least request POV demos. ETF2L also somehow managed to figure out this apparently hugely complicated and expensive "filehosting" thing before RGL even existed, so you could upload demos directly to their website.

Are you really sure that the problem is that cheaters aren't reported for months or even years and that's why RGL is so slow with banning them?
Are you really sure that the TF2 community goes straight to making hackusation videos without reporting the suspected cheaters even once?
Are you REALLY sure?

wonder dm'd arcadia to send him the videos and complain and when arcadia told him to submit a report he got mad and posted about it on here instead

Yes lol, like back when feno was *super* obviously cheating his ass off and and it was just kind of public knowledge, no one had ever submitted any reports. The only reason he got banned is bc one of the 6s admins mentioned it to our AC team.

Just please, for the love of god, report players you think are cheating. Even if they've already been reported, report them again when you see more sus ticks. Reports with stv demos and ticks save literally hours of AC time, since that means the AC team doesn't have to trawl through as many demos themselves. More reports is literally always better (other than resubmitting evidence you know someone else already did obv)

How on earth has the whole administration for our community league become so out of touch that the AC team is totally unaware of someone who might be cheating when there are videos of them cheating being posted on the only TF2 6s forum that gets used in NA? Is there no way for the division admins to pass on people they think might be worth investigating?

Seems like a total breakdown in organization like people have been suggesting.

Truly, the american condition is a complex one.

I had to rewrite this like 3 times because HOW ON EARTH COULD YOU HAVE A COMMUNITY AC TEAM WHOSE NEVER HEARD OF FENOMENO???

Please RGL, if You are reading this, just accept some people onto the AC team who can act as a messenger between the AC team and the community. Like just a couple really nice fellas that everyone likes, even if they couldn't spot a cheater for shit. cuz at least they will know who fenomeno is.

edit: sorry i had to collect my thoughts but let me justify the middleman thing. the AC ticket system is one of those ideas that seems great on paper but just doesn't mesh with the psychology of players. someone cheats against me in a game? i grab their demo and watch it with some friends. we laugh about it, say "i cant believe this guy!", and move on. by the time the watch party is over, the bad blood has been dealt with. i no longer care enough to open up the rgl ticket system and fill out a form, especially because i have no confidence anything will come of up given prior experiences. does it make me a bad person? maybe. but i know im not alone in this behaviour.

my point is that cheater demos get thrown around in steam DMs like trading cards, even if a lot of them never make it to the ticket system. so just have someone who has their steam DMs open that people know and can trust. that person can then pass those demos onto the AC team, and could even keep track of tips. i know it sounds completely redundant, but i think you would be surprised how much information such a person could pick up between playing pugs, scrims, and matches. and i have become increasingly convinced that nobody on AC has touched 6s maybe ever in their lives.

I don't have much to really add to the larger debate aside from the fact that AC usually is a lot more complicated than people on TFTV make it out to be, and that the same people complaining will never put their names forward to actually being an AC admin and making the 'clearly obvious' changes that can be made to the process of AC.

I'm mainly wanting to point out that this suggestion is incredibly dumb. Like, what is the point of having someones Steam DMs 'open' for people to send evidence to and to act as a middleman? The logistics of that don't even make sense, is someone supposed to friend every team leader for every division each season on the off chance that they send 'evidence' that could just be sent in a ticket? Who organises and gets people to send steam IDs, or are they supposed to just accept any friend request? Or to create a steam group and do stuff there which at that point is just another forum and adds complexity.

Its really not hard. If you have evidence or suspicions that someone is cheating, make a ticket. If you "no longer care enough to open up the rgl ticket system", TF do you expect the Admins to do? There are legitimate criticisms you can weigh against the AC team and this response, but presenting a solution when you can't even be bothered to do the bare minimum is ridiculous.

Formal reports for cukei and other known and blatant cheaters have already been submitted, and I know that because I did it myself over a month ago, maybe even longer. Still haven't been banned.

maybe you mean 'no other game' - I've made ac tickets for etf2l that have gone unanswered for 3 months now

nothing has been replied to since this message to them on jan 10th (5 individual tickets)
https://i.imgur.com/Ex7ZcXZ.png

including this (to clarify the checkmark reacts are automated reacts to say the messages have been received, not that they're being looked at)
https://i.imgur.com/NFz2zEu.png

im not gonna claim that im speaking any more with my head than my heart, but i will just point out a couple things.

This literally already happens every season. Every admin adds the team leaders from their divs/creates a steam group to streamline coordination. How do you think demos are collected? How do you think playoffs are organized? In fact, the only things admins don't do as you've listed here is communicate with AC in any way.

I thought i already addressed this position but i think it was in one of the rewrites i deleted. it's always been the easy stance by RGL to blame the players for not doing "the bare minimum," but that doesn't really fix any problems, does it? You can criticize the culture of the community all you want, but that doesn't defeat my criticisms of RGL policies, and I maintain that its RGL's position to accommodate the community rather than lambast it.

I've been an admin and I've applied to AC before, too.

Anyway, i could've just not thrown that edit in and collected my upfrags, but honestly i'm just frustrated that it seems increasingly that nothing is going to change in this league in spite of excessive public backlash. i'd like to encourage more people offering up suggestions to improve the system, even if they aren't super well thought out. At least that way we can get more insight into what the community would like to see more of going forward. And it gives you more people to dunk on, too!

IMO walrex's suggestion sounds a lot more like a pretty regular, modern type of AC. In Apex Legends for example, all the top players know that they can message Hideouts (public AC liaison type guy) and have him manually review accounts they suspect of cheating pretty fucking quickly. Having a guy like that for RGL AC would be pretty reasonable. When you play tf2 for 40 hours a week for 10 years, you get pretty good at telling when there's fuckery going on. I think letting top level guys skip the process of filling out a ticket that's going to get buried by AM players reporting a scout that got more than 50 acc anyway sounds like a good way to cut out all this bullshit. I don't think anybody is saying that every low level player should have the same access as people that have spent years and years at the top level of the game. Rather, I think letting players that can actually tell the difference between someone that's just really good and someone that's too good skip the line is pretty much standard issue in esports today, and I don't really see any argument against it that makes sense.

I agree, for three main reasons:

1) Because invite is the 'face of the league', having cheaters there is just more harmful to the image of the scene, and therefore more urgent to deal with. It's the same reason why it's understandable for professionalism requirements (aliases, generally being respectful, etc) to be enforced as well; it's a two-way street.

2) In light of point 1, the RGL admins SHOULD have a more direct relationship with invite players already, and often do.

3) Frankly, I think cheaters in higher divs are as much better at disguising their cheats as players in higher divs are at playing the game. That's why you hear lots of suspicion about invite players but not as much blatant evidence. Even borderline invite/advanced cases like mxr and elijah were still less blatant to my eyes than some of the lower div cheaters we've seen. Like the most recent OMG thread, idk maybe it's just me, but I feel like that's a much quicker report to put together than one for the higher divs.

if mustard agrees nvm

this has been posted before but @exa just post on tftv dude nobody reads your forums, at the very least just mirror major announcements, it's the very least you can do (or at least have some person from RGL mirror the posts and actually read the forums here, a community league should not be completely disconnected with the community like this)

it is a little sad that we let sigafoo let us all play in a league run by highlander players which clearly is very mismanaged probably in no small part due to the fact that the communities and priorities are totally different (RGL trying to recruit pubbers to play highlander, supporting no restriction/alternative gamemodes, etc.)

Eh tbf to exa they (or other staff) most of the time do post important stuff on here, especially 6s related stuff (lan announcements, rgl pugs, etc.). This post just happened to be wrapped into their monthly minor rules updates/bans stuff which like 99% of the time is just very minor rule updates or amateur highlander players getting banned for cheating or alting or some shit. I agree that they probably underestimated how important it would be viewed but I don't think at least on this front it's a consistent thing, I think they just (rightfully) assessed that tftv doesn't care about 99% of rgl updates.

That being said tftv is pretty dead as well so it's not like a monthly RGL announcements thread, minor or not, would really clog things up if that's the concern so I support mirroring things as a general principle.

Off topic but if you're like me and read the rgl mission statement recently you would've also had a fucking stroke (notice how there's literally nothing in there about fostering the top level of competition LOL).

here is some nerd stuff about real disk usage
etf2l use this: https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box/ for demos storage and it costs 3.20 EUR/mo/net for ONE TERABYTE of data
5 TB costs 20.80 EUR/mo/net which is something which definitely would cover all needs for demos for RGL and ETF2L together for many years with current policies, not entirely with demo upload enforcement for every player, in that case it would be enough for one league to run out of space without any retention (removal of old files) for a few years
after the server failure in 2019 we lost all demos on etf2l historically and after keeping all of the new ones we have:

Filesystem                                Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
xd.your-storagebox.de:/home  1.0T  140G  885G  14% /mnt/external-storage

meaning etf2l will die faster than this storage gets entirely full
you have to keep in mind that each season only stv demos has to be uploaded from each game, demos usually have idk ~100 MB (after compression) per match and you have like idk 80 matches a season in prem? + we keep demos from requested demos by the etf2l staff and players

on average around the same for each player if they were forced to upload demos, so assuming the worst scenario which is highlander, you have 1.8 GB per match, for 6s it would be 1.2 GB per match
ETF2L 6v6 Autumn 2023 had something around 300 matches in non-top tier, ~115 top-tier
that gives us around 500 GB per 6v6 season and probably something similiar to hl considering less players are involved in that overall, also less teams so less matches to play
you don't have to keep these demos forever, it's enough to keep it for a season or two
it can be more costly but it's definitely not something impossible to do, for etf2l it would mean it wouldn't live without anybody donating it from time to time but it's not like you won't be able to take advantage of this sort of solution
etf2l server costs € 15.85/mo net (with backups) + 3.20 EUR/mo/net + $12.98/yr for domain renewal + a few eur/mo for mail service because afaik it's paid
staff isn't paid anything for work, so it's around 28 EUR/mo gross to run ETF2L right now

what is needed here is willingness to put work into making it happen and enforcing demo upload

edit: added backup price
the devil is in details; these disks which are with vps/dedicated servers are usually ssd (hot, fast storage, pricey) and these on external services like we use are usually enterprise-grade hard drives (cold, slow storage, cheap) and connected thru network protocol which means we have a latency, but it's completely acceptable for files you don't have to access immediately

Incredible, isn't it?

I'm sure RGL will tell us there's some reason why it's just completely impossible to do it like that in North America, and it will be headache-inducingly stupid. Probably something about how they've got no EUR, any service in the US offering the same would cost at least 500 USD/month, or how RGL is just so incredibly popular that they'd need a million times ETF2L's bandwidth and pay for it accordingly.

RGL run a website written in ASP.NET, not sure if Core or not, but if not, then they must host it on a machine with Windows Server which is obnoxiously expensive compared to hosting things on Linux
depending on if you maintain a Windows license yourself or you use pay as you use option, prices will differ
in pay as you use case it's at least twice more expensive if not thrice when comparing to a machine with Linux with exact same specification (vCPU, RAM, disk, network throughput etc)

So the money RGL should be spending on demo hosting is instead spent on a Windows license.
That's almost reasonable, but still depressing.

Though let's be real, even at twice the cost (and half of ETF2L's cost is the domain, which shouldn't actually double), that would work out to an extra ~600$ per year. That would shave around 100$ off of every season's price pool.
Doesn't seem like a real dealbreaker to me.

Now, most community leagues would probably come up with an estimate for the cost, and then put it to a vote by the people who provide that money. Put I guess we'll just have to trust RGL when they say that it's too expensive and simply can't be done.