Tuesday, October 26, 2021

The bot crisis is NOT only a TF2 problem

I decided to try and play some F2P CS:GO by using a new account, since I bought the game a day before it became free to play on my main, it automatically gave me the premium matchmaking. I never encountered a single bot or a single DDoS attack on that, but I figured that was because I was using the premium paid matchmaker. I don't like CS:GO, and I knew that Valve paid a lot more attention to that game, so I wondered if it had the same problem as TF2.

TLDR: It does, but it is quite minimal compared to TF2.

I queued up for a match. I told the friendly lobby that I was a new player and was wondering if this game has as big of a bot and DDoS problem as TF2. After asking this and them replying "we have a lot of cheaters but I've never seen a bot", the server started to lag to an unbelievable degree. Everyone on the server complained and did not understand how this was happening. I then told them this seems very similar to TF2. When the match was completed, I encountered my first CS:GO bot. The bot started mic spamming and was named "BUY BITCOIN NOW" or some garbage like that. I then proceeded to queue in several other game modes and most of the servers I played on suffered from this server-wide lag; it wasn't on my end. I didn't see another micspamming bot, but for all I know, there could have been more bots that I didn't notice due to the TTK in CS:GO being so quick I can't really identify cheaters very well, but that is my own lack of experience at the game.

My conclusion from this little experiment is that, shockingly enough, Valve's fucktoy CS:GO has a mild bot problem, but nothing compared to TF2. Trying to join the new event maps is impossible because EVERY single game you find has ~50% bots.

This begs the question "why doesn't valve improve the security on all their games if this is a problem observed even on CS:GO"? I really couldn't say, I am slowly losing my faith in Valve, most companies would be calling a company-wide fire and putting everything aside to solve such a crisis, all hands on deck. My mind is boggled by this and the only way I can sleep at night is thinking that maybe Valve is developing a massive solution behind the scenes since this seems to not just be limited to TF2.

I'm curious to see if this issue can also be observed in DOTA 2, but I really couldn't stomach more than 2 hours of that god-awful game. If anyone has insight on that game, please let us know!

Thanks for reading <3


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