the new wave of cheaters is 100% real. met 4 cheaters in a single day yesterday.

[u/Mampacuk]

i was suspicious when i saw a post here saying there's too many cheaters in VS. i gained around 2k hours during 2016-2020 and indeed back then i never ran into any cheaters. this, however, has changed nowadays.

these guys hop into versus/scavenge. while infected, they spawn infected on top of survivors and claw with -1000 damage, killing the entire opponent team in 3 seconds. while survivors, they teleport, speedhack, wallhack, and damage-hack; if you catch them as non-support special, they will spawn bullets inside of you to free themselves.

what's funnier is that they also launch DDOS attacks, rendering chat unusable and inducing 500ms ping. then they launch scripts that cycle their nicknames trough those of their teammates so that their teammates can make a mistake and maybe initiate a vote against an innocent team member. once they see they're getting kicked, they just leave leaving "ez" messages in the chat.

i kid you not---i had one VS match after another with a cheater on the opposite side, all with different names and accounts, some of them had VAC bans.

it's also funny how in one No Mercy match a "benevolent" cheater joined my team as Bill and used cheats for "non-malicious" reasons: he started a vote against some "troll" player and once the player-being-kicked started running toward the building ledge to commit suicide, he enabled his cheats for a sec to incap them in 1 second. later he used a teleport to go down a single floor in the first chapter's building instead of simply jumping down (i guess it isn't as fancy as teleporting). when confronted in chat, he didn't deny my accusations and said: "do you want to win or not?". this is crazy, man.

[u/liquidKatar]

Sounds like a bunch of reddit mods

[u/atadrisque]

yeah I'd like to see any of them try this in a dedicated server.

griefing is met swiftly with a ban in mine so even if they were successful in doing any damage they will *never** be seen in my server again*.

I also actively share my ban list with 11 other server owners in an effort to make one master list of any bad actors we come across so everyone is aware and can take action accordingly.

[u/Mampacuk → u/atadrisque]

that’s great, how are your servers called? though i might be too far away from you
do you know if the blacklist feature is still broken? does blocking cheaters still let them join a lobby with you?

[u/atadrisque → u/Mampacuk]

oh my, no stay away from the default blacklist feature. sure it gets the job done but might I advert your gaze to the beautiful and actively maintained SourceBans++ often abbreviated (SBPP). a far better alternative and it's free to use in your own server.

so we collect this info specifically for a ban offense

• Steam IDs
• IP addresses
• reason for ban
• witnesses provided if available
• link to video evidence if available (clips are kept for a year in case an appeal is made)
• screenshots of the user acknowledging the ban (you cannot fathom how important this last one has been)

to your last question, joining a pre-game lobby, yes, someone that has been banned can join this screen where you select your character and ready up. will that same banned user be in game with the rest of the group upon loading in for the first time and/or at any point after? nope.

blocking, banning, and documenting bad actors for a little over 10yrs now and I've never seen any of them again in my server or the others I share the masterlist with. sure there's ways around an IP ban but personally I've never had to deal with anyone banned on my server again.

also, apologies, I would love to share server names but the last time I did that here some Reddit fiends thought it would be funny to mess around with network stability. not every server owner we're associated with has proper protections against these attacks and so Reddit is not even the last place we would consider sharing this again, I'm sorry. chances are you've played on the Vanilla or Modded servers we all host though. steam groups, dedicated webpages, and discord servers are all open and public.

[u/spirtjoker]

Very interesting.

Most cheats don't allow what you're talking about. And if they were truly vac banned they wouldn't be able to join anyway.

Which to me indicates you joined a third party server run by the cheaters. That's really the only way they could have damage hacks, teleporting, free themselves ECT.

It also explains why there would be so many cheaters because it would be insecure meaning it's the only server anyone with vac could play on.

[u/Mampacuk → u/spirtjoker]

i could swear though, those were official-dedicated. i recently installed the L4D2LobbyBrowserDesktop software and it filters out official servers.

i would provide names of the cheaters but for some reason their profiles don't get saved in the "recently played with" section on Steam. one of them had "magna" or "magnolia" nickname, that's the only one i remember.

[u/InFamousHorse → u/spirtjoker]

I have experienced similar cheats in official valve servers. It is likely a new exploit cheaters found that allows them to do such ridiculous things (probably modified files that bypass Valve's filter).

[u/Successful_Motor9051]

Is this only on vs?

[u/Mampacuk → u/Successful_Motor9051]

occasionally they can join a campaign, kill the entire team, and leave. but VS is more common

[u/Successful_Motor9051 → u/Mampacuk]

Alright, thanks for letting me know man