ShoX — The really great thing about VanillaTF2 is that any idiot can write low quality, barely substantiated crap without fear of editorial reprisals. A fact that I intend to exploit below. After the jump I’ll share the screenshots captured by AnAkIn’s plugin which on face value appear to have captured two Premiership soldiers with their trousers down.

 matnuN

Israelite matnuN is a reasonably long standing member of premiership team Crack Clan as well as the Israel national team and was a candidate for ETF2L soldier of the season. The screenshot below has been provided in good faith as an image taken of his screen on a server that was running Anakin’s plugin.

Check on the top left hand corner.

The screenshot apparently shows matnuN with xRadar 4.0 loaded.

 Tarkus

Fellow Israeli Tarkus has recently joined Quarantine and like matnuN also participates in the Israel National side.

If you can’t see what’s wrong with this image I’d discourage you from commenting.

The Plugin

At time of writing I wasn’t able to track Anakin down to ask a few questions about how the plugin works and more importantly discuss the moral position of taking data away from a players machine without their consent (which, despite the underlying good work that’s being done is extremely dodgy) but it was alluded to that the data was being gathered in a way that perhaps Valve didn’t intend.

[19:56] <@AnAkIn> valve will probably block it tomorrow, unfortunately

Despite the good work that is being done this undisclosed mechanism that’s in place to collect data probably wouldn’t (or won’t) sit well with Valve and a good number of people who have used servers with the plugin loaded. It’s not beyond the realm of comprehension that in one of Anakin’s screenshots lies some in game chat of yours that you wouldn’t want broadcast to a third party, who knows. Maybe I’m the only one who cares about that kind of stuff.

Moving forward

ETF2L have a long and chequered history of cheat detection with good and bad decisions made in seemingly equal measure.  Should they take this seriously?

Historically they’ve paid no credence to the work of Anakin, possibly due to the bad blood that existed between ESL and ETF2L back in the day. But I’m sure they’ll have banned for less than this. If they do they’re setting a precedent and acknowledging the accuracy and authenticity of a third party application. If they don’t there’s a good chance it won’t sit well with a number of players who’ve suffered at the hands of these players and increasing doubt and paranoia will eventually cause a situation.

So what do you think? Do you trust the work done by Anakin? If you ran ETF2L where would you go from here?

Should ETF2L use this evidence?

View Results

Loading ... Loading ...