SpawnPoint

I've been in the Anti-Cheat Team (ACT) for 7 months now, having been invited by Hitman about six hours before I was going to volunteer. Always nicer to be invited though.

It's been a learning experience so far, I taught myself to spot cheats just by watching players and then watching the demos before sending them in. Now I know a few more tricks to help make a decision, like demoui and r_drawothermodels 2. Not only that but I also get to see a whole range of legitimate tactics and techniques that can look like cheats on server.

The actual work on the ACT is mostly copy and paste, data entry and keeping things in order. Here is what I will typically do with one demo:

• Download demo and save to cstrike folder.

• Watch demo, with demoui and r_drawothermodels.

• Watch the demo again if it is not an obvious one

• Repeat until I am certain that the player is cheating or not. Ask for second opinion if I can't be sure.

• Copy and paste SteamID and name of the player in question to Notepad.

• Reply to the person who sent in the email, copy and paste response then SteamID and name of suspect player from Notepad.

• Copy and paste details into the ban list, if applicable.

• Make a note of who sent in the demo for the "who got the most cheats banned" list.

• If sb_status was used and the demo was conclusive use winrar on the demo and submit to Steambans.com.

• Delete the demo from my cstrike folder. I had 1000 demos in there a few months ago taking up 1.5Gb, not fun going through all those.

• Move the email and my response to done folder.

• Next!

I've got organised now, so all the things I need are all open and I can do all of the above quickly now.

We can get up to 10 demos a day, we got about 70 in the last week, not including the demos we receive for other things. So as you can see it's important to be as efficient as possible when dealing with demo submissions.

Fortunately I hate cheats so I don't mind the dull parts of the job and I take great pride in the fact that we quickly and fairly deal with the demos we receive.

Raven @ 2007-06-01 09:37:06
I really must congratulate you guys for the job you do. There's times that you get emails back within the hour and I appreciate the times you've managed to "Fast Track" a demo for me! I'm still disappointed when i get emails back saying that the demo isn't conclusive enough when i KNOW the guy is cheating but it makes me more determined than ever to catch the culprit in the act. Keep up the great work Phil and if you guys ever need any help i'm always available.

Greenblaster @ 2007-06-01 10:21:30
I second everything Raven said. We are all very grateful to the ACT members for taking time out of their personal lives to keep SpawnPoint servers free of cheaters.

Skydavo @ 2007-06-02 06:01:49
Yeah, keep up the good work, all members of the ACT !

As I report a lot of hackers, let me tell you how I do : I record the guy, one demo per round, then go to my cstrike folder, winrar all the best demos, send the .rar file to my desktop, send the demos and wait for the reply to erase the rar file... As the ACT don't send reply at the moment due to unavailable GBL... well my desktop is such a mess at the moment :( :D
Go ATC, GO !!!!!

cpnichol @ 2007-06-02 18:38:22
The ban list was down for a week or so, but it's back up now. Not only that but after a mammoth demo reviewing session by me and XTR3M3 we are now totally up to date with all demo submissions. My eyes have all gone weird :(