The more I play TF2, the more I think cheating is a lot more rampant than players like to think.
I used to “hackuse” a lot when I first started playing due to others getting seemingly impossible kills, and so on, but most turned out to be either lag, or “game sense,” and so I grudgingly adapted and admitted fault.
But more and more, I’m finding people looking right at me while I’m fully cloaked, hiding in a place where spies don’t usually hide. I’ll approach an area where there’s no one nearby and suddenly am surrounded by enemies, as if they knew I was coming. All while fully cloaked, going out of my way to be stealthy, they just seem to have radar.
Many times I’ve had people say they had the spawn wallhacks when I wasn’t disguised. Spawn wallhacks tell you where your team is and, if an enemy spy is disguised as one of your teammates, where that spy is. But when an enemy spy is NOT disguised, it doesn’t tell you where they are. So when I get this excuse I know they’re lying.
I also use a trick to prevent myself from dripping after coming out of the water on 2fort. TF2‘s game mechanics make it so you only start dripping when you are mostly submerged, but if you hold down the spacebar key when you enter the water, you tread water at a knee-deep level, making the drip not appear. They see me upon me doing this, they kill me, and say “you were dripping, lol.” Well no, I wasn’t dripping, they are lying. Others in the same situation, long-time players who know what to look for, are fooled by me when I do this right in front of them, so I’m not the one misunderstanding the game’s mechanics here, and I’m sure as hell not the one lying about my skill in the game.
Tonight we had someone come in with a “Valve Rocket Launcher,” supposedly a developer’s launcher which has infinite ammo, zero reload, infinite crits, and makes a solder run as fast as a scout. He came on, claiming to be a game dev, and everyone loved him even though he was causing trouble for the rest of the players. I don’t know if the “Valve Rocket Launcher” is a real thing or not, but I do know that when all those people were kissing up to the one calling himself a dev, they were basically celebrating a cheater. He may not have been breaking the rules per se (if the “Valve Rocket Launcher” is indeed a thing), but neither are people who modify the Spy decloak sound to be much louder and more obnoxious than it is in the game. They’re not technically cheating, it’s not against the rules and won’t get them banned, but it does give them an unfair advantage over other people in the game and in every practical sense absolutely is cheating.
I’ve begun to see that people don’t care as long as their team is winning. Rarely does a team ever support the votekick on a cheater.
I left in a huff tonight because no matter what I did, no matter where I hid, people were finding me and I had no way of fighting back. In particular, a pyro who kept coming after me was always there with a flare gun the exact instant I came within firing distance. He’d retreat, I’d retreat, and then I’d go around to the place again and he’d be right there, firing that flare gun. The last straw was when I was in the enemy courtyard and that pyro was up in the corner, looking right at me. I was fully cloaked, I wasn’t moving, or anything. When he moved, he made a beeline right towards me, making it abundantly clear he saw something where I was. There was no one else around for him to be suspicious of, and I was silent.
Sometimes I’ll call the kill lucky, because it is very possible in many cases that they really were lucky. But almost universally when I do so, they accuse me of hackusing them, which if nothing else tells me that they know full well their kill was suspicious at best, and they’re overcompensating by trying to make me sound like a fool.
For years I’ve been seriously considering getting rid of Steam as Team Fortress 2 is the only game I play via Steam regularly, other than Star Wars: The Old Republic. SWTOR lost its lustre a long time ago, to be honest, mainly due to the fact it’s a WoW clone with enemies placed all over the map with no care if they’re in the middle of roads or anything like that, making getting to where you need to go a chore unto itself. Also, the combat is tedious. And of course decisions you make are overridden by the game because the devs decided that Thou Shalt Not Say No To A Potential Companion, Especially If Thou Hatest Them.
I love TF2 and have loved it from the day I started playing it back in 2011. It’s fun, light-hearted, and filled with wonderful humor. But the sheer number of players who “just magically know” where a silent fully cloaked spy is standing just by being in the same general vicinity, not by spychecking or anything related to that, combined with the amount of people who would rather excuse their behavior than force them to obey the game’s rules, has gotten to the point where I’m seriously considering leaving.
Of course, this is true for any online game these days, to be honest. Too many of them are so concerned with the money that cheaters and hackers spend on their games that they’d rather turn a blind eye to what they’re doing than ban them and lose that extra source of revenue.
This kind of stuff usually happens after I’ve been on awhile, like several hours. I am a very good spy, and am quite adept at fooling people. This can be frustrating to some, and if they decide that using a script to show me up is worth the risk of getting VAC banned, some will do it just to see me squirm. It’s petty, it’s obvious to the victim, and because neither Valve nor the server owners do anything about it, it takes all the fun completely out of the game.
I’m tired right now, and grumpy from leaving the game in a huff. It’s currently 1:18 AM and I need to go to bed soon. I won’t be deciding tonight, though I really really really want to throw in the towel right this instant. I’ll wait, though, until I’m more grounded in reality and more refreshed from sleep to make the decision at hand.
~Lilith
