Saxton Hale Saga: Part 1
I feel that it would be appropriate to post a short update as to how the Saton Hale mask event went down, given that the fuss has died down, and anyone interested is more likely to be of sane/calm mind.
First, accusations that I modified the server or client binary in any way are out and out false. While I am quite handy with tools like SourceMod and MetaMod:Source (via Pawn or CPP, and CPP, respectively), I wouldn’t have the first clue as to where to start on live-patching the client binary. I have some ideas, but VAC2 (and VAC3 at the time, apparently) stopped me from considering them — I value my account far too much.
Second, the admin abuse complaints. I was on a server, owned by a friend, and we were locating what we thought were “drop spots”. The server’s password got leaked, we suddenly spiked from 10 players to 32, and notably there was a lot of whinging. So for those 22 players who found out that the weak/generic password we used to use was ‘woodstock’, I apologise that you felt the wrath of admin abuse, but you interrupted science.
Third, I still believe there were some fixed locations, but that offsets were applied to them.
Fourth, there is no way to access the data from the server, we confirmed suspicions that the gamecoordinator data was being sent directly to clients attached to servers with that map.
Fifth, I did not use a variant of the ‘idle’ programme that Drunken F00l distributed long ago. While I have a fairly good idea of how it works (I suspect a lot of people do), I would be too paranoid about losing half of the utility of my account to run something like that on it.
Sixth,yes, I have 9 friends who did not want the masks. That’s right, they didn’t want them, they barely play TF2, and they just sat there using voice coms to gossip. Go LAN party go.
Finally/Seventh, by my loose calculations I’ve given away more than two thirds of the masks I collected.
I know this is by no means what most people want to hear; they want to know there’s some magical ‘hack’ out there which allows you to teleport straight to the gifts, and, well, there is, but I don’t have it, never have had it, and only knew it was theoretically possible at the time (and yes, I know who has it, and no, they wouldn’t give it to me — a lot of others know too). I now understand how it could be done, and hope that VAC3 would catch it in the future…
