I've tried everything I can do to get some eyes on this issue with Valve, including emailing Eric and PMing Jill on Reddit after deciding to finally go to r/tf2 to find their account, so hopefully this gets figured out fully soon and fixed, because I'd really like to play MM for fun on my main but I'd rather not lose access to my game in case if I'm needed for backing up.

Well my alt account suffers from this bug now (my main is fine because I stopped playing MM on it literally because of this issue) and a friend of mine also has it now. Both times happened by quitting the game after ranking up. Going to e-mail dumps to Valve.

I'm noticing a correlation here.

Please post dump files or email them to Valve or something. It seems pretty obvious there's some fucky with the rank up in matchmaking and quitting around it breaking the game, it seems like, because that is the only thing in common here, but giving Valve dumps would be very helpful!

If anyone can like, nag Jill or whomever from Valve to look at this and help them identify it, that'd be great too. This is probably going to get more and more widespread.

#31 & #32

Supplying dump files on top of this would be extremely useful, as just saying this stuff isn't going to be as useful as showing them the dump file that shows them exactly what causes the crash.

The only thing I can think of related to matchmaking is they mentioned that once you hit a higher rank it changes from FT2 to FT3 on 5CP/KOTH, did you guys happen to very recently hit that rank? (they don't specify what it is, and I'm not there yet)

It's about the only thing I can think of, and would definitely be something that unlike a corrupt Item Schema error would bypass Steam Cloud obviously. However, people who are at the super high ranks don't seem to have encountered this yet like Mr Slin I guess, so I don't think this would be it either.

Though I think if it is something relating to this that it's interesting that it's throwing the same error as something completely unrelated which shouldn't have ever thrown the error it did in the first place. @_@

#24 if you have Steam Cloud disabled that wouldn't matter though. :/ I don't think your guys problems are an Item Schema problem because if you disable Steam Cloud on TF2, delete the file, and verify you get a fresh copy guaranteed. So while it is the same error message, it seems to be a different problem entirely from what barycenter et al had at the start of the thread. @_@

Since this is beyond mine (and seemingly anyone else's) expertise, time to try official shit.

#20,21,22,25 and anyone else still suffering from this after doing the above steps do the following:

Go to your steam install folder, then dumps folder.

There should be recent dump files here for Team Fortress 2. If there is, upload them to Dropbox or wherever. Post them here (and email them, I think Eric is still a regular TF2 email guuy you can e-mail him at erics AT valvesoftware DOT com ). Then hopefully someone who knows b4nny or other people close to Valve bothers Jill or whomever to go look at the dumps to figure this out ASAP, because only Valve developers can read the encrypted dump files fully and at this point IDK what to tell you otherwise.

I'm at a loss on you guys because this is extending past my knowledge of TF2 now. To my knowledge the Item Schema file is the only thing that propagates through Steam Cloud, is account based, and in online mode on launch the client has checked by the Game Coordinator server as it is digitally signed and if that signature is not correct it forces the game to crash.

If there's anyone out there that is super intimate with TF2's file structure, they might know if there's anything else similar, like a stats file or SOMETHING that I'm not aware of?

The worst part is that there's also a very high chance it isn't the right error message since everyone else before you guys was receiving it for the WRONG thing.

:/

That's intended and that is why sv_restrict_aspect_ratio_fov 1 exists as an option which won't let aspect ratio increase FOV on anything bigger than a 1:95:1 ratio, so 16:9 will still provide an improvement.

Happens in CS too but a lot of people there are stuck on their old 4:3 ways even if it makes them miss people outside of the FOV rarely.

So I feel like I'm dumb but I did try this out just to see how it looks (esp on Spy) and I set it to hide Scout primary viewmodels and Spy primary and installed it and I still see my viewmodel in loobbies.

Does this only work in matchmaking?

e: Oh I don't think lobbies sv_pure 2 allows this, so I'll just have to config those I guess. I mostly just like this because you can hide revolver but keep watch which should have been an option a billion years ago.

#50

I mean I'm not a literal Valve developer but I just go off of what they've said in other articles / what I've seen others in the hacking community say from dissembling the parts of VAC that have been dissembled in the past.

This is going to include most of your similar questions.

VAC according to Valve has functionality which uploads code/processes hooked into things it checks to Valve directly and Valve checks it for cheats, so this could be a possibility. They've said directly before that this functionality is at least good enough that they can tell a program affecting their game is just an Anti-Virus by its code they're sent and not flag it. Admittedly to the best of my knowledge this functionality and its limits are not very well understood publicly, as they do not talk about it very much for obvious reason. You also (last time I checked) automatically get kicked if you try to block the internet routing that creates the upload connection to Valve since it's a part of the VAC connection required to be maintained the whole time you're on a server. But I don't think you can preclude the human element either on a lot of these cheats of someone who has the cheat actually just giving it to Valve. Just coz it's limited slot or hackers try to vet people as not being rats doesn't mean there aren't any.

As far as how certain cheats don't get banned or whatever, there's two big reasons for that. 1) VAC isn't a sentient AI, it still relies on the employees to check (or receive) cheats and add them to the detection list manually which when you keep in mind that VAC is used for plenty of other games besides Valve games but VAC is solely managed by Valve employees, it is probably overwhelming to keep everything detected as hackers will always move faster than them. 2) It's not completely understood either so I'm not going to say this is a fact, but it would make a lot of sense to me with how their challenge system works it's possible some of these hacks are unknowingly triggering anomalies sooner than other hacks are which leads to them getting detected sooner even if they're kinda similar to other hacks.

Valve's public stance has always been that they delay ban on cheaters, although you can historically see that they have a system where the longer a cheat has been in the wild the faster it bans you for it. Like if you bought CSS or whatever and loaded up a 2 year old cheat you'll get instabanned from VAC. I dunno about platinumcheats specifically, but Valve does seem to like doing ban waves where they set dates and ban everyone that has been flagged, maybe the signature was added on a wave day, then? There really isn't too much public info on this other than Valve repeatedly saying VAC doesn't ban instantly because they aren't going to talk about this much. Valve just pretty much bans flagged people whenever they feel like it, which is what I meant really.

VAC doesn't check just the game process. This used to be a really big problem when it was still internally versioned VAC2 because on Windows Vista (woo showing the age of this) due to Windows Aero actually being rendered in DirectX people could window the game and inject a hack into the start menu's DirectX thread which VAC2 couldn't detect until they started checking more than just the process with VAC3, as people would just RPM the game and use that data in the start menu hack. This was like THE go to hack in Modern Warfare 2 on PC until it got detected.

I dunno what method people use anymore to not inject into the game tho, if that's still common or not, haven't kept super up to date on this since my interest in TF2 itself has waned.

That section of their terms was changed awhile ago since they introduced applying phone numbers and Family Share, as those both can propagate VAC bans.

Man the viewmodels with those offsets do look quite a bit better sombrez.

I get your point and do not disagree because there are certainly more things Valve can do on this end like Blizzard does but fwiw Blizzard does not ban based on IP. Basically no one does that for a very long time since a lot of people have dynamic IPs and you'd just be banning innocent people. They ban with hardware IDs on the CPU end combined with using other information they can know like if you decide to save your credit card information with them and you hack and buy a game on another account with the same credit card you get banned because they can put 2+2 together. Sort of like how VAC now works across Family Share & attached Phone Numbers which the latter is actually in play when it comes to comp MM.

A really big problem with TF2 is actually just that there's plenty of hacks that just aren't even detected at all though. LMAOBox was just the most famous one that everyone knew about.

Basically, the hard part is how they'd give people access though, there isn't that many people on comp MM and it's very recent compared to when Overwatch was implemented in CSGO so they can't really easily gauge who is an experienced player. Can't even go by time in TF2 since that can be manipulated on the client side with stat managers.

Overwatch isn't perfect but it's still more than good enough to catch the super obvious people like these guys, since the few times I've played against them they've been using really obvious shit like extremely high FOV aimbots etc.

Also they'd have to call it Counter-Strike if they added it to TF2.

No problem, I will say this is pretty weird though because it really was supposed to be a long shot fix, like I felt pretty dumb for even suggesting it because the only way it was going to work is if Valve fucked up their error message handling which would be pretty rare even for them.

The thing is that when your Item Schema is corrupt and crashes TF2 the error message it pops up is supposed to be something akin to (not verbatim) "Your items_game.txt is corrupt, please delete it and verify your installation through Steam" because that isn't confusing and tells you literally how to fix it, whereas "CutILinkedList overflow (memory exhausted allocator)" is a warning message that encompasses both memory leaks and something not being allocated into your RAM or VRAM (hence the GPU driver update suggestions common on threads about the error) properly and crashing the game.

So either the recent update or some update quite a bit ago messed up the error message TF2 is supposed to throw here. You guys kind of lucked out on the fact that there was no client update but there was some item schema updates because that eliminated almost everything else as being a problem.

Can only guess that Valve pushed a corrupted schema accidentally and then you guys closed the game before receiving the updated correct Item Schema from the Game Coordinator.