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Valve Bans Razer and Wooting's New Keyboard Features In Counter-Strike 2 (theverge.com) 66
The Verge's Tom Warren reports: Valve is banning Counter-Strike 2 players from using keyboard features to automate perfect counter-strafes. Razer was the first keyboard maker to add a Simultaneous Opposing Cardinal Directions (SOCD) feature to its range of Huntsman V3 Pro keyboards last month, followed shortly by Wooting. Using Snap Tap as Razer calls it or Wooting's Snappy Tappy will now get you kicked from Counter-Strike 2 games.
"Recently, some hardware features have blurred the line between manual input and automation, so we've decided to draw a clear line on what is or isn't acceptable in Counter-Strike," says Valve. "We are no longer going to allow automation (via scripting or hardware) that circumvent these core skills and, moving forward, (and initially -- exclusively on Valve Official Servers) players suspected of automating multiple player actions from a single game input may be kicked from their match." [...]
Razer and Wooting's SOCD features both let players automate switching strafe directions without having to learn the skill. Normally, to switch strafe directions in a first-person shooter, you have to fully release one key before pressing the other. If both are pressed, they cancel each other, and you stand there for a moment until you release one of the keys. SOCD means you don't need to release a key and you can rapidly tap the A or D key to counter-strafe with little to no effort.
"Recently, some hardware features have blurred the line between manual input and automation, so we've decided to draw a clear line on what is or isn't acceptable in Counter-Strike," says Valve. "We are no longer going to allow automation (via scripting or hardware) that circumvent these core skills and, moving forward, (and initially -- exclusively on Valve Official Servers) players suspected of automating multiple player actions from a single game input may be kicked from their match." [...]
Razer and Wooting's SOCD features both let players automate switching strafe directions without having to learn the skill. Normally, to switch strafe directions in a first-person shooter, you have to fully release one key before pressing the other. If both are pressed, they cancel each other, and you stand there for a moment until you release one of the keys. SOCD means you don't need to release a key and you can rapidly tap the A or D key to counter-strafe with little to no effort.
Back in the day (Score:2, Interesting)
We used to have Nintendo controllers with turbo buttons. Nobody thought that was cheating. Simple keyboard macros are basically the same sort of feature. I think the real issue is more along the lines that some people today take gaming way too seriously and don't realize it's just supposed to be a fun way to blow off some steam.
Re: Back in the day (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Back in the day (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in the day there wasnâ(TM)t an online ranking system that created a highly competitive environment on an international scale.
And I miss those days, just being able to jump into a game with a bunch of randos with everything equal bar skill and no way of knowing who was good and who wasn't. Sometimes you got a team of crack commandos, other times you got a team of Miltons. Luck of the draw.
Now most online games are "suck until you have enough XP to unlock the things that make you unstoppable", especially FPSs that have no reason to be this way. What's worse is pay to win but that's another rant altogether.
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Most games have an unranked or "scrimmage" queue where the games don't count towards your ELO. Don't know if that's true for counterstrike though.
Re: Back in the day (Score:4, Insightful)
Bunch of randos? Your team?
Are you talking about at the arcade? Or did your parents along a bunch of weirdos they don't know hang out in your basement?
Maybe we have very difference experiences back in the days of the NES and turbo buttons.
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Bunch of randos? Your team?
Are you talking about at the arcade? Or did your parents along a bunch of weirdos they don't know hang out in your basement?
Maybe we have very difference experiences back in the days of the NES and turbo buttons.
Because online gaming started in the 2010s... Really?
We definitely have different experiences as I remember BF1942 the year it came out, not to mention the original Team Fortress, Unreal Tournament and Vietcong. There once was a time where you could easily find a server that wasn't full of bots or cheaters and anti-cheat software back then was laughable.
I also remember the Atari 2600... I'd tell you to get off my lawn, but this is probably the first time you've ever been out of your mums basement.
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No, it started around '93 or so. XBand on the consoles was '94, and Kali making all those IPX games work over the Internet was '95 and when things really took. Do did have MUDs and stuff before then, but those were more chatroomish versus an action game with other people.
But ya '93 is about 7 years after NES and turbo button days. In '86/87 what were you playing online?
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Back in the day there wasnâ(TM)t an online ranking system that created a highly competitive environment on an international scale.
And yet we still have a high effective way to recreate the good old days: just don't care. It's interesting that we are really good at ignoring some things that we shouldn't and yet also bad at ignoring other things that we should.
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I.e. Quit complaining about verifying the controller inputs of others when for all you know you're playing against a dog.
Re:Back in the day (Score:5, Informative)
We used to have Nintendo controllers with turbo buttons. Nobody thought that was cheating.
That's because the company designed it that way. They purposefully allowed it. If the company allows it, it's not cheating.
Valve is saying using any form of automation, software or hardware, is not allowed because they have not designed their games that way. They are requiring you to use your own finger/hand skills since that creates a level playing field. Everyone has to use the same key combinations. The faster ones win.
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Check out the NES advantage, adjustable turbo buttons as well as slow motion
Check out the Sega Genesis 6 Button Turbo Controller MK-1470
Turbo and slow motion were a first party thing when I was a kid.
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https://nintendo.fandom.com/wi... [fandom.com]
Nope. The was the Max Advantage and I think some others as well. "Turbo" was very much a first party thing.
I'll also make the controversial statement, the Max was absolutely the best NES controller :-)
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Sega's official Arcade Power Stick for the Genesis / Mega Drive also had turbo buttons.
I distinctly remember using it plus the Master System emulator to make a mockery of some older games...
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Valve is saying using any form of automation, software or hardware, is not allowed because they have not designed their games that way. They are requiring you to use your own finger/hand skills since that creates a level playing field.
But it doesn't. Some people are naturally more dextrous than other people, while some people are impaired. I don't see how this won't affect handicapped gamers using assistive controllers.
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...Some people are naturally more dextrous than other people, while some people are impaired. I don't see how this won't affect handicapped gamers using assistive controllers
Hardware manufacturers and scripts will just introduce subtle and randomized timing between key 'activation' so it appears that a dexterous person is using the keyboard.
Re:Back in the day (Score:5, Informative)
We're already seeing folks get banned because their normal inputs are too fast according to the new 'detection' tool.
Mind you, we also had folks break the velocity limits Valve had for their VR controllers math by almost an order of magnitude when Beat Saber came out so they had to roll out changes to support that.
They're not good at judging what 'human limit' folks can do, especially looking at say FGC where folks have single-frame accuracy for extended periods at 30fps or 60fps games but applying that to CS:GO this can get bonkers.
The fact they bad certain keyboard bindings THE NATIVE ENGINE SUPPORTS (making A be +moveleft;-moveright not just +moveleft as a high level explanation, some implement key-up others make a dedicated 'stop' binding) that have been used since the literal Quake 1 days says how arbitrary and random these restrictions are.
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We're already seeing folks get banned because their normal inputs are too fast according to the new 'detection' tool.
Mind you, we also had folks break the velocity limits Valve had for their VR controllers math by almost an order of magnitude when Beat Saber came out so they had to roll out changes to support that.
They're not good at judging what 'human limit' folks can do, especially looking at say FGC where folks have single-frame accuracy for extended periods at 30fps or 60fps games but applying that to CS:GO this can get bonkers.
The fact they bad certain keyboard bindings THE NATIVE ENGINE SUPPORTS (making A be +moveleft;-moveright not just +moveleft as a high level explanation, some implement key-up others make a dedicated 'stop' binding) that have been used since the literal Quake 1 days says how arbitrary and random these restrictions are.
How about we back the fuck up and admit obnoxious crap like ADAD spam is not a "skill"
Implement momentum so strafe direction can't be rapidly switched. Or straight up rate limit it.
Can we finally move on from Quake style physics, or the lack of.
If you want to allow ADAD, duck jumping, instant 180, pixel accurate precision, then deal with the repercussions.
Even the most cartoonish arcade flight or racing games with a player vs player element don't do that crap. FPS is the one genre just stuck in the mud on t
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Quake actually did this even, so rapid tapping smooths from the inertia (which is generation-dependent, Generations on Q3A is great to explore this).
The real issue is ADAD spam messes up the movement prediction because it counteracts the core idea of most of the anti-lag tech.
Inertia + a tiny bit of enforced minimum latency on things (like 50ms) so the inertia can be smoothed in would indeed fix like 99% of these complaints because it puts a 'A-10 BRRT speed limit' on how much tapping matters but still lets
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People aren't equal, beyond utopian fantasies of the modern far left. And the entire point of competition is to rapidly establish a hierarchy of players based on ability.
And it's enjoyable overwhelmingly by men (with tiny amount of women as an exception that reinforces the rule) because that's how the thing we're evolved for, the hunting parties work. Female hierarchies work in a different way (emphasis on tearing down the exceptions towards the average), so they enjoy different games.
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emphasis on tearing down the exceptions towards the average
never beating those weird allegations
let me guess, their skull measurements obviously lead to that conclusion
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Tell me you're an incel who has never interacted with women in group setting, without telling me you're an incel who has never interacted with women in group setting.
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Wins what? And this is the point of the original person's comment, I believe. There isn't anything to win, aside from some egotistical rant rights. And after the rant is over, nothing has been added to your life. When you lose, nothing has been taken away.
The things that you do in-game don't translate to anything useful in the real world, unless pressing a button fast means something in your life, and if it does.... wow.
No, instead what we have is a rage-fueled generation of asshole kids that put way to
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Speedrunners definitely thought it was cheating, and once online play became a thing so did everyone else.
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Same speed runners were upset when people used a controller for left hand, and mouse for right hand and said that was cheating too - despite controllers being laughed at as being for low skill players. People gotta play the game the way I like to play the game, because anything else hurts my feel bads.
Re: Back in the day (Score:1)
Multiplayer on the SNES was rather limited to your home or with some weird add on where latencies wouldnâ(TM)t make a difference.
Also Turbo buttons could be coded out or were practically not used as the code could not perform to react at every frame (at ~30FPS) and in some cases people are faster, these days frames and input is 10x faster where humans no longer have parity or an edge over machine.
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We used to have Nintendo controllers with turbo buttons. Nobody thought that was cheating.
False, you're not allowed to use such controllers to set any Nintendo speedrun or other records. What you really meant to say is "We used to not be competitive and no one cared about what I did in my living room".
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And I'm sure back in the day your capacity to "cheat" was limited since it was you vs a console, or at most a few of your friends who'd doubtless not be happy if you cheated. These days, people cheat in these online games every which way they can - aimbots, transparent walls & other hacks. Games that allow cheaters to proliferate soon become very unpopular and presumably Valve has a reputation to uphold and in-game crap to sell and doesn't want to see that happen.
Re:Back in the day (Score:5, Informative)
It depends who you ask. In the early days of Super Mario Bros speed-running, Japanese players all used turbo-fire controllers. That gave them an advantage. When Western players noticed they split the leaderboard into with and without turbo-fire.
Years later one Goldeneye player posted a video where it could be seen that he had drawn a crosshair on his TV screen with a marker pen. The game doesn't have a reticule for aiming unless you press a button, which stops you moving. Some people were outraged, but many other top players admitted they did it as well, with some commenting that they thought everyone did. Eventually it was allowed.
For Counterstrike, some keyboards let you configure the activation point of the switch, so you can make keys super sensitive and reduce the amount of travel needed. That is allowed, but this is apparently not.
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And same Counterstrike players get upset at people using low profile keyboards because of said low activation point being the default. It is not fair if someone is not playing the game ergonomically correct, because that gives them an unfair advantage over those who care about their wrist health! And before that, there w
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If you want to play Valve games, then you shouldn't blow off Steam.
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NES didn't have online competitions with prizes. I would be that any in-person tournaments banned turbo and slo-mo.
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We used to have Nintendo controllers with turbo buttons. Nobody thought that was cheating.
Fast forward to the PlayStation 1 and I can specifically remember a scene in Metal Gear Solid where a character breaks the 4th wall to explicitly tell you not to use "auto fire" or "he'll know". Sure enough, if you use an auto-fire controller the game detects, chastises you, and you fail the minigame. So, SOMEBODY thought that was cheating (in this case Hideo Kojima specifically I suppose).
I think the real issue is more along the lines that some people today take gaming way too seriously and don't realize it's just supposed to be a fun way to blow off some steam.
Try saying the same thing to a teenager who is trying their best to make it into the NHL. The fact is that there are pe
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Yes, but eSports people don't use their own computers at home versus other competitors using their own computers at home; each player a different distance and latency from the server. Plus, the serious competitors aren't in the US in the first place; they're in South Korea and playing on different servers from then the rest of us even if the former weren't true.
For the vast and overwhelming majority of us, Starcraft is just a game just played for entertainment
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It isn't fun when you're playing against people who are significantly better than you due to, in most/many cases, botting.
This is fundamentally no different.
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We used to have Nintendo controllers with turbo buttons. Nobody thought that was cheating. Simple keyboard macros are basically the same sort of feature. I think the real issue is more along the lines that some people today take gaming way too seriously and don't realize it's just supposed to be a fun way to blow off some steam.
Back in the day we'd be playing Street Fighter on the floor next to each other ABSOLUTELY calling each other cheaters if one had a turbo controller and used it while the other did not. House rules, but there were rules.
If you haven't heard, Counter Strike is a competitive game. I'll play back in the day all day long. Back in the day, what happened when a "premade" group of older kids showed up to a friendly neighborhood game and wanted to play on one team to cream everyone.
Back in the day 99% of the stupid
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Yeah and if the other player used turbo buttons when you agreed it shouldn't be used, you'd reach your arm up and hit them!
"Recently, some hardware features have blurred" (Score:2, Interesting)
Recently, some hardware features have blurred the line between manual input and automation
I've been using AutoHotkey to fire on full auto in games, including left4dead, for over 10 years now.
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in e-sport games, this may be a big issue, on other games, specially single player or PVE, no problem at all
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I've been using AutoHotkey to fire on full auto in games, including left4dead, for over 10 years now.
EasyAntiCheat detects the presence of AutoHotKey. The internet is full of stories of various people getting bans from EAC games for using AHK. Some software is explicit about it, such as The Finals which put AHK on a list of banned programs back in Jan.
Re:"Recently, some hardware features have blurred" (Score:5, Interesting)
This is different. These are competitive online games, and give the player an advantage that can't be had simply by mashing the key.
Basically in Counterstrike when you move the accuracy of your shots goes down. If you let go of the key you were using to move, your character comes to a stop in say 500ms, and accuracy returns to maximum. Instead of just releasing that key, you can also press the opposite direction key to cancel your motion even faster. That gives you an edge because you can stop moving and aim with precision much faster, say 60ms.
It's a skill that top level players have to master. These keyboards have a feature that lets you configure it so that instead of releasing one key and tapping the other, you just tap the other. Makes it trivially easy to do.
So it's more like auto-aim. I do use auto-fire because I have arthritis, but I can see why competitive players who have mastered a difficult skill that even they can't pull off consistently under pressure would be upset.
Just requires a bit better coding (Score:2)
That said, cheaters are why I stopped playing these games. They are just not fun if some no-skill people can and will blow away everybody.
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Ban seems like overkill. (Score:1)
I read TFA. I don't get what the big deal is or why this required a ban. It's literally just granting temporal priority on the cardinal directions, i.e. you can press both keys to strafe left and right at the same time and whichever one was pressed last gets priority.
Without this feature you need to make sure left is released before right is pressed or your character will just stand there, but this really doesn't seem like such a massive advantage. I imagine it would be relatively easy to fake out the detec
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The problem is that in casual play, 'competitive' players seem to enjoy ruining everyone else's fun, 'winning' by letting the computer play for them via macros, scripts and hacks.
In competitive play, those forms of cheating are even more annoying as you quickly learn you're unlikely to progress up the leaderboard without cheating to keep up.
As cheats are detected and blocked, cheaters just find new ones that squeak past the detection algorithms. Eventually they will get to the point where (as you pointed o
The devil is in the details (Score:5, Informative)
There are two levels of mechanism being discussed:
"Null Binds" means that if you press one direction, a key press in the opposite direction gets cancelled.
Many games cause the player to stand still while opposite directions are pressed. That has made null binds controversial for those games.
"Snap Tap"/"Snappy Tappy" goes one step further: If you press and continue holding the key for left or right, then it is enough to press and release the opposite key to move left/right.
The first key press does not get cancelled completely: it gets reactivated directly when the other key is release. This means that with this feature, changing direction is faster, and requires less skill.
for tournaments they should control the hardware (Score:2)
for tournaments they should control the hardware 100%.
You must use our keyboards and mouses as well our CPUs so all teams are even and cheating is that much hardware to get away with.
This is an uphill battle (Score:3, Insightful)
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Going by TFA, right now it's just detecting the actual behaviour, i.e. consistent 0ms delay between left/right inputs.
I think eventually we'll see games with USB device whitelists, rather than blacklists. Then you'll have people spoofing USB device IDs to make one input device appear as another to the anti-cheat software.
The future looks lame.
It's Their Game I Guess... (Score:2, Interesting)
It's their game, I guess they get to make the rules.
It seems to me though, the question of weather an input device is a cheat or not should come down to if the device can respond to the game state and behave differently based on that then it should be considered cheating but if the device is only responding to the user input and has no knowledge of the game state then it should not be considered cheating. This seems like the latter.
Descriptions Don't Do It Justice (Score:2)
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I mean... this tech has existed in some form since the literal original NES days, and on PC since the dawn of FPS games with Quake 1.
If devs games break from this tech that's very much a "them problem" IMHO at this point a literal quarter century later.
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Where's the "automation"? (Score:2)
It seems from the manufacturers' websites, that it's simply the case the the keys trigger on "key down" events, regardless of whether some other key is still being held down. How is that automating anything? My terminal does the same thing. And even if they're saying that it reverts to the original still-held-down key after then temporarily-pressed second key is released... I mean, okay, maybe that's OP in an unfair way but it's still not "automation"...is it?