how crit hacking was stopped in tf2 (& how crit hacking still kinda works today) 

FAQ: hey watch these two videos i made before this video if you have a question, your question is almost definitely answered already: ~~ the random crits series ~~ 1. how it works, very technically: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-BzFi0iFoLoU.html 2. fake crits: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-cxvOOryIlzc.html none of what i said here applies to melee weapons (except the command number thing) so they still just crit like mad 🙃 personal thoughts: finally: video 3/3 on random crits. the topics covered in these 3 videos were originally meant to be one video, but i hope you can now see it was practically impossible to somehow fit them all into one video. (at least i don't think it was possible to make it a good video trying to jam so much into it) i'll acknowledge this video is a little awkward because i kinda say mostly the same stuff as before but idk, i don't think there was a perfect compromise i could've gone for. either way, hope the random crits research was useful :)

"This is a crit bucket" "Dear GOD" *"There's more"* *_"NO"_*

TF2 is such a complex game, even the random crits have lore.

I'll never forget the first time I realized crit hacking was a thing when I died with 5 crit rockets in a row from the same enemy player. It just works.

I love how the graph implies cheaters are not humans lmao

I once met a crithacking heavy on 2fort, except he was only using the holiday punch. He roamed his base, terrorising anyone who got inside

Not sure if Id rather face crappy aimbots or crithackers

I feel like an easier, and more funny, way to discover when the anti-crit stuff was added would be to check cheater forums and look for the crying babies.

Can't imagine a tf2 where crit chance was 2.5x what it is now

So the scene with Spy, Soldier and bucket, where Spy gives Soldier *the* look, is actually Spy realising that Soldier is possibly a cheater, since he is a bit afraid of the new bucket mechanic that could prevent him from having fun New lore

I remember me and my friend were playing in Doublecross and we died to the same Soldier by random crits every single time. The team kicked him, only to realize that someone looked at his profile, stating he was actually part of a pro highlander team. lol

Remember, avoid getting melee cheaters or bots , they always do melee CRITS everytime.

I remember finding a crit hacker with an australium force a nature a few months ago. It was really annoying because it was on control points and nobody except me noticed until I pointed out the killfeed.

I just love that the devs added an internal game mechanic and officially called it "the critical bucket".

Its really common to tell when someone is crit hacking if you already suspect them of hacking. They tend not to waste crits on shots that wouldnt kill you but the second you can be one shot with them they smack you with one. Nothing better then watching a brain dead scout destroying your entire team because every kill shot was a crit. No idea why but scouts always seem to be the ones crit hacking now. Maybe other classes are but its just harder to notice among the normal random shits.

Hey! I made a post about this on reddit but here's some ways to spot hackers (coming from someone who's spent 500+ hours doing so): If they're using an automatic weapon and stop firing the SECOND they will you, it's super likely they're cheating; their aimbot stops detecting a target and refuses to fire. If you walk up behind someone using an aimbot, sometimes it'll glitch out and they'll aim straight up. Recently, I've been noticing that scouts will fuck with their interp (or something. I've never done it) to get both of their force-a-nature shots to fire at the same time. If they do this, it's likely they're using some other cheat as well. Melee crits have a 15% chance of happening, which happens to be pretty common. If you spectate someone swinging their melee for a long time and they don't roll a random crit, and they're already suspicious, they're likely cheating. Soldiers, Demos, and other projectile classes have special aimbots that predict player movement. I wont get into detail, but there are some moves you can do to expose a projectile aimbot, like walking into corners without actually going across the corner. If a rocket shows up where you were likely to go every time, it's likely they're not legit. Cheaters are likely to be offensive. Not everyone who Is offensive is a cheater obviously, but people who are a bit too defensive when they're called out are usually cheating. If their name is different from their steam name, most of the time, they're changing their name on their client, which requires cheating software. Scouts that use both force-a-nature shots consecutively without waiting for their aim to adjust are sometimes cheaters. It takes time to see if they're not just good at aiming, but it's pretty obvious sometimes. Snipers that have a tendency to no scope bodyshot players who are ONLY low on health tend to be cheaters unless their team is communicating effectively. Sometimes, players will abuse the scotman's skullcutter's random crits and the tide Turner to mask their 'random' crits. This is easy to spot if you ask your team if they've been getting killed by crits too. Is that player always getting melee crits? Approach them within melee range. Of course, melee crit rates are super high, but I usually give them 5 chances to not crit before I call them out on crit cheating. Players who aim straight down, crouch, and walk backwards at a super fast rate are doing something called 'duckwalking'. They're cheating. Players who are good with the direct hit can typically predict enemy strafe movements. Players with aimbot can't.

1:00 Hey just wanted to mention that i love these lil messages you leave in videos, and the ones who give more comedic examples to explain what you're talking about, specially since the narration is nice and serious, but the editing contrasts it by being more joke-based. Great work as always, cheers from Brazil ! And i dunno if it sounded like it, but when i mention that the narration is more serious and explanatory i'm not complaining, it explains everything well, and when you actually do say a joke while narrating it's even more special

If this hack was discovered this year valve would've just disable random crits

Thanks for this critical info.

This change effects all weapons apart from the pan, which as everyone knows has a 99.99% crit chance.

I like how the cheater isn't considered human.

Literally happened to me yesterday. I noticed this one guy had crits on every single person he killed. Nobody questioned his shit tho and honestly he wasnt too bad of a nuisance to deal with

I will remember to breathe oxygen, thanks shounic!

Valve: "this is a bucket. & there's more" Hackers: "no..."

Even with so many problems in TF2, bots, cheaters, aimbotters, the game is still so beloved. I feel like Valve is throwing away a lot of their beloved games, such a shame. If they cheat random crit in TF2 casual game. I kinda feel bad for them, guess it made their day so props for them

Safe to say you can hack anything in tf2 for your benefit. No reason for someone to say "no such cheat exists" like someone I once played with said lmao

I really like your videos, Shounic. I've been working on this game with multiple classes with different playstyles and I always drink a lot from TF2's balancing or community for inspiration. These videos about tf2 coding really stir something in my brain that makes me feel refreshed and with ideas, I just wish to make my game open source one day so that people can investigate the coding in videos like these, but... it's a Roblox game. I don't think anyone would bother looking an open source for it..

It's amazing how this could be easily solved by removing random crits.

Theoretically, could one make "anti-crit" hacks? As in, just not send any packets which are crits?

Just yesterday while playing in a casual payload game, came across two cheaters that ALWAYS had crits, still pretty much a thing

that crit bucket implies firing your weapon while nobody is around is actually advantageous

a few years ago a crit cheater saved their crits just for me and i ended up getting vote kicked for speaking up

I do have a few questions which would be nice to know regarding random crits if you have a bonus video for this topic: 1) Let's say you only used your melee swing to deal damage from the moment you join, if normal damage is any dmg which is NOT a melee swing then how can one get a crit with a melee weapon if the melee hit does not count? If melee weapons do work differently for that ratio, then in what way and how does it determine it? 2) How does crit chance get lowered with respect to a period of time of no damage being dealt? Does recent damage get lowered after a period of no dmg being dealt or is it perhaps part of the cumulative total in the bucket being lowered instead? Or is crit chance just locked up there once you reach max % chance and it is governed by the bucket and normal to crit ratio blocking crits to make them normal shots? 3) Why does the bucket have a negative component? How does one get a negative bucket value? Are there any actions besides the deduction for paying for a crit which remove from the bucket?

I still find it so laughable that they only applied these measures to non-melee weapons. I guess it wouldn't be Valve if they ever made any sensible changes. Fun Fact: For a brief period of time in 2017, you used to be able to force random melee crits on melee weapons that had the "No random critical hits" attribute, resulting in quite a bit of chaos. This worked because one of the command numbers for those weapons still had the ability to allow you to crit. It's just that the chances of this happening without forcing it were extremely unlikely, as it was one specific value amongst tens of thousands, as opposed to other weapons having multiple values that worked. This was quickly patched when it was added to the most popular cheat in the game, which I won't name in case there's a filter for the comments. A lot of exploits died when they were added to it, as Valve used to keep semi-close tabs on it.

as much as it would technically be cheating, I would love to have a "crit button" only to be used when comedically appropriate. Like, being friendly, shooting a single crit, then immediately killbind-ing

1:06 Instructions Unclear, Forgot how to breathe. Suffocated.

Crazy how the prevention sorta still works after all this time.

Kinda is an understatement. Literally just played a match about a few days ago on Detroit keep where a scout player had crits on all the time and had howling coming from them all the time. Not even like voice chat just from the scout himself

I have been interested in this for literal years but assumed the info was not public. Thank you

The newer form of hacking is actually worse for the community than the old form. If every shot is a crit, the hacking is obvious and indefensible, so it feels justified to everyone on the server to votekick them. With the new form hackers can be smarter about their crits, not only getting crits at opportune moments, but deliberately choosing not to sometimes. This makes it harder to call hackers out, and can result in innocent individuals getting called out through suspicion. Because critical hits are already a controversial subject, many people are liable to be blinded by not just being unsure whether someone is guilty of hacking or not, but the emotional impact of being the victim of a successful critical hit. This blurs the line even further between a legitimate hacker, and someone who actually just got lucky. As such, I'd argue the "fix" actually made things worse rather than better. The end result of hackers being unfairly advantaged hasn't changed, but now players are naturally more suspicious of each other, or might be too trusting towards a hacker in an attempt to avoid this. As a result, you get both more innocent players getting votekicked under suspicion of hacking as well as more hacking players getting a free pass under the suspicion they might not be. I feel like a better fix would be to just remove anything clientside regarding whether a hit is critical or not, and change the visuals to accommodate this change. As cool as critical hits look in first person, in my opinion this alone isn't worth the hassle. It becomes much harder to cheat if you can't manipulate things clientside and the server itself decides whether attacks are crits or not. You fire a shot, the server decides if that shot is a crit, the shot either lands or misses, and then some sort of indication of this is delivered to everyone in the game. Likely the only remaining indication of whether a shot was a crit or not would be on impact, aside from projectiles such as rockets.

There's obviously server side plug-ins for 100% crits, but I wonder what would happen if the server changed those cvars to have a high default and/or cap, or a positive bottom. Would that also increase crit chances?

Day2 of asking:what about when you get double crit(without cheating) and what about the crits in the start of the game(or with your first shot)

The most obvious solution to crithacking would have been removing random crits, but this works too I guess.

This is why Soldier loves buckets

i had some weirdo random critting WAYYY too often in a game just yesterday, and it seemed that every time i or someone else was just about to kill him, he'd random crit

"hey viewer remember to breathe oxygen" oh shit I knew I was doing something wrong by breathing nitrogen.

I saw some guy on Hightower with the skull cutter and tide turner who had wall hacks crit hacks and even could see spies through clock

Man i fucking love ur videos i am even watching them while i have TWO FUCKING EXAMS TOWARD ME AND EACH ONE IS MORE THAN 50 PAGES

It looks to me like they didn't prevent cheating so much as simply make it less obvious. Like, cheaters are still going to get an advantage from abusing the system using control over the timing. The only difference is it's harder to tell from pure luck now.

Thanks, I'm always forgetting to breathe oxygen!

Thanks for the reminder to breath oxygen! I was about to die of asphyxiation when I saw it and didn't even realize.

Crit hacking is another reason I prefer no random crits servers. Random crits are bad enough, but when someone can choose when to random crit, it turns an unpredictable feature into an even worse ability. Also finding out if someone is crit hacking is more difficult than something like Aimbot

If I get this correct, the message id is assigned by a client and then sent to the server, which then reads the id and confirms if it's a crit or not. If so, then one way to go about fixing current iteration of crit hacking is to make server have a message counter per player, and using that instead of trusting the client message's id. Also, to preemptively restrict people from sending empty messages up until the counter goes to required number, the server can discard the empty ones and not add them to a counter

Yeah I still see people doing things like 1 shotting enemies as heavy (no crits), and getting crits every other shot. An engineer was literally critting 5 people in our game nonstop.

Remember in 2010ish, a heavy with aimbot, crits and infinite ammo spawn camping us, luckily I backcapped with bonk and he quit after that I lost the footage but I had it recorded on my shitty laptop

Ohhhhh crit bucket… it’s mine now. I will teleport bread with it

This man makes content to fuel future content with facts from past videos. He snowballin' fr fr

Can't believe just a single white bucket controls how much we can make our opponents angry.

No wonder the soldier loves his buckets

I'm waiting for the shounic experiment where everyone gets to be a crit cheater and fire their crits whenever they want

Thank you I almost forgot the breathe

I love how there is "humans" and ". "cheater’s" like we hate them so much we don’t even consider them like us

fun fact some weapons crit more often then others: random person:no shit

You've heard of crocket, now get ready for crucket

I remember one demoknight on degroot keep that would always get crits with the Scotsman Skullcutter 24/7. Claimed it was “electric” or something lol

Oops! I forgot about oxygen. I've been breathing argon this entire time. Thanks shounic!

And today we have fire-2-shot-at-once hacks for soda popper and force-a-nature

Can valve bots control their random crits and/or random bullet spread occurs on higher difficulties similar to hackers? I've played with games filled with just the hardest version of the Engie bots and they are able to regularly hit 9 to 15 damage shots with their shotguns from across the map, which means at least 3 pellets would somehow land each time. there also probably some mvm bs that happened to us we can all attest to as well.

Crit hax then: ok. Infinite power generator Crit hax now: ok... Now let me save the crits. You won't get crits unless you said so

I was playing with a Crit cheater two days ago. This heavy kept smgetting lazzer beams every time he started shooting. Made playing kunai spy fun

Fitting that today I had a crit cheater in my round.

Crits were the worst thing every put into tf2. I have nightmares about the unfair deaths I've had.

I imagine if there ever will be a good anti-cheat in TF2, it won't instantly kick the player but instead force him into a "cage of shame" in the middle of the map where they can't even disconnect, and, if allied team won't kick him in some period of time, they'll be down one player until the end of the round

OK that’s why soldier obsessed with buckets

I'll love to see shounic program a game someday

Oddly enough, when you list out the random crit mechanics and how cheaters can manipulate them, having control over that sounds really appealing. Maybe not in TF2, having that kind of control still requires cheating, but if someone could make a single player FPS where the kind of crit management these cheaters do is actually a core mechanic, that would be awesome.

I wonder how the 'crit bucket' looks for the pan

Great series, but I fear more normal players who just got really lucky with their crits are gonna get accused for cheating or even kicked now.

I once was in a game where a medic with no comsetic or weapons joined and everytime he hit me with his melee it was always a random crit, he killed me atleast 10 times and i dont believe a man can be this lucky

Just yesterday I ran into a scout who crit on every third shot (or so it felt like). Almost all of his kills in the killfeed were "random" crits and the only time we actually killed them was when he didn't get enough of them, cause luckily they always ran into more enemies than they could chew. Provided this video is correct, it's just crazy how many crits the game actually allows you to get if you just max out your damage output with a little help of an aimbot ...

idk why but whenever I use the back scratcher as pyro, I ALWAYS get 2 crits in a row , so basically, i hit the enviroment until i get one so i can then go and use the surprise crit that is left

1:06 thanks i almost forgot

This guy knows more abt tf2 than the devs

Why not just move the calculations to the server side and calculate if the NEXT shot will be a crit, rather than the current one? That way you have no delay, crits are invisibly stored on the server and given to you when is actually random (or you earn it with enough damage). OR, we could rework random crits entirely to be just like a crit hack, where you can choose when you want to use a readied crit with a keypress. This could be accompanied with an electricity animation to show a crit is ready, and give a crit boost glow to a weapon when a crit is about to be fired. It'd effectively be a small one shot buff banner, but for all classes.

Isn’t the crit bucket what also buffed medics and snipers. Since sniper shots fill their bucket but can’t subtract from it, snipers have a higher melee crit probability, same with medi-gun healing.

“This is a dying game” “Dear God” “There’re bots” “NO”

3:06 "Human, Cheater". Okay hahaha

It hasn’t been patched btw. I encountered a crit cheater a week ago and he hasn’t got a normal kill.

2:32 ok, explain the ubersaw. I went on a murder spree in 2fort with random crits as a Medic

I remember finding out how to do easy crits back then when I played pyro using the powerjack.

imagine if bots that are classes other than sniper start to use this lol

Beatifully explained

even thought almost every time i died it's cause of a random crit instead of adding these safety measure remove it completly

I'm positive I encountered a crit hacker a few days back, seemed to always kill people with random crits whenever it was most convenient (ie when he rounded a corner as heavy into a crowd of enemies) He also was aimbotting, toggling it on and off at times.

nitro has the best crit system on earth

...I wonder how a whole server of modern crit hackers facing each other would look?

So how come crit hackers can still get a 100% crit rate with melee weapons specifically? This is very apparent with the bots but recently I've been seeing a lot of demoknights with 100% crit rate swinging and killing people behind themselves and stuff. I know the melee crit algorithm is different than that for other weapons but it'd be interesting hearing why

and yet for some unknown reason they didn’t apply this change to melee weapons…

Very well made video, nice job.

I remember when someone was crit hacking and had a 100% random crit chance and he didn’t use a per say: rocket launcher but he used the hot hand. He eventually got kicked by the enemy team.