Workshop submissions are still being manipulated. If you’re getting a worrying sense of déjà
vu, that’s because we’ve been here before. I made a video about it almost EXACTLY 3 years
ago- and it’s tragic how little has changed since then. I could have just uploaded the
same video again really. To summarise: fake submissions promoting dodgy
services are being upvoted. Honest submissions are still being downvoted. Occasionally Valve
restores balance to the workshop, but it’s only ever temporary and before long it’s
a broken state again. I’ve been asked to do something about this,
but what can I do? I can only make videos, but I’m only repeating what I’ve said
already. I don’t want to sound like a broken record, or to sound like a broken record,
or to look as though I’m exploiting this situation for FREE KLIKS! (Philip). But I
think waiting 3 years is pretty acceptable and it’s about time this issue got another
bout of publicity to spur some sort of change into action.
Last time I had screenshots showing dodgy goings on, but this time I can go one better.
ZooL, maker of CS:CO, made a new map full of custom assets and gameplay. I think you’ll
agree that this is workshop-worthy content right here. Even if it’s not your cup of
tea, it would be rather cruel to downvote such high-quality content.
And yet it was. By hundreds of people, ALL AT THE SAME TIME. This was enough to knock
it off the front page and into some dark corner where it would no longer be found. All the
while, these sneaky scam submissions remained at the top!
He uploaded video proof of it happening, showing a timelapse of the front page of the workshop
and how the top maps changed minute-by-minute over the course of 2 hours.
The video is 7 and a half minutes long. I watched it and I made a note of everything
that happened, and when it did. Thanks to ZooL’s video, I’ve learned a bit more
about how the bot army works. It seems like it tries to keep 4 submissions
on the front page at all times, with 3 of these usually being at the very top. Valve
removes these every minute or so, and then they’re almost immediately reposted and
upvoted to the top again. I would say that if you view the workshop while this battle
is going on, there’s a 50-50 chance of seeing them plastered across the front page.
But there were a few stretches in these 2 hours where the scam submissions reached the
top and remained there for about 10 minutes. Maybe the poor Valve employee responsible
for battling them was in the toilet or something. And, to balance these periods out, it seemed
like the spam account would eventually get banned, leading to about 10 minutes of peace
on the workshop… before another spam account under a different name appeared, starting
the same spam again until that new account also gets banned.
From this I’ve learned that Valve has done very little to improve their spam removal
efforts in the last 3 years. When starting on this video I did think to encourage the
community to help in some way, but frankly, I don’t think there’s much point in reporting
or downvoting spam submissions because they’ll only appear again moments later, massively
upvoted and using the same name and thumbnail. The bot army appears primitive, but extensive,
and large enough to be able to mass-downvote any honest submission. I don’t know much
about combatting spam, but it seems like blocking the name ‘free skins’ and perhaps a handful
of thumbnails would do it for now, and maybe to consider restricting workshop submissions
to proper accounts, or at least ones that have more to them than… this. Eugh.
But while I know very little about combatting spam, I have watched batman, and am aware
of ESCALATION. If you counter a primitive threat, it will evolve and become cleverer
and elaborate, and will in future require more advanced techniques to battle it.
This is best demonstrated in the cheating community. I don’t care what other Youtubers
say, I think that Valve has been great with their anti-cheat methods, integrating a number
of elaborate systems to stay ahead of cheaters, or at least to render known methods quickly
ineffective. But the same cannot be said for the workshop.
They have shown little interest in combatting this spam in any meaningful or lasting way.
The problem submissions may only be temporary, but they’re recurrent. I could understand
it if this problem was new, but it’s been well over 3 years now. I can only conclude
that they are not interested in doing anything more about it.
And that’s a shame. Because the mappers who deserve the most recognition end up getting
the least! They incur the wrath of the downvote bot army, leaving only the scam submissions
and any unfinished or low-quality submissions that are lucky enough not to get enough upvotes
to be downvoted into the void. I said 3 years ago that Valve undid the mass-downvotes
that honest submissions received, but ZooL has said that his have remained downvoted.
I checked my recent Dust2 submissions and sure enough, you can still make out the 95
downvotes mine received on the day of release, compared with a near-100% positive upvote
record ever since. I don’t care too much about my own submissions- but not everybody
has over 800,000 subscribers on Youtube to help their submissions to be seen.
This bot-workshop manipulation is making the CS:GO mapping community look bad. It’s making
Valve look bad, and is reducing what could be a wonderful resource into a simple marketing
tool for scammers. Another reason I haven’t made this video
until now? Because sadly, spam works. You get junk emails because enough people click
on them to make it worthwhile. And likewise, they spam the workshop because enough people
are foolish enough to click on it. This sort of spam doesn’t depend on good publicity-
any publicity’s enough. And it saddens me to think that by making this video, I’ve
only gone and helped them to get more. But enough is enough. This is a problem that
really should have been countered by Valve years ago.
But… maybe I’m jumping to conclusions here. Maybe there isn’t a problem! Maybe
these free skin submissions are upvoted because lots of people really like them! Perhaps the
way it’s promoting itself is subtle enough that people don’t realise it’s a scam.
Maybe 200 people all decided to downvote ZooL’s submission at exactly the same time, 2 hours
after it was added to the workshop. Those are also possibilities.
But you’d be an idiot to think that’s what’s going on here.
Valve, please fix. And because I like to end on a positive note,
please browse the workshop and upvote the kinds of submissions you want to see more
of. If it results in a huge bot-led downvote counter-strike then at least it will make
the problem appear even more obvious. And check out ZooL’s custom Mario level,
too. Link is in the video’s description.