Trash.ca

Spectacularly Lethal Soldier
I've noticed that when potential admins are considered the questions asked are usually hypothetical scenarios that test their understanding of the rules and as a way of testing their potential admin abuse but one thing i never see is testing them on how they identify cheaters. In my humble opinion, a large portion of the tf2 players i encounter on skial have no idea what cheats look like or what they should be looking for. Most are not aware of spectator delay or gauge a suspected cheater purely on their aim. What im trying to say is that the methods some people (and some admins) use to identify a cheater could be improved. I've been banned by new admins 2 times now which prompted me to make this. Im not hating or anything, i just think it would be great to increase awareness on identifying cheaters. I dont expect every new admin to be able to do their job properly but being banned twice made me realise you guys dont even try to help these guys when it comes to sniffing out cheaters so heres some info that i think new admins (or just players really) would find useful:

One thing im sure all admins are capable of doing is identifying blatant cheaters. Im talking about the ones that do 360s and crank out headshot after headshot. These are bad cheaters and it doesnt take any thinking to ban them. Something i notice is that people often mix up the terms associated with cheats or use different definitions, for consistency i'll just define what i consider a few terms to be :

Aimkey:
When held down the aimbot is active, when not held aimbot is inactive and the user aims manually.

Triggerbot:
Does not affect your crosshair movement, only fires when the player puts the xhair over an enemy. Some people think it triggers their aim to flick however this is not true afaik.

Silent Aim:
This is what most people are referring to when they think of aimlocking. Here's where it gets interesting, in source games the field of view to which these cheats can cause your aim to flick to a target can be configured. A poorly configured one may use a large FOV which would cause blatantly inconsistent flicks to hit consistently. A properly configured low FOV aimbot however is much more difficult to see in spectator, and in my opinion 100% impossible to spot. Because the aimlock only triggers when your xhair is only a few degrees away from the enemy and when your aimkey is held down, the flicks look really natural in spectator. I've even defended a silent aim user because i was unaware of them using it, thats how hard it is to know. This is also the type of cheats csgo pros use which some supposedly pay upwards of $100k to code so it can bypass custom LAN anticheat. Scouts/heavies usually use a higher fov aimbot than snipers.

I thought i'd list a few ways you can identify a cheater OTHER THAN their aim:
1) Look at their movement, if they look like they're moving on a controller or cant strafe properly or show any signs of movement of an experienced player but their aim is god tier then theres a higher chance they might be cheating.

2) Look at their xhair placement. Tf2 classes have varying heights so someone with a wallhack would place their xhair at an angle at different heights based on what class is going to peek. For example, i have a general height where i place my xhair and i adjust based on what class is peeking me because i have no idea whats going to peek (unless ik im fighting a sniper or a player keeps doing the same thing) however someone with wallhacks might have a higher xhair placement when a sniper is peeking but a lower xhair placement when a scout is going to peek or an engineer.

3)Look at how they kill other players from the dead player's perspective. This might sound silly but (especially during sniper 1v1s) you just know when an enemy sniper is cheating. The way they peek and their time to kill looks normal but it feels off. This is something that can only be gained from gamesense and playing but its definitely a real thing and experienced snipers ( like soo) would agree that it exists. Heres an example : https://www.skial.com/threads/vertillex-aimbot-toggling.69261/
I never caught him when i spec'd him (didnt know about !spec at the time) however i knew he was cheating because he felt off from my POV and it turns out he got VAC banned a few days later. This might be hard to determine from a demo but if the suspect is still on maybe its wise to try and fight them to get a general idea what you think about their deathmatch skills.

4)Other than private profiles or level 0 ones, a suspect with edgy names or people trying hard to bait a response out of others are probably cheating. They do it to get a reaction out of you.Definitely not nearly a determining factor but all of these things are worth considering.

Enough with the wall of text, lets go on to some visual examples:

1)Spectator delay can look pretty weird but its just something you have to deal with. Here's a clip of a demo recorded on LAN showcasing how stupid it can look.

Fast flicks are properly recorded on the suspect's POV,on their end the flick looks normal while in spectator it looks like their aim hasnt moved:

2)Heres a poorly censored in post demonstrating how the wallhack XHAIR thing would look (Note: the guy in the clip WAS NOT cheating this is just an example of how it COULD look) Notice how they change xhair height based on what class was peeking.

3) heres some vids demonstrating silent aim in csgo however the same concept applies to tf2:

Bit longer video but imho its a great vid to watch if you're interested in this type of stuff:

4) Its important to keep in mind that tf2 is a very chaotic game and despite some stuff looking incredibly shady it can be boiled down to luck in the heat of the moment. For example look at how i accidentally headshot this cloaked spy while aiming for the other one:

That would look shady in spectator, it would look like my xhair was noway near that guy yet a cloak spy dies however when reviewing my pov you can clearly see it looks normal. Im only showing you this to emphasis how different stuff can look from spectator.

Keep in mind sound is also a great factor in tf2 and i personally think some of you guys overlook the info sound can provide. Here's an extreme example that was obviously lucky but the point im trying to make is keep your wits about you when watching demos. This looks blatant but with some paid attention it can be explained:

So whats the point of this long post?
TL;DR:
I personally think that in admin applications some questions should be geared towards the admin's ability to identify cheaters. Doesnt sound like a huge issue right? It really isnt but some form of evaluation about their overall knowledge on how cheats look would be nice. Nothing major, maybe just being able to understand spectator delay and just how cheats look. Provided some info so it doesnt look like im just flaming but i think you guys would find it useful. Keep in mind i can assume you guys arent helping the new admins because ive been hammer'd twice by newer ones however i know this is not true but it can happen to any other decent player that might sour their taste of skial.
 

Metroidz

Australian Skial God
Contributor
My favorite memory was becoming friends with a Scout main only for him to target me every time he was on the other team. He knew I could hit shots up close and was bouncing up and down on the stairs/ledge near our spawn. He double jumped at me to try and get close to finish me and I quickscoped him in midair about 2 feet away from me. He immediately left the server and unfriended me after that. Good times.

I usually carried the piss jar for that. Because you might kill me; but at least I won't be the one covered in pissssssssss.
 

Bottiger

Administrator
I find it funny you supposedly don't care about the game anymore but you waste 10 hours a day cheating and money buying vpns and making alt accounts. And any mention of you here, you immediately arrive, desperate for attention.

If you were actually good at the game, there would be no reason for you to cheat, because you lowered the accuracy of your aimbot to below samien in order to hide it. So it is very doubtful you were ever good at the game without cheats.

It is also amusing that you think that we have an "anti-cheat" team let alone a "crack" one. This isn't a league, and we are not rolling in money to be able to make an "anti-cheat" team full of pro players that are willing to stare at 30 minute demos every single day.

We've had actual pro players on our servers for many years, and we've never had any complaints about them getting falsely banned by an admin. Anyone that gets banned without enough evidence will get unbanned. We really don't need a cheater telling us we are too stupid to know the intricacies of cheating... just because you've used an aimbot and we haven't doesn't mean you know everything.
 

Trash.ca

Spectacularly Lethal Soldier
I think i should clarify a few things about my suggestion.I simply suggest a few questions asked or a guide provided with general cheating info for new and potential admins hell even publicly.Dont expect this to fix the already low amount of false positives nor do i expect it to drastically improve abything however i thought it would be great to clear up some stuff about cheats.What sparked this suggestion was 2 of my bans making me realise no questions are asked about cheaters in admin apps not because of rage or something.The guide thing doesnt have to be mandatory asking a simple yes or no question about if they read it before applying would suffice.It'll just make skial look more professional (which i admit isnt necessary but would look nice).The point of all the info and gifs were to serve as a resource dump and not to insult staff competency.With the info given forum cretins cant say "lol too much work make the guide yourself".This really isnt a problem im complaining about rather a minor suggestion to improve skial overall.Making a suggestion purely because of some specific problem only i have is a bit selfish imo.Dont think i came across condescending in the OP and it wasnt meant as an insult to skial simply a "suggestion" but i understand the confusion because recently there have been a lot of shitpost suggestions.
 

selkies

Notably Dangerous Demo-Knight
I find it funny you supposedly don't care about the game anymore but you waste 10 hours a day cheating and money buying vpns and making alt accounts. And any mention of you here, you immediately arrive, desperate for attention.

If you were actually good at the game, there would be no reason for you to cheat, because you lowered the accuracy of your aimbot to below samien in order to hide it. So it is very doubtful you were ever good at the game without cheats.

It is also amusing that you think that we have an "anti-cheat" team let alone a "crack" one. This isn't a league, and we are not rolling in money to be able to make an "anti-cheat" team full of pro players that are willing to stare at 30 minute demos every single day.

We've had actual pro players on our servers for many years, and we've never had any complaints about them getting falsely banned by an admin. Anyone that gets banned without enough evidence will get unbanned. We really don't need a cheater telling us we are too stupid to know the intricacies of cheating... just because you've used an aimbot and we haven't doesn't mean you know everything.
Provoking Bottiger is so satisfying and easy to do. I guess when someone makes fools out of you and your admin team for almost 2 years, lashing out and desperate projection is to be expected.

"We really don't need a cheater telling us we are too stupid to know the intricacies of cheating." I genuinely don't know if the man is naive or just an idiot, really. His fellow ESL admin Sakiko legitimately thought emailing Valve would get them to RAT my PC so they could reverse-engineer my private cheat and that they'd get free games for doing so. Of course, the lemmings on Discord ate that up because you must know what you're talking about if you throw around enough buzzwords!

I have sympathy for him, though, I really do. It must be very frustrating that he can't get rid of a single cheater in a way that actually matters. IP bans are useless, I have an executable file that generates and swaps me to a fresh Steam account with a press of a button, I haven't spent a single dime on a VPN, and his admin team is so incompetent that it took me deliberately headshotting cloaked spies and spinbotting for them to finally catch up and do something.

Perhaps this anger stems from knowing that his community is steadily dying and that free ad revenue gravy train is slowly but surely pulling into the station for its final stop. Bottiger, I work in counseling and I care about your mental health. If you ever need someone to talk to about your inadequacies, my DMs are always open. <3
 

ck24

Server-Clearing Cynic
I find it funny you supposedly don't care about the game anymore but you waste 10 hours a day cheating and money buying vpns and making alt accounts. And any mention of you here, you immediately arrive, desperate for attention.

If you were actually good at the game, there would be no reason for you to cheat, because you lowered the accuracy of your aimbot to below samien in order to hide it. So it is very doubtful you were ever good at the game without cheats.

It is also amusing that you think that we have an "anti-cheat" team let alone a "crack" one. This isn't a league, and we are not rolling in money to be able to make an "anti-cheat" team full of pro players that are willing to stare at 30 minute demos every single day.

We've had actual pro players on our servers for many years, and we've never had any complaints about them getting falsely banned by an admin. Anyone that gets banned without enough evidence will get unbanned. We really don't need a cheater telling us we are too stupid to know the intricacies of cheating... just because you've used an aimbot and we haven't doesn't mean you know everything.
This probably going to get rated a troll or dumb it doesn’t matter to me. But I have a funny feeling this brainwashing. And I know how it works very well.
 

Bottiger

Administrator
Provoking Bottiger is so satisfying and easy to do. I guess when someone makes fools out of you and your admin team for almost 2 years, lashing out and desperate projection is to be expected.

"We really don't need a cheater telling us we are too stupid to know the intricacies of cheating." I genuinely don't know if the man is naive or just an idiot, really. His fellow ESL admin Sakiko legitimately thought emailing Valve would get them to RAT my PC so they could reverse-engineer my private cheat and that they'd get free games for doing so. Of course, the lemmings on Discord ate that up because you must know what you're talking about if you throw around enough buzzwords!

I have sympathy for him, though, I really do. It must be very frustrating that he can't get rid of a single cheater in a way that actually matters. IP bans are useless, I have an executable file that generates and swaps me to a fresh Steam account with a press of a button, I haven't spent a single dime on a VPN, and his admin team is so incompetent that it took me deliberately headshotting cloaked spies and spinbotting for them to finally catch up and do something.

Perhaps this anger stems from knowing that his community is steadily dying and that free ad revenue gravy train is slowly but surely pulling into the station for its final stop. Bottiger, I work in counseling and I care about your mental health. If you ever need someone to talk to about your inadequacies, my DMs are always open. <3

Ahaha you are obviously the one triggered, and I'm enjoying it. I've never seen another cheater so desperate for attention that they spend 10 hours a day cheating on alt accounts and different vpns. It amuses me when I think about how mad you must be after lydee got your account banned on tf2center that you are spending so much effort cheating everywhere. After 10 years of TF2, I have never seen another cheater so desperate for revenge.

Again you have some weird notion that we're making a fortune through ads, so it really doesn't matter to us if the "gravy train" ends, which it won't any time soon. We have dozens of servers that are still full every day. And while we're making money and do something useful for people, you waste time and money cheating.

This "projection thing", I really must have hit a nerve that you keep referring to your favorite insult, but it doesn't bother me. Hurr durr random insult you must be projecting! You being a "counselor" not surprised you are too dumb to make it as an actual psychiatrist. But you are probably even lying about that just like getting NordVPN for free and actually being good at the game.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: Crash.ca

ck24

Server-Clearing Cynic
Ahaha you are obviously the one triggered, and I'm enjoying it. I've never seen another cheater so desperate for attention that they spend 10 hours a day cheating on alt accounts and different vpns. It amuses me when I think about how mad you must be after lydee got your account banned on tf2center that you are spending so much effort cheating everywhere. After 10 years of TF2, I have never seen another cheater so desperate for revenge.

Again you have some weird notion that we're making a fortune through ads, so it really doesn't matter to us if the "gravy train" ends, which it won't any time soon. We have dozens of servers that are still full every day. And while we're making money and do something useful for people, you waste time and money cheating.

This "projection thing", I really must have hit a nerve that you keep referring to your favorite insult, but it doesn't bother me. Hurr durr random insult you must be projecting! You being a "counselor" not surprised you are too dumb to make it as an actual psychiatrist. But you are probably even lying about that just like getting NordVPN for free and actually being good at the game.
Don’t listen to him @selkies his trying to use his words to brainwash.
 

Feral Angel

TF2 Admin
Contributor
Don’t listen to him @selkies his trying to use his words to brainwash.
Sad that you’re only defending her because you’re banned as well. I also don’t care if “I can get around.” Also please explain about this “brainwash,” is? I’d like to know. If you don’t have an actual good reason to say that, then please stop talking.
 

Roboute Guilliman

Australian Skial God
Contributor
Sad that you’re only defending her because you’re banned as well. I also don’t care if “I can get around.” Also please explain about this “brainwash,” is? I’d like to know. If you don’t have an actual good reason to say that, then please stop talking.

Neither of these two people do. Just two people who got ass shattered that they were banned and now both lack the maturity to let it go and instead go around here to cause trouble.

It's semi-flattering at least that we managed to cause them so much butthurt that they insist on coming back here to get whatever form of petty revenge they can... by shit talking and burning money on more TF2 cheats :lol:
 

ck24

Server-Clearing Cynic
Sad that you’re only defending her because you’re banned as well. I also don’t care if “I can get around.” Also please explain about this “brainwash,” is? I’d like to know. If you don’t have an actual good reason to say that, then please stop talking.
I’m not defending anyone. I’m just telling.
And i’m a complete dork.
 
Last edited:

Toxik

Moderator
Contributor
Bottiger, I work in counseling and I care about your mental health. If you ever need someone to talk to about your inadequacies, my DMs are always open. <3
You spend your days cheating on a 10 year old game and acting extremely proud about it in an online forum. This leads to doubts about you having a high enough education to be a certified counselor.

Anyways, I completely agree with Bottiger on this one. At any single mention of you, you pop in here boasting about how clever and amazing you are for using cheats that weren't easily detected. Is that really the best thing for a counselor to do with their time? Shouldn't you be out there, helping people's lives, instead of trying to get people in an online gaming forum to somehow look up to you, when the only person who actually does that is your only friend here Samien?
 
  • Like
Reactions: Chance

Crash.ca

Wicked Nasty Engineer
Contributor
Ahaha you are obviously the one triggered, and I'm enjoying it. I've never seen another cheater so desperate for attention that they spend 10 hours a day cheating on alt accounts and different vpns. It amuses me when I think about how mad you must be after lydee got your account banned on tf2center that you are spending so much effort cheating everywhere. After 10 years of TF2, I have never seen another cheater so desperate for revenge.

Again you have some weird notion that we're making a fortune through ads, so it really doesn't matter to us if the "gravy train" ends, which it won't any time soon. We have dozens of servers that are still full every day. And while we're making money and do something useful for people, you waste time and money cheating.

This "projection thing", I really must have hit a nerve that you keep referring to your favorite insult, but it doesn't bother me. Hurr durr random insult you must be projecting! You being a "counselor" not surprised you are too dumb to make it as an actual psychiatrist. But you are probably even lying about that just like getting NordVPN for free and actually being good at the game.
very well said Bottinger, couldnt agree more.
 

Crash.ca

Wicked Nasty Engineer
Contributor
You spend your days cheating on a 10 year old game and acting extremely proud about it in an online forum. This leads to doubts about you having a high enough education to be a certified counselor.

Anyways, I completely agree with Bottiger on this one. At any single mention of you, you pop in here boasting about how clever and amazing you are for using cheats that weren't easily detected. Is that really the best thing for a counselor to do with their time? Shouldn't you be out there, helping people's lives, instead of trying to get people in an online gaming forum to somehow look up to you, when the only person who actually does that is your only friend here Samien?
How would a so called "counselor" have this much free time anyways, to sit on an online forum to discuss how they were able to "beat the system" by downloading their abilities, seems to me someone has read a few of the ads that pop up on skial and sent away for their in home kit but as for having any ounce of knowledge towards helping anyone, the only thing to spew from their sewers is ridicule and harassment, to which are sub par at best.
 

ArayhMD

TF2 Admin
Contributor
Bottiger, I work in counseling and I care about your mental health. If you ever need someone to talk to about your inadequacies, my DMs are always open. <3

Lol Bottiger, if you actually did have a medical condition, I think you should see a real doctor, not a therapist with a Master's Degree at best, but more than likely, just a Bachelors in Psychology. Let me know, I have a handful of friends who went into Psychiatry and are working in some upscale Manhattan private practices.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: Crash.ca

Bottiger

Administrator
Really? what role or title do you hold?

Probably the janitor and a wannabe by the way it sounds like she just learned about "projection" and is trying to apply it to everything.

Either that or I really hit a nerve when I said cheaters usually lash out like this because their entire self-worth is tied to being "good" at the game, and when you take away their ability to feel good by banning them, they go apeshit.

By the way she is constantly trying to "teach" people about cheating and being nostalgic about how good she was at TF2 in the past, it seems like she is trying to compensate for an inferiority complex.

I can understand how you feel selkie, you may want to get professional help for yourself. We can all tell you probably look like this while you "rage" hack 10 hours a day in a failed attempt to make us as mad as you are. But it is good entertainment for the forums.

RpChd8S.gif
 
Last edited:

Maddo

Gaben's Own Aimbot
Contributor
I find cheaters are only in it for one thing: Attention. Whether its attention for appearing to be a good player, or attention from the feedback they get when annoying a server, it's always about them.
So yeah you're quite correct about the inferiority complex, once the cheat is exposed, the cheater either becomes highly apologetic or projects their feelings of inadequacy onto those who have exposed them.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Crash.ca

ck24

Server-Clearing Cynic
Well I did not know selkie was banned and would not have told her that bottiger was brainwashing her
 

иιgнт вℓα∂є

Spectacularly Lethal Soldier
What an informative and toxic filled thread, actually seeing a hacker respond is a rare occurrence and the reasoning behind it is indeed attention like I've always assumed.

Back on topic, admins asking other admins for help in determining if a demo or suspicious report shows hacking is a great idea, why not have a vote system in place? say 3 admins saying yes or no to make any doubts about suspected hacks? might take a bit longer but I'm sure other than Samien there's other people who might of not been hacking (ahem: I've suspected Samien before) that have been banned.

Regardless, Samien's original post opened my eyes, I had no idea of the extent of hacks out there, used to be an admin for MOHAA and CSS, back then it was blatantly obvious if someone was hacking, the complexity of what is available now boggles my mind, I don't envy you Skial admins for the job you have.
 
  • Like
Reactions: defse and Percilius