This is confusing to me. In the Elijah and Sampha cases, playoffs were boycotted/ postponed (by players). So RGL AC will be investigating a suspected cheater, but let playoffs continue? That doesn't seem comforting for someone who is competing. Even if the player is banned after the fact and scoring is redone, it still leaves a sour taste.

I understand it probably shouldnt be done during regular season, but playoffs are a culmination of the season, I think a:
"Hey we gotta postpone to make sure playoffs are fair" -statement from rgl would be nice

Is this sufficient enough for tftv to start banning witch-hunt threads?

edit: Looks like it was always banned. Just not enforced anymore and looks like no one cares.

"We will not ban any paying customers unless we're absolutely sure they've kept cheating for multiple months in a row. If they tone it down to less blatant levels, we have no choice but to let them continue, instead of banning them for the offences we can prove. Please do not publicly complain about it, or do our work for us, or accuse anyone of cheating, or we'll feel even less sure about our decision and take an extra year to deliberate, just in case."

More seriously though, if you find indicators for cheating in demos, someone points them out publicly, and suddenly they disappear, you shouldn't spend months second-guessing yourself and searching for different indicators. Bring the banhammer down. This isn't life or death, and 99% of the time it's not a coincidence.

An AC team is also supposed to be better at spotting cheaters than the average player. If you've reached the point where random players are correctly pointing out evidence of cheating, you're not banning the cheaters quickly enough. And honestly, the alternatives, (forum) banning people for exposing cheaters or just nicely asking people to wait a few more months (or years) aren't going to get you anywhere good.

If you really need X demos until you're sure, make demos mandatory for everyone, for all matches, all the time. No need to publicly host them, only the AC team needs download access, and no need to keep them for longer than a season or two, so storage requirements won't keep rising. Please don't tell me a paid league can't afford that. That way the AC team can look at a dozen demos whenever they want and don't need to wait a year for a handful to trickle in via the "random" demo requests. Yes, this'll get a lot of people banned temporarily for failing to upload demos, until everyone gets their shit together, but if it also gets cheaters banned, then people will deal with it.

If they have to continuously monitor everyone who has ever been reported forever until a majority of the AC team is absolutely sure they're cheating, then it's no wonder they're not getting anything done.
Without banning everyone or expanding the AC team to keep pace, the workload will increase until the AC team can't function anymore and either ends up informally closing cases anyway, by simply not working on them anymore, or putting an equally tiny amount of time into every case so that it becomes pointless.

Agree completely with magic that administratively the non AC side has been handled sub-optimally.

There is a lot to unpack in this statement as a whole but I wanted to focus on one part here:

This may be a hot take, but I really do not think the 100% confidence threshold is a desirable goal. I understand that exa is just speaking colloquially here, but the amount of evidence one would need to go from, say, 95% -> "100%" confidence is probably several magnitudes more than going from like 50% -> 90%. In many situations it's probably not even possible; imagine you have cheating parameters a and k where a is the number of times you cheat per demo (such as the number of times you toggle triggerbot for an important flank) and k is the average number of demos in which you cheat (where k = 1 means you cheat in every demo). For a and k sufficiently small, maybe like a = 2 and k=1/5 (not too unrealistic for somebody cheating on a top team with only a couple hard matches per regular season), and assuming each instance of cheating is not super blatant, are you really ever going to reach this so called "100%" confidence threshold? I feel like this does not converge even asymptotically as the total number of demos n increases.

I don't know what the right % cutoff should be, it's all arbitrary in the end at a certain point. But I think the situation of "hey we're like 98% sure this guy is cheating and ruining the league right now buuuuuuuuuuut that's not 100%" would be pretty silly if that's how it currently is.

I think this standard especially in the elijah case has really contributed towards the recent animosity. Recall that elijah already had a previous cheating ban and was, at least in my eyes and many others, cheating pretty blatantly. And yet it still took 2+ months to ban them. Assume this is because of the extremely stringent standard RGL AC imposes. What kind of lesson am I, a player, supposed to take from that? How long would it take for a cheater with no previous cheating history who is cheating like half as blatantly to get caught? How many matches, playoffs, seasons would they ruin? Why would I want to play in a league like that?

The alternative explanation of course is that AC is simply overtaxed, which is fair we all live busy lives. But still I would hope that cheater priority is at least skewed top heavy, sorry to those in newcomer.

i personally think its really cool that someone can blatantly cheat for a whole night, get reported for that one night and then not get banned because it may take many months for the AC team to acquire the necessary evidence to justify a ban

https://i.imgur.com/9praP1v.png

This is pretty ridiculous to watch from the outside.

I've noticed that TF2 Community Organizations™ have a habit of forgetting what their objective is, and instead focus the vast majority of their efforts on playing student government. RGL is (supposedly) running an organization on minimal volunteer time for the primary purpose of enjoyment for the players (i.e. not moving large sums of money around). In spite of that, they seem to put quite a bit of effort into passing the blame to different named positions, or to writing up verbose rules and procedures, or funneling user commentary into some formal reports form (evidently /dev/null).

Recognize what resources you have. RGL is not a state government; you are managing a few hundred people and your operating revenue is somewhere around one fulltime cashier. You do not need to provide a bulletproof legal framework to justify every action or provide all of the supportive services of a DMV. You don't need to be 99.999% sure that someone is walling to ban them from your game, especially if that means a several-month delay on preventing them from disrupting legitimate players. Worst case, you unban them later: you're not a state, so you are allowed to be wrong and apologize. If the entire playerbase has decided someone is cheating before your AC Team™ has come to any such conclusion, your standards for proof are at odds with the people you claim to represent and should be changed.

On Tempus, we have a few hundred daily players and it's far easier to cheat in jump than it is to cheat in 6s: players don't pay for anything, you don't need any kind of dll injection, there's no required social interaction of being on a team, etc. It's the same game; VAC is just as useless. Somehow, there aren't long-running scandals in which known/blatant cheaters get away with it for months/years.

Yes, some obfuscation is needed to avoid making it easier for cheaters to go undetected. No, that doesn't mean that you should admonish players for doing your job for you. No matter how much student government you play, the reality is that the league only functions insofar as players are proactive and willing to help/cooperate with moderation.

Probably half of cheaters on Tempus are caught because someone tips off admins, the other half because they stand out statistically. If you guys haven't set up a system to find players with obvious red flags, do that (the APIs are all there). It's really not that hard, even when the schizo of the month decides to buy 20 accounts from 2005.

The reason it works? If someone cheats, I ban them from the servers. This is a very scary action, because it means that I am responsible if I make a mistake (this is known as "leadership"), and it also means that players are expected to not cheat (this is known as "integrity"). Some people get very upset when their friends are cheating, but after demonstrating very clearly that I don't care, this ceased to be a problem. If you let people cheat for months before banning them and then unban them in a year or two while failing to police alts, you are directly allowing cheaters to play in your league some substantial fraction of the time. This means you fail to deter them in the first place, and you have more work to do.

Also, I don't believe that you've done any thinking about hosting demos publicly. Tempus keeps a public archive of all demos that ever contained a record (41253 as of now), as well as a rolling bucket of all recent demos (133099 in the last 3 months from 57 servers). Jump STVs are a good deal smaller than 6s POVs, but that's under a TB, and costs a whopping $6/mo in B2. That's less per-year than sigafoo extorted from me to play in Main for one season with a bunch of friends who hadn't touched TF2 since 2013. I get that there's a development cost to integrating this into the website properly, but this is ridiculous; Tempus is running out-of-pocket. File upload required for each player after each match -> push to cloud -> link on match page, done. Empower the people who care more than you to help you.

11 months ago:

I've heard this line of logic before:

Can we talk about how dumb it is for a second? The only way for the above to ever happen is if

1) there is a public witch hunt for a certain player

2) that player IS, in fact, cheating

You're saying that people posting public evidence that looks incredibly suspicious will lead to these players covering their tracks, and that this actually HAS made the process take longer. Meaning the witch hunt was correct AND that it was evidence of that level of suspicion that led to the ban in the end (if it was more blatant stuff, it doesn't make sense for the investigation to have slowed down by less blatant stuff being public). So then, the public should get more credit?

Putting aside the argument that having to be 100% certain is a little silly, how can you get from 99% to 100% if no new evidence is coming out? The AC people just rewatch the old stuff and change their mind? This is starting to sound a lot less rigorous and quantifiable.

Also, doesn't the point about 'allowing the suspicions to calm down' contradict the idea that public outrage has no effect on the speed of the process?

Honestly, it sounds like RGL is just running through the beats of what they're 'supposed' to say to defend their AC process without thinking through the implications. Please enlighten me if I am wrong about any of my assumptions here.

This is provably untrue.

Also, a standard in the AC admins' mind of "beyond a reasonable doubt" instead of "beyond any reasonable doubt" would smooth this process a lot. But this post by exa is basically internal confirmation, once again, that RGL is not going to change anything / respond in any meaningful way to the requests that sprung out of the recent sampha situation. It's what I expected. Something needs to change, and everyone agrees that something needs to change, except, of course, the admins.

When is RGL going to just admit that their AC team fucks up every now and then instead of trying to build them up like this Pillar of an Ethical Institution of Competitive TF2? Like this guy never got banned for aim assist over this playoffs match with two full halves where he had 98% accuracy over ~26 minutes of play, and top fragged the combined log. half 1 half 2 and the other halves with 83%. In highlander. While still getting the most spy kills on his team.

No TFTV thread was made about Snowie, but I know for certain he was reported to AC where they decided there's not enough evidence to ban, and this guy is still playing advanced/invite highlander to this day. It's a perfect example of the kind of cheater that never, ever should make it through the cracks- if somebody's accuracy on logs can tell you they're absolutely cheating before even watching their demos, it should be inexcusable to not ban them. If there were a TFTV thread about this guy and the teams in his division boycotted playoffs, I would bet so much money that RGL absolutely would have taken another look and realized how blatant he was cheating.

Waldo makes a good comparison to RGL thinking they're a government. You don't have to determine cheaters to be 100% guilty. Even the fucking actual US government doesn't use that standard for determining guilt in crimes, they use guilty beyond a "reasonable" doubt. Can you reasonably doubt that someone with 98% accuracy on scout in highlander (where there are invisible spies and teammates that could be spies and pyros airblasting and sentries to shoot) is cheating? Like the league is supposed to be in place to provide an enjoyable environment for their players, letting a player that everybody believes to be cheating play is ridiculous. There is an insignificant amount of money on the line. We aren't an institution. Please just apologize for being below community standards and change your policies to do better.

Also side note your anti cheat team according to the staff list has 1 main admin and 2 "Trial" AC admins. Why can't you admit you just don't have enough people to have a competent AC team.

maybe i don’t know what im talking about but i think its a bit disingenuous to compare a free jumping service to a paid competitive tf2 service and act like they’re the same thing.

like yea lol just ban them 4Head. maybe it’s easier to conclusively decide whether someone’s cheating at jumping than at playing scout. maybe its easier to detect outliers by data in a speedrunning mode than in a pvp mode.

im sure everyone would be chill and not complain much if rgl ever did this. tempus has had plenty of cheating and administrative drama too, but people arent on here writing 500 paragraphs every time it happens

im pretty sure every single time RGL addresses AC problems they mention how their AC team is overworked, and their applications are always open. im not sure why u think it would help if they called their existing team incompetent. either way im sure they’re reviewing you and Jw’s applications right now and once you guys get to work everything will be fixed

What do you think the solution is? Do you even think there's a problem to be solved here?

I can tell u right now admins are never letting spu on the team

obviously there’s always room for improvement, and it’s a problem that big cases can take long enough to handle that it causes a major problem

my assumption is that an invasive anti cheat isn’t feasible for both technical and non technical reason, which means the only realistic solutions are finding more staff and being more loose with ban criteria. none of the people writing paragraphs on here are going to help with the former, and i think the latter is something people arent really considering the full implications of

mostly the solutions posited in these threads tend to just be “simply immediately ban the people i believe are cheating”, so mostly i just try not to talk about shit like i know everything. would u rather just have a monthly community poll to vote on who we think should get banned?

this seems like the best thing that could happen to tf2

this is insane that cukei still isnt banned although i cant say im surprised

effex was a main hl player who randomly went from getting dumpstered every match to cheating his cock off and it took rgl like 7 months to ban him

furthermore, during covid my friends and i used to watch cheater demos all the time, we would file reports and go through the normal processes, and it still took sometimes up to 2 or 3 months for anything to happen, and thats during lockdown

rgl just needs to accept that they will have false positives every so often if they want to actually ban people in a timely manner, and be willing to unban people, every other game with community ac does it

also rgl didnt seem to care about being wrong when they tried to DQ RIB (who are now in grands) from playoffs for "match fixing" without any evidence, so....

You're right; Tempus has total server costs on the order of $8k/year, whereas the only infrastructure RGL runs is a single website. AFAIK RGL hasn't publicly released their financials, but presumably (hopefully) the majority of the "paid league" is getting paid back out in prize money given how little value-add they provide over a community spreadsheet (casts?). I would argue that the "operating budget" (rather than just the total amount of money passing through the organization) is what should be used to determine the amount of scrutiny applied to management, so if anything it's unfair to hold RGL to as high of a standard as Tempus.

Being terminally afraid of scandals and drama is why we have the eternal drama and scandal of "there are cheaters playing in my paid gaming league." In what other game do you have to choose between skipping scrims and playing "the cheater team," then go with the cheaters because you have a match with them next week? It is a matter of just ban the cheaters, because the alternative (having a glacial "process" for dealing with it) clearly isn't working.

If the Anti-cheat Admin™, Head Admin™, Division Admins™, Division Moderators™, and Floating Staff™ altogether cannot perform the basic function of removing players who are so disruptive that a majority of a division threatens to boycott playoffs, then it's certainly an organizational problem. Clearly nobody feels like they have the authority to take action without consensus, as shown by all the drama threads where something gets "escalated" in a circle between different RGL Officials.

Tempus (and jump in general) has had more than enough administrative drama in the past; you can dig through that on the jump forums if you want (and some of it spilled over to here as well). Most of that came from apathetic management, but also a fair amount from the same reasons here: failed attempts to impose formality and bureaucratic process on a niche gamemode in a 17 year old game. LARPing as the IRS has no place where people in playoffs for the second-highest division are crying about pyro+huntsman and we have leaderboards for jump_ultimatebuttfucker.

I too expect that the free, decade-old speedrun community server managed by volunteer jump mains to be better run than a paid competitive league.

I didn't want to bore everyone with the math, but that's exactly how it works.
Without some magic way for the AC team to git gud, a 100% sure way to tell whether someone is cheating or not, it's just statistics.
There will be false positives, and there will be false negatives. It's impossible to reach 100% confidence. Yes, only a majority of the AC team needs to be convinced, but clearly that bar is still too high and that results in a disproportionate number of false negatives. Aka way too many cheaters are sitting in the limbo of an "ongoing investigation" that'll never produce a result.

Getting more samples helps, but like I said, if you rely on that then all demos should be uploaded so it doesn't take years. And like Waldo said, if Tempus can afford a public demo archive, RGL should be able to as well. So I really think that's not too much to ask for, even if they "have to" limit it to a private, time-limited archive just for the AC team to reduce the costs.

Otherwise, or even in addition to that, just accept that false positives happen, acknowledge that they'll happen more often if you ban suspected cheaters with less evidence than you might like, but ban them anyway or the AC team stops being a threat to cheaters. Like I said, it's not life or death. And like Waldo nicely put it, RGL is not a government. Hell, even governments do falsely convict people and that's a lot harder to undo than unbanning and apologizing to someone.

Even if RGL for some reason doesn't believe that TF2 should be fun and that occasionally banning someone who didn't actually cheat is worth it to keep it fun for everyone else, it simply makes sense from a business perspective.
If you've got one customer who negatively affects the experience of many, many other customers, you do something about it. If 10 customers tell you that the 11th shat on the floor, you might want to ban him from the store, even if CCTV didn't catch him in the act. It's better (for a given definition of "better") if you've got it on tape, but even if you don't, waiting a few months until you do while customers keep complaining about finding shit every week, would be insane.

i like that this is only a problem in this game, in other games they ban u and if ur cleared ur unbanned and if ur not cleared u stay banned

i also like that its always people obviously cheating yet it still takes a decade for them to be banned (cukei is somehow still not banned)

i didn’t say tempus was easier I said it was different, meaning saying “well I can moderate my service sufficiently” isn’t really meaningful

again i agree with everyone that there is an organizational issue (failing to recruit sufficient qualified staff), but notably no one in these threads ever has any ideas for how to solve that problem, (other than Jw offering them $50/mo lol)

how many people are there on the anticheat team? i feel like even with the bottleneck of them needing to be 100% certain, it shouldn't take so long to punish cheaters when there's more than circumstantial evidence against them.
In cases like sampha, he wasn't even initially smited by the anticheat team's doing, rather it was for failing to upload demos for the 3rd time.

garm stated that he had submitted evidence nearly 20 days prior to creating his forum post, so forgive me for finding it hard to believe that they [AC team] have coincidentally decided that enough evidence has been collected to indict sampha right after playoff teams threatened to boycott yet another season.

the only justification is the commonly cited one which is that the team is severely understaffed and hardly paid (if at all). In which case, how does it make sense to hold the team to such a high standard when there are literal hundreds of players competing in the league?

Also somewhat unrelated but how come cheating bans aren’t permanent? I kind of understand not wanting to punish players in lower divs too harshly, but in a paid division with prize pools, it’s completely illogical to allow players to re-enter the league.
Especially when they show no remorse for cheating in the first place, as was the case with Elijah and nowsampha, who’s ban expires in 2028 btw.

I believe the stated reason they make it non perma is to allow for human error, which does sort of fly in the face of the "100% certain" part.

Edit: There's also the reason I've heard about wanting to give ppl second chances because most players in the league are dumb (and young).

My conspiracy reason is that admins just have too many friends with prior cheating bans because there's a lot of people in invite across both game modes with them. Or they're worried about the hypocrisy of it or something.

cepi is still actively cheating in inhouse games to this day btw (also never banned despite the entire community sitting down for a night and watching the demos of him cheating)

rgl will really go outta their way to ban some random guy who has a vac ban from cs2 from a year ago instantly but wont ban the people that everyone knows is actively cheating like bro you dont need a report for this just go on the website and click Ban lol

I can confirm multiple people watched his demos, took note of suspicious ticks, reported him through the correct channels, and nothing happened. It still feels pretty bad that my season got ended by this and when I said he was cheating I got called a "retarded main player".

this is fine but if they truly want to give reformed cheaters a second chance, make the bans permanent but appealable like they do for racism and bigotry.
Having bans expire doesn't require cheaters to do any sort of reflection, and just assumes the cheater will be reformed after waiting out their 3-4 year ban.

Additionally, handing temporary bans down to players who cheat in a PAID division sets an awful precedent that they don't really care about players breaking the cardinal sin of esports. I don't have any reason to trust a league that allows players to pay to ruin other's experience with the only real consequence being essentially a formal warning and maybe an OMG thread ostracizing their behavior.

it's easier to disqualify an entire team off a single vod than it is to get one (1) single person banned from RGL.gg for blatant haxing.
I understand it's different people handling different situations, but it's concerning how rgl handles some situations on a whim whilst others take literal months to process.

i'm fairly skeptical of the notion RGL somehow can't afford hosting demos. demos are not large files like videos, they're just recorded server instructions. i know there's hundreds of players, but even then it cannot be that much storage space. if it's a paid league they can use some of that money to actually do what people want, no?

i know RGL runs at a loss, but cutting the already rather small prize pool down for a season or two to just... buy hard drives, or cut the prize pool a bit each season to rent cloud hosting space cannot be that egregious an ask. i think people can stomach that to not have to deal with guys blatantly walling or toggling each season.

No other league, regardless of how understaffed they may be, has this problem.

Just want to add that if "cheating his dick off" sounds like an exaggeration, some friends and I (definitely not the first people either) voiced suspicions to RGL after playing a main HL scrim and dropping these numbers. I just checked his page and it looks like he didn't get banned for cheating until 2/16/2022. If it takes "many months" to determine whether a guy who was in main a month ago is unfairly putting up 75% and 840dpm over two halves of play, amidst a slew of other complaints and similar logs, then I just don't think they know, or care, enough about the game to make that call.

Why's that? CS Faceit has that type of anti-cheat and while it isn't perfect it works a lot better than vac and is much faster & easier than reviewing demos. I personally wouldn't mind something like that being implemented and don't see an issue with it.