Date:
Tuesday , November 16, 2004
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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Valve's Counter Strike:Source – Beta at Best

There are many Counter Strike:Source players out there asking a lot of questions about the recent release of CS:Source. Many of us think that it is a BETA release at best, and at worst, just a Half Life 2 marketing tool. The following editorial addresses our concerns and grievances.

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Why CS:S WAS Not Ready for Release

When CS:S was declared “released” after a relatively short 2 month BETA period, in our opinion it was little more than a glorified demo and not even close to what it should have been considering it was to become the only multiplayer option for the upcoming Half-Life2 release. You heard that correct. There is no multiplayer version of Half Life 2, only the addition of CS:S, so obviously CS:S plays a huge role in marketing Half Life 2. DOOM 3 has been trounced publicly for its limited multiplayer capabilities, and we have yet to see the community response to Half Life 2 having no multiplayer abilities at all.

Handling Cheaters and Rule Breakers

As noted, at the release of CS:S, not only were there numerous and very serious bugs still present (bugs which had been clearly documented by server admins and submitted to Valve through the BETA bug submission process) but most if not all of the server admin tools were missing that Counter Strike server admins counted on to operate their servers on a daily basis.

Simple things like the status command that used to show the player name, slot number, and Steam ID were replaced with a status command that would only show the player name and slot number. Unfortunately the Remote Console commands, or “RCON” commands, were also broken making it impossible to ban by slot-number or player name. Instead server admins were forced to go through an arduous process of log checking to find Steam ID numbers and then matching them with player names in order to ban the user or forced to ban by IP. Banning the IP usually only works briefly until the offending player reconnects and gets a new IP or commands his proxy to switch IP’s.

Other major problems included a lack of sanity checking on user supplied variables such as the bug that involved a player changing his name to “%n” then committing suicide or being killed and thereby crashing the entire server. Or the fact that Valve Anti-Cheat or VAC, was not yet enabled for CS:S at release, or the fact that the SDK was not available at release making it impossible for the mod-makers to update their admin modules or enhancement modules to work with CS:S. While any one of these missing features or remaining bugs may have been minor issues by themselves, together they make for a game that is all but impossible to admin in any sort of effective manner.

Valve Ruins Counter Strike

We think that our [H]ard|Gaming admins have always prided themselves on operating some of the best Counter Strike servers on the Net that were well policed and competitively a cut above most of the other public CS:S servers out there. The complete lack of admin tools rendered our servers little more than high tech sandboxes for cheaters, hackers, and those who live simply to annoy the rest of us Counter Strike players through whatever means available.

To make the CS:S admin situation completely desperate, a hack of the CS:S release exists that allows a cheater to create new Steam ID’s at will. This means that a Steam ID ban is good for about 30 seconds. Waves of TeamKillers, spammers, and other annoying player types flooded CS:S servers for days doing everything in their power to disrupt the game for everyone else.

Valve simply dropped the ball by not having solid administration tools in place in CS:S at the time of launch. Counter Strike has been the mainstay of online gaming for a length of time that was unheard of for any other game until now. However we think Counter Strike’s popularity has been waning over the last year due mainly to the overwhelming cheater/hacker/trouble maker problem that is allowed by Valve’s seemingly apathetic nature.

Valve’s Failure to Fix Counter Strike

Last year Valve implemented the Valve Anti-Cheat system, or “VAC.” VAC was supposed to end the rampant Counter Strike cheating problem once and for all. The promise was that VAC would eliminate the need for any third party anti-cheats because it would be integrated with the engine. VAC would also be closed source, eliminating the possibility for cheat sites to reverse engineer the anti-cheat code and get around it.

As part of the move to VAC, Valve disabled or severely limited the functionality of all the 3rd party anti-cheats that were in use like Punk Buster and HLGuard that had worked well for many of us fighting Counter Strike cheaters. After VAC was implemented by Valve, they identified those 3rd party anti-cheat programs as cheats themselves, resulting in a flurry of false positive cheat identifications. For a while VAC was updated weekly and this meant that the Counter Strike cheating was held back, at least for a while. Then at the end of July 2004, the updates just stopped, and since then we have seen nothing visible that Valve is doing to stop the huge numbers of Counter Strike cheaters that are playing online. Since July, VAC updates have sat dormant.

When CS:S was released we all hoped Valve would finally get on top of the cheating problem but in fact the opposite was true. The Valve Anti-Cheat for Counter Strike:Source was not, and still is not enabled. There is not any other sort of anti-cheat included with CS:S either. For a game that is plagued by cheaters, CS:S simply needed to arrive “out of the box” with robust anti-cheat protection and Valve ignored this.

Valve Supports CS:S Cheating

To make matters worse, other cheat friendly bugs existed, the common “sv_cheats=1” setting used in many games for single player cheats was not disabled by an online servers setting of “sv_cheats=0” This means that a player could use the built in Counter Strike:Source cheats while playing online. Instead of making a strong statement that cheating was not going to be tolerated Valve’s CS:S actually seemed to encourage it.

Does Valve Care About Us?

Among all of these issues the absolute worst deficiency is the simple fact that Valve seems to ignore the CS gaming community that has made their game as popular as it is. We cannot tell you how many public posts we’ve seen sent to the Valve Half Life Dedicated Server Linux List from server admins who simply got sick of waiting for Valve to fix this bug, or update VAC, or optimize the code to use less CPU. The list of complaints goes on and on and on and on. The simple fact is that server operators are leaving in droves and moving to other more admin-friendly games like BF1942 and UT2k4. We all expected HL2 and CS:S by extension to not only include all the admin tools we were used to, but to follow the lead of other current multiplayer titles and include simple, integrated admin tools such as a web-based admin interface. Instead, Valve removed the basic tools that are needed to successfully run a CS:S server publicly.

Taking all of this into account, CS:S felt like nothing more than a stopgap measure to take people’s minds off the constantly delayed release of Half Life 2. Worse yet, CS:Source feels like a cheap freebie that many people wanted dearly and were “forced” into purchasing Half Life 2 in order to get their fix.