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:
WaldoThe entire point of moderating the game is to make sure it's fun for the overwhelming majority of the playerbase that is just trying to play.
There's no inalienable human right to play tf2 in a league; if someone goes out of their way to ruin it for others by cheating (or doxing/ddosing/whatever), just permaban them and don't look back without a damn good reason. It's a videogame ban, not taking away their driver's license.