Weapon Skins - Why, and Why Not

[sneaK]

So this is a post I've been meaning to make for a while, but never got really motivated enough to set aside the time and do so, but I feel particularly motivated, after being on the receiving end of some pretty nasty criticism. TL;DR at the bottom.

So as many of you who have been here for more than 3 months, we didn't have !ws, !knife, etc for over a year. For those of you oldschool folks who have been here since the beginning (2+ years ago), we actually did have weapon skins/knife plugins when they came out.

A bit of a timeline, for context:

• Beginning: Once we fired up back under the old gaming community 2 years ago, we had knife plugin. This was pretty standard on pretty much every community CS:GO server.
• Mid April 2015: The original weapon skins plugin came out. As you guys know, keeping a keen eye out for cool new plugins/features all the time, I hopped right on it and added it to the servers. I helped do some debugging with the plugin author, and completely refactored, organized, and added missing weapon paints to the config file - this is actually the basis of what you'll see on many servers.
• July 2015: An official request by a CS:GO dev was sent to the CS:GO Server Operators e-mail list, essentially a kind of nice 'cease and decist using these plugins'. Knife/weapon skins plugins were immediately removed from our servers. Shortly after, I implement !takeknife plugin, which abides by Valve's Game Server Operation Guidelines.
• October 2015: (I could be a bit off), Valve experimented with master list server IP bans for servers that still used these plugins. It was incredibly effective.
• November 2015: Valve got a lot of backlash from the community and GSP's, so they introduced a GSLT system - you can read more about it here.
• December 2015: I add custom knife models. The community had been really on my case about re-implementing !ws/!knife since no real action had been taken in a long time, so I had found a middle ground where I was sticking to the rules, while giving the community what they want. This plugin was also OK by Valve's Game Server Operation Guidelines.
• January 26, 2016: I receive a GSLT ban on my main account, despite not having weapon skins/knife/etc plugin (a nice late birthday present to me, thanks Valve!). To this day, I'm not sure if it was !takeknife or the custom knives (assuming takeknife). I emailed several members of the CS:GO team at Valve, finally got a very short response after a few attempts, and no explanation of the ban. I followed up the email with an explanation of how it works and how it is compliant - yet I was still banned, and never received another response. After quite some investigation, it turns out Valve implemented checks for certain functions and changes, that basically makes the server tattle on itself, and gets added to a list for a ban wave. Some of these functions have legitimate uses (i.e. giving you your skin on the opposite team, say your AK-47 Elite Build, but when you're on the CT team).
• August - October 2016: I've become aggravated by seeing more and more servers pop up using weapon skins and knife again. Obviously these servers get wildly popular, because they have cool skins, yo! I send out a series of emails to numerous CS:GO team members at Valve, no response to any single email. Here are the emails. At this time I have also been talking extensively to other community leaders (both large and small), and we all feel the same way. As you can see here, I'm pretty ticked, and I'm doing everything I can to play by the rules, without risking losing my community, as with the other community leaders I've been speaking with.
• February 2017: Since the start of this timeline, I've been adding cores to our existing VPS where the servers are hosted to support our growing community, I've added a dedicated database server & website, upgraded that as needed, and eventually I upgrade all of our servers to be on a single dedicated server to eliminate performance issues. All this costs $$, and while existing donations are nice, this ups my cost by ~40% since the final VPS upgrade. Leaves me in a bit of a pickle in how to attract more players.
• Early March 2017: I begin testing weapon skins/knife & GSLT ban bypass system on our rebooted KZ server - immediately we get more traffic in one day, than we ever had in a single day when it was up a year prior.
• Late March 2017: I add !ws/!knife to our most popular servers.

This whole situation has given me a really pessimistic view towards Valve. They roll out GSLT bans every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. To create a new GSLT, which is required to run a CS:GO community server, every ban wave a new account must be created, and CS:GO must be bought on said account. Valve is just raking in cash every other day from banned GSLT's and they know about the problem, yet refuse to acknowledge, or do anything about it.

So what do I do? Sit idly by while I lose players every day to shit tier servers, just because they have weapon skins? "But sneaK it's not about weapon skins if you have a good server they'll stay" - bullshit. I've experienced this first hand, with our community, and others. Lots of people just want to flip around cool skins all day. "If you can't beat em, join em."

Those are just my thoughts on the matter and the logic as to why we are one of those "bad servers". I used to hate them too, but I'm just tired of Valve wanting to be the judge, jury and executioner - but not communicate a damn thing. If Valve came up with a way that actually stopped servers from being able to hand out weapon skins/knives, or actually enforced their own rules, I'd be totally fine with it. In fact, I'd probably prefer it. People would actually play the damn game instead of playing with/focusing on skins. With how it is now, we lose out 9 times out of 10. Valve has forgotten that without mods and community servers, CS:GO would not exist today. Thanks for reading.

TL;DR - Valve has proven that they don't care about actually stopping the usage of weapon skins/knives, are money driven, and do not support community servers.

 

[Josh]

a y y l m a o

 

[pbjpie]

I receive a GSLT ban on my main account, despite not having weapon skins/knife/etc plugin (a nice late birthday present to me, thanks Valve!). To this day, I'm not sure if it was !takeknife or the custom knives

they banned you for something you didn't do wut the fuck? its probably way too late but id go on reddit and complain until i hit frontpage. super shitty on their part

and this shines some light on the whole !ws plugin for me in general, I knew valve send a letter out because some community servers displayed it when you typed !ws, but I didn't know why some got off scot-free..guess when money's on the mind anything to make the consumer buy CS:GO again will be seen as a viable option

To create a new GSLT, which is required to run a CS:GO community server, every ban wave a new account must be created, and CS:GO must be bought on said account.

I love money $$$$ cash make it RAINE

someone should seriously speak out about this, but then again, its valve. they barely update as it is already.

so is your servers currently stuck in the loop of constantly giving valve money? or are we lucky ducks and the gslt bypass system is working as advertised

 

[sneaK]

they banned you for something you didn't do wut the fuck? its probably way too late but id go on reddit and complain until i hit frontpage. super shitty on their part

As I explained later, I'm pretty sure we got nabbed by the automatic function changes (which are also used legitimately). Shitty, considering there's no appeals process or anything. Perma ban, done.

It's already been brought up a million times on the subreddit, in fact the founder of GFL got 4k+ upvotes on a post about their lack of support/communication for community servers, but nothing's changed.

so is your servers currently stuck in the loop of constantly giving valve money? or are we lucky ducks and the gslt bypass system is working as advertised

Constantly giving Valve money. Granted, we're on one of those systems I described to Valve in the emails, which makes it much more affordable, so I'm not shelling out $15 every other day for GSLT's.

 

[Robo]

How often are you getting GSLT banned roughly? Kind of curious.

On a side note, the lack of communication from them is laughable. We're talking about a billion dollar company that can't provide some useful insight to the situation.

 

[sneaK]

How often are you getting GSLT banned roughly? Kind of curious.

On a side note, the lack of communication from them is laughable. We're talking about a billion dollar company that can't provide some useful insight to the situation.

They roll out GSLT bans every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

So 3 times a week.

How's the saying go? "I remember when Valve used to make games, now they make money." It's a fucking shame tbh. Their organization and communication is a joke, and unnecessarily piss off their playerbase more often than not. But guess what, we're all still here right?

 

[Robo]

So 3 times a week.

How's the saying go? "I remember when Valve used to make games, now they make money." It's a fucking shame tbh. Their organization and communication is a joke, and unnecessarily piss off their playerbase more often than not. But guess what, we're all still here right?

I can't even say it's not worth the ban. I see quite a few people come on the Advanced Surf server and try to do the !knife command, and we tell them to go to easy surf for that and they do. It's a pretty hot commodity. At the end of the day it's your call if it's worth it or not.

 

[sneaK]

I can't even say it's not worth the ban. I see quite a few people come on the Advanced Surf server and try to do the !knife command, and we tell them to go to easy surf for that and they do. It's a pretty hot commodity. At the end of the day it's your call if it's worth it or not.

Only reason I haven't added it to advanced surf is because it will attract all the wrong players. Players who don't know much about surf and will just rtv every map and aggravate people who are actually grinding out higher tier maps.

 

[s p o o k y]

I remember the old school days, I'm gonna need my tokens back

 

[sneaK]

It's already been brought up a million times on the subreddit, in fact the founder of GFL got 4k+ upvotes on a post about their lack of support/communication for community servers, but nothing's changed.

Following up on this, here are the posts:
https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffe...alves_poor_support_for_community_servers_and/
https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffe...s_poor_support_for_community_servers_lack_of/

I actually hold the top comment on the second link, bitching about the broken GSLT system heh