Players of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive might be finding it annoying to play the team-based shooter recently, as chat bots have been flooding lobbies with text.
The attack is said to be coming from one person, and that the bots are being launched into Counter-Strike: Global Offensive in a somewhat concentrated effort.
Chat Bots Flooding 'Counter-Strike: GO'
The attack has bots entering lobbies, even those that have been marked as private, and filling the chat box with walls of text.
The message contained in the text calls out Counter-Strike: GO developer Valve for allegedly doing nothing about the rampant cheating in the game. The hacker calls for players to stop playing Counter-Strike: GO for a day to push Valve into making more effort in improving the state of the shooter.
"We are customers that are willing to pay for a good game without hackers and bugs that break the game," the message continues.
The exploit is similar to one that was discovered a few weeks ago, wherein players are able to type messages into the chat box of a lobby to increase or decrease they rank as they see fit.
Is Valve Working On A Fix?
Solutions are being proposed by the game's community of players, and Valve itself has said that it has released a temporary solution to help prevent the exploit from being abused further. The developer added that it will continue working on patching up the exploit within the week, but it seems that the attacker has been able to adapt to the solutions being implemented by Valve and suggested by other players.
It seems that there will be no easy fix for the problem of chat bots flooding Counter-Strike: GO lobbies, and that the hacker will be able to force players to abstain from playing the game for at least a few days.
Many Problems For Valve
Valve has experienced several Counter-Strike: GO, including gambling and cheating.
In July of last year, Valve issued a cease and desist letter to gambling websites that violate the subscriber agreement for its Steam platform, the majority of which are tailored for Counter-Strike: GO. The letter was the developer's attempt of a nail in the coffin for gambling, which has become a massive problem in the game due to the high real-life monetary value attached to certain in-game items.
Recently, Valve also revealed that it has tapped artificial intelligence to help it with its fight against cheating in Counter-Strike: GO. The developer said that it has implemented a machine learning system to try to combat spinbots, which is a type of cheat that spins characters very fast to give players a 360-degree field of view. Cheating players using spinbots are very hard to hit because they look like they are glitching, and when paired with aimbots, can hit opponents at all angles to make them very tough to take down.
Machine learning is required to catch cheaters because using hard-coded detection systems are easily bypassed by cheat developers. With artificial intelligence on its side, Valve can allow the system to learn to detect and hunt down cheaters on its own.
