Let's talk about being a bad sport.

Published: 2017-01-21

Author: Teddi

Your average definition of ‘bad sport’ in every day use is that of someone who takes losing badly. In British English; being a bad sport is more akin to someone who plays unfairly, tries to get an advantage via what could be considered unethical or unfair methods.  Here at [BB], we acknowledge that cheats and exploits are going to happen - historically for as long as any competative scene has existed, some way has existed for participants to find some way to exploit.

In early November we started noticing that consistently more and more people were starting to use scripts to assist in various activities. Some were just for shits and giggles, others were using them to track admins and so one for some reason (staff don’t hide behind other names so I’ve no idea why this was the case); but ultimately some were trying to use them for bhopping and to try and get faster times.

It’s usually fairly obvious when someone starts cheating to try and game times on Surf. We’re able to analyse a persons surf history via their records (and in some cases other methods which may become future updates for gameplay purposes) and when we find that people are cheating - we invalidate records and flag them as not being eligible for the season (the UI doesn’t reflect this currently). That said, to a degree we’ve always treat scripts and cheats as a gray area. We don’t like them - but at the time people weren’t really using them to try and get faster times and in the worst case if the odd person did - we would deal with it on a case-by-case basis.

Around October time some players were starting to report that various players were bragging or just outright blatently cheating - worse yet while they didn’t actively encourage people from doing it; indirectly others saw that they were getting away with it and started to do the same sort of thing. We started seeing in the records people that had started surfing recently whom had abysmal times, suddenly jumping to top 20, top 10 and in some cases, top 5. These records were purged as per standard (which is why interestingly one of the recent seasons had such a disparity between players). The problem is that this was starting to happen more and more and the last thing that we want is to deal with this on a constant basis. With this, I decided it was time to re-activate the old anti-cheat system and revamp it at the same time.

28th November 2016

I re-activated it on the above date. For the first few days I was worried that maybe I had over-reacted or the system wasn’t working as it didn’t appear to be catching people or doing much of anything. A few days later however and it started catching people and with great effect. Over time I’ve retuned it slightly to catch a few edge cases I didn’t initially account for; but so far it appears to have been a roaring success.

But wait, what exactly does being a bad sport entail?

Being a bad sport essentially results in a few things, primarily -

• You can only earn a maximum of 10 cubes no matter what.
• You cannot receive crate drops
• You cannot use voice chat
• Gamemode restrictions, eg cannot earn time records on Surf.
• This lasts 30 days from initial detection. If you are detected again this resets the duration.

Now to clarify something - you will not get caught if you’re using say binds in the console and so on. This system is actively looking for things loaded outside the scope of the gamemode. This does mean that things like sv_cheats will flag you as well, but it’s primarily lua based things we’re looking for.

You are free to appeal it if you do get flagged on the forums - but please don’t be dumb about it. If you’re willing to admit you cheated and you’re not going to in future then we’re more likely to consider clemency as opposed to laughing at you and issuing further punishments.