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- Aug 23, 2016
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Hey everyone, it's been just over a month now that Valve made CS:GO free-to-play, and while this has changed quite a bit behind the scenes, not many of you know exactly how we have adapted to it. Right off the bat, I knew this would be no easy journey, but I also wanted to make sure that we weren't blocking out our new f2p friends, which today appear to be making up almost 25% of the community. Free-to-play brings new or additional challenges - increased numbers of cheaters, ban evaders, you name it. Within the first 48 hours of CS:GO going free to play, our bans increased 110%, ~68% of those bans coming from new free accounts (notably attempted ban evaders & anti-cheat detections). For the interim, we had blocked all F2P accounts from joining our competitive servers to remedy the issue, which apparently many had not even realized, and the placebo of 'oh no f2p cheaters everywhere' actually increased our call admin reports, when in fact the players were not actually cheating a good percentage of the time.
While we should not fight it entirely, we should still have protections in place to ensure a fun, cheat & toxicity free environment for all. That being said, we have just put into place an anti VPN/Proxy plugin, that will disallow free players from connecting to our servers using these methods of obfuscating their actual IP address. While there are legitimate uses for a VPN, the vast majority of the time they are utilized for malicious purposes, as we have been seeing in an increasing frequency. The ease of changing IP, creating a new Steam account, and continuing to cheat/grief was becoming a bit too accessible, so additional measures had to be taken. If you wish to use a VPN for legitimate purposes you are welcome to (however highly discouraged), but you will need to do so with a Prime account.
In light of this added feature, as of today, free-to-play accounts are now again allowed on all of our competitive servers. I have no doubt in my mind that there will be a slight increase in cheaters, at least for the short term. We ask that you be diligent, and as always, if you are absolutely certain you see someone cheating, feel free to use the call admin feature, so we can take action on said cheater. I expect the number of problem players to die down quickly as we get more logs, improve our anti-cheat, and expand our player database, so we ask you to tough it out for a bit with us. 🙂
Now, with all that being said - we are looking for new moderators and administrators!
Moderators - what?? Yep, we have a (slightly) revamped Administration hierarchy!
Moderators are held to the same standards as Administrators, however holds a 'casual' administrative approach that is more integrated with the in-game playerbase. We will have more information on the new moderator position by the end of the week!
While we should not fight it entirely, we should still have protections in place to ensure a fun, cheat & toxicity free environment for all. That being said, we have just put into place an anti VPN/Proxy plugin, that will disallow free players from connecting to our servers using these methods of obfuscating their actual IP address. While there are legitimate uses for a VPN, the vast majority of the time they are utilized for malicious purposes, as we have been seeing in an increasing frequency. The ease of changing IP, creating a new Steam account, and continuing to cheat/grief was becoming a bit too accessible, so additional measures had to be taken. If you wish to use a VPN for legitimate purposes you are welcome to (however highly discouraged), but you will need to do so with a Prime account.
In light of this added feature, as of today, free-to-play accounts are now again allowed on all of our competitive servers. I have no doubt in my mind that there will be a slight increase in cheaters, at least for the short term. We ask that you be diligent, and as always, if you are absolutely certain you see someone cheating, feel free to use the call admin feature, so we can take action on said cheater. I expect the number of problem players to die down quickly as we get more logs, improve our anti-cheat, and expand our player database, so we ask you to tough it out for a bit with us. 🙂
Now, with all that being said - we are looking for new moderators and administrators!
Moderators - what?? Yep, we have a (slightly) revamped Administration hierarchy!
Moderators are held to the same standards as Administrators, however holds a 'casual' administrative approach that is more integrated with the in-game playerbase. We will have more information on the new moderator position by the end of the week!
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