finally maybe those Russian servers can go away from hlds mailing list "We all know that some server operators run mods specifically designed to falsify information sent to the Valve backend and to their players. These mods inaccurately report the player count and whether players are human or not. They conceal that significant modifications to gameplay have been made. This is detrimental to players' experience. Perhaps some server operators would actually prefer to not run these mods, but feel that it is necessary to compete and maintain their community. For this reason, Valve has made the decision not to take any action against any server operators at this time. We will be directly contacting some of the "institutional offenders" who are using these mods on multiple servers. However, whether we contact you directly or not, this email serves as warning to all server operators that we do have the ability to detect this class of behavior, and, going forward, we are going to be more aggressive at policing it. If we determine that you are modifying the network stream or otherwise circumventing basic security measures, we will take the actions needed to maintain a positive environment for our players. To be perfectly clear, here are some examples of the modifications and behaviours which we consider especially harmful to our community: * Forging or modifying network communications used to describe server properties to the backend or directly to clients. * Concealing the fact that bots are bots, and making them appear as human players. (Running bots is OK, as long as no modifications are made that make it difficult for players to identify which players are bots and which are humans.) * Interfering with the mechanisms that advertise modifications to gameplay rules in the server browser. (For example, nocrits, gravity, respawn times, etc.) Experimenting with gameplay modifications is encouraged, but any mechanisms in the engine designed to alert players to those modifications must be allowed to function. * Listing the same game server multiple times in the master server. Thank you, Fletcher Dunn "
