By Jim Rossignol on September 9th, 2009 at 12:45 pm.
UPDATE: PC Gamer UK got Robin Walker to come to their server and show off his super-dev-rocketlauncher. (See below.)
So this is weird (and old, apparently, so this can be retro news: “Remember the news last year? Ah, they really knew how to reblog stories back then…”). In a match between mod developers from HL2CTF and Valve Software a moment of near-magical source code cheating was seen. Steam forumite palehorse864 reports: “I heard Gman’s voice saying “Rise and shine Mr. Freeman” and every player’s view changed as Valve “transformed” into their superhero personas. A title came up giving the Valve employee’s name and their alter ego, and they then changed into that alter ego, gaining several powers. One had a rapid fire rocket launcher and infinite health, another turned into a living combine plasma orb and rushed around touching everyone and vaporizing them, the scoreboard went nuts as the points climbed constantly in Valve’s favor, even with no flag caps.”
There’s a video that apparently shows this happening below.
New:
Old:
In before internet-shitstorm claiming Valve are dishonest cheaters and as such, hypocrites for taking away everyone’s idling-items.
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Haven’t you seen Valve’s TF2 developer weapons?. See Robin’s here. The descriptions are gone, sadly, but they had things like auto-heal, super damage, extra critics, vampire heal and more.
I hope HL2CTF is released soon. It was expected in early May!!!
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I don’t really get what’s happening in the video after the Valve guys transformed, but the general idea is pretty funny. I know why I still have a place in my heart for Valve, they pull stuff like that off with a kind of spirit that is rarely found among bigger gaming companies. Hats off!
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Valve are awesome, and they only had the code for a day, pretty impressive really.
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lol this was like 4-5 years ago :0
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This was yeeeaaaars ago. I knew that Valve thrashed the mod developers, but I never knew they did it like this!
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Yeah, this was from 2007.
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This was apparently some kind of practice match the mod devs had with valve. The fact that Valve had the sense of humour and the skill to knock this out in a day (it’s probably not all that much work actually, all they really did was tweak some characteristics of their players and their weapons) is one of many reasons I hold them in such high regard.
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TB If you’re who i think you are, theni’m pretty sure that you would object just as much to Blizzard spawning über items for their own characters, just as much as idlers and non-idlers alike would object to Valve developers spawning hats and über weapons for themselves, and even uses them on public servers.
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Oh wow! I didn’t expect to see this here, especially not after all this time!
I was a beta tester for the mod when this happened, and I remember the hilarity of it. Valve actually gave us two matches at different dates, and I think this may have been the second of the two. Whilst I didn’t get to play, it was great seeing the mod get this kind of exposure, though I assume it’s dead now.
HL2CTF was a really fun time, and was the first mod I spent hours and hours playing. What made it good for me was that I was actually GOOD at it. Sometimes, top of the leaderboard good! And really, in an MP FPS, there are few feelings better than that. Man, so many great memories. The maps were astoundingly good.
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@Thomas – You may be sure, but it’s not true. Blizzard did in fact do something almost identical to this, spawning and transforming into massive raid bosses, including a giant tree that breathed acid on people, during a battlegrounds match. The shitstorm blew up on the forums and I recall, very specifically, coming out in favour of Blizzard on the show directly following the incident. To paraphrase myself..
“So Blizzard do something fun and unique for once, in a videogame, which let’s face it doesn’t matter a jot in the great scheme of things, as a one-off no less and you guys explode into a fit of tears and rage over it? Shut up, just shut up, it’s their game they are allowed to have a little fun and while it might have been ‘unfair’ for you 10 or so people, it was certainly funny for the other 8 million of us’.
Can’t remember which episode that was, it’ll have been back in Season 2 at least, feel free to dig for it if you wish, after all, the burden of proof is on the accuser ;)
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@ rocketman71: I was lucky enough to be on the PC Gamer TF2 server about 2 weeks back when PCG’s Buck Sexington (aka Craig Pearson) pestered Robin to join and deploy his haxxy rocket launcher. Fun times.
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Hell, I wish this kinda stuff was the norm. If I end up playing against one of the developers of a game, I’d hope they’d try pulling some crazy shit like this, just because they can.
I’d more than happily trade losing a match for seeing something completely unique and unexpected.
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Honestly never heard of anything like that outside the PTR’s, anyways i stand corrected.
I still think that Valve has gone overboard with their own cheating while taking the “moral high road”.
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Btw, it wasn’t an accusation, i was merely trying to make an analogy, and as i remember you from the WoW forums i thought one with WoW would be good :)
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I think is obviusly a nice “genuine cool people doing cool stuff” by Valve. Not to be confused with PR.
It could also be described as a devs2devs easter egg. Is not like the game will be release with this.
Not all dev’s add easter eggs to his stuff. I don’t do that. But I know people that do that, and I think is funny and a good tradition. I know a webmaster that created a gay shop, that has a “flyiing penis” secret page. If you enter this secret page, you see a penis flyiing and bouncing on the borders of the screen.
Hell… even Bill Gates did it in BASIC V2.0. He placed this easter egg: typing “wait 65,1″, the basic interpreter prints “Microsoft!” on screen. And Bill Gates is practically a lawyer and almost only 0.0001% a dev. If a shy and boring guy like Bill Gates have easter eggs in his games, why not cool people.
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It’s particularly nice this happened in the HL2 gameworld, which is generally so dour and dismal; now we just need a Super Smash Bros. full mod to include the cast of Silent Hill.
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I wouldn’t call Basic 2.0 a game XD
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@Thomas:
I haven’t heard of Valve developers constantly annoying people on public servers with their uber-weapons. And as long as it’s an occasional “what-the-heck-is-just-happening” moment for a few people, it’s perfectly fine. Hell, it makes for some RPS-worthy stories as you can see and there’s nothing wrong with that.
The beautiful thing about Valve is that their humour never comes off as something forced. BF:Heroes tried to be funny and failed. With Valve games it often feels natural which is truly refreshing. It’s one of the reasons why I still fire up TF2 from time to time, even after playing it exhaustively on high competitive levels for a long time.
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that was a typo error, is a interpreter. but it was fun. maybe was a freudian slip..
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@Thomas Well it wasn’t such an analogy since it actually happened :) I’m sure there’s a video on Youtube of it, I can’t access it from work though.
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wow, valve are assholes.
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“The beautiful thing about Valve is that their humour never comes off as something forced. BF:Heroes tried to be funny and failed. With Valve games it often feels natural which is truly refreshing. It’s one of the reasons why I still fire up TF2 from time to time, even after playing it exhaustively on high competitive levels for a long time.”
This is one of the reasons I’m such a huge fan of Valve. They know how to get things done but have fun at the same time.
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Well Valve still apparently thinks I’m a cheater.
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“Man Raised By Puffins says:
@ rocketman71: I was lucky enough to be on the PC Gamer TF2 server about 2 weeks back when PCG’s Buck Sexington (aka Craig Pearson) pestered Robin to join and deploy his haxxy rocket launcher. Fun times.”
Me too. Seeing every one on red on KOTH_Nucleus explode with one rocket…. very odd. I thought it was natural as I’d just set them all on fire. It wasn’t until he turned his entire team uber that I noticed something odd was going on! :)
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Gives me an idea. Is there any chance, with the awesome connections that the wonderful RPS has, that they could entice some Valve employees onto the RPS server for some TF2 fun? An RPS readers (and writers) Vs. Valve would be incredible. At the very least, getting a couple to pop in would be good enough. If PCG can do it on a whim, I’m sure RPS could organise an actual event.
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Possily the oddest thing about this story is I’ve had contact with palehorse864 before. I think it was with regards to The Opera (underrated HL mod) and its various never-quite finished sequels (I still have a DVD with Alpha 5 of The Opera HL2 I think)
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My word, that is some absolutely terrible video quality.
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Alpha 5 eh? That’ll probably be my code then.
Can’t say I really remember a palehorse or a CMaster but its been a long time now, where you one of our testers at the end there before it died? :) Shame it never got finished. Most of us old RA’s are still in occasional contact via Twitter and Facebook.
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So this is what they get up to instead of working on Ep. Three, huh?
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This is great stuff. It’s like the PC equivalent of when you’re losing at chess and you go, “My bishop is now a NUCLEAR MISSILE!”
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Ha, that’s awesome.
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Dan Lawrence = Myre?
Yeah, I became an Opera Fan after the game went rather quiet in HL, stuck with it for ages, eventually becoming one of the main testers in the HL attempt at R2. I still have Aneur and Infestasyde on MSN I think, as well as a few other testers on an AIM account I never use.
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The Innocent: You mean utterly classless and bitter?
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woot! The pyro heroicly setting the entire red team on fire before Robin CHEATS LIKE HELL and uses some kind auto-rocket gun. I’m glad this video exists — I had no idea what actually happened. Pyro’s can’t see much, you see. All that fire and running in cricles they do.
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I look forward to seeing CoH/Champions versions of these characters :P
Also, they patched the ‘exploding bishop’ exploit out of chess in the early 1800′s
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How lame. I wasn’t expected this from Valve.
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Dracko:
Serious Business.
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“So this is what they get up to instead of working on Ep. Three, huh?”
This was before Episode 1.
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How classy.
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Seth: Yet if anyone else pulled this off in the middle of your deathmatch or CTF game, you’d quite understandably be pissed.
Why does Valve get a free pass exactly?
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I an boycotting halflife 2 episode 3 because of this. At least until it comes out.
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@Dracko: I am not quite sure you understand the context of this particular game. This was not Valve jumping into any random server and displaying their mad skillz with the console command. This is not Valve doing it to people who just wanted to relax at the end of a gruelling day at the office. This is Valve attending a private (albeit with SourceTV Live Footage) game, one that they’d been invited to and ADVERTISED ON THEIR SITE, of a mod made by people in love with the primary, main game: Half Life 2.
Let me sum up the details.
1. Valve were invited to play the mod makers of HL2CTF.
2. They accepted, and give some exposure of the mod on Steam News.
3. Because of this exposure, the population of people playing the mod went drastically up.
4. The first game they had, months before this one, ended in a tie. This was jokingly known as the decider.
5. Every single person on the opposite team got a kick out of this. The fans got a kick out of this. Everyone was pleased.
Help me find the cons here. Please. Help me. I really can’t find them.
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Also let’s look at the description of the first video:
“We invited the TF2 developer Robin Walker to the PC Gamer UK server, and asked him to show off his over-powered, personal Rocket Launcher.”
Thanks for playing, Dracko.
Also, even if they decided to drop that shit into a regular game and I was the other team I would be amused rather than outraged it’s a goddamn videogame.
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Oh.
Well, that’s okay, then.
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Dracko, nobody was taking the game seriously, it wasn’t an official match or anything, the devs were just there to have a look at the mod and play with the guys who made it. It’s not like the guys on the other team started weeping, wailing, or gnashing teeth, everyone was just having a good time and goofing off.
Heck, we do the same thing on our Left 4 Dead servers sometimes. If a team’s doing particularly badly sometimes they’ll mysteriously get multiple Tank spawns to throw at us, or a sudden freak hailstorm of Witches. Their team will find Special infected helping them get to the saferoom by clearing the way. It’s brilliant.
Personally I think this is awesome. If the Valve devs came to our TF2 server and busted out the special weapons we’d all just start laughing and go nuts with it. Likely somebody would start piping Benny Hill over the background, and the game would be abandoned in favour of just having a blast.
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@Red Scharlach: OH HAI.
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Requesting [that I one day learn how to be a human being]
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Hacking is delicious. And is something that ladies really really really like. There are types of fun. And probably was as fun to release this joke, as to create it on the valve offices :-)
You only take over the world once, but you can plan it every night :-)
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lol, cool.
People all too often forget that point in games is *to have fun*. As long as Valve doesn’t try to pass this off as a real, fair win, and as long as it doesn’t happen in some kind of ranked tournament kind of match, I think it’s great.
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You guys do realize that the steam forums post this article is pulled from is in a thread complaining about Valve employees ruining people’s games by hacking, right?
Dracko may be incorrect about this one PCG match, but there are definitely complaints floating around about current Valve weapons in TF2. Especially when servers start emptying over them.
Personally, I think it’s hilarious. But I haven’t come up against them in a game.
Also, I saw this yesterday, and it never would have occurred to me to mention it to RPS. Obviously, I need to reconsider what I should be linking them to.
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Right after finishing this match, Valve put on their halo hats and then started making Left 4 Dead 2.
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Hehe, this [i]is[/i] ancient… but epically epic at the same time.
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You don’t understand jalf. Valve viciously denied the other team their hard-earned win. It doesn’t matter if everyone was having a good time, it was a morally reprehensible act, I cannot even imagine the kind of person that would justify this behaviour.
In fact, I’m going to start a boycott group on Steam right now until Robin Walker officially apologises and releases a signed and legally recognised document conferring the status of “winner” to the HL2CTF team for the game of 07 March 2007.
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Christ, what are you on? Is the concept of “fun” alien to you?
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How may different boycott groups are there now anyway?
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2, including “Boycott the Internet”
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They should merge.
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Oh, Valve.
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I’m beginning to think that Valve could donate a million dollars to the save the dying orphan charity and people would complain that they didn’t donate 2.
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…goes to download HL2CTF again *casually whistles*
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I am boycotting Valve because of their one-way flow policies.
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So what’s up with hl2ctf being totally dead?
There are servers but no one on.
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In my time on the scene of quake engines, I remenber to play Team Fortress with a edited version of the quakeworld engine, with floating names, a better hud, and stuff.
http://telejano.berlios.de/option/llamahud1.jpg
..but I was not “playing”, I was just testing these features in-game.
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“Possily the oddest thing about this story is I’ve had contact with palehorse864 before. I think it was with regards to The Opera (underrated HL mod) and its various never-quite finished sequels (I still have a DVD with Alpha 5 of The Opera HL2 I think)”
Woah, I was in The Opera community too (Shifteh.) Man, small world!
Oh, and I think Valve are awesome for this. They didn’t just ‘cheat,’ or mess with code, they made SUPER HEROES. Come on people, that’s some funny shit!
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Yep, Myre is/was me. Aneur-never-could-spell-his-handle went on to work on that Vin Diesel game until Midway went bust. I’ve been at Codies for the past four years but am now about to move on to a terrifying new future of scraping out pennies as an indie dev. It gladens my heart to see old Opera folks hanging out on RPS :)
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I remember playing DoD A long time ago (The origonal not the source version) Some how the person running the server had hacked the game some how to where it allowed him to spawn as one of the female assasins from Half Life proper, along with giving him some super powers like flying about and being mostly unkillable (After getting shot with a Kar like 50 times it died but came right back lol) It was funny for a while but getting murdered over and over again by this thing got annoying very quickly. Luckily the person caught on that we weren’t having fun any more and stopped :P
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MEANWHILE AT VALVE
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“Oh, and I think Valve are awesome for this. They didn’t just ‘cheat,’ or mess with code, they made SUPER HEROES. Come on people, that’s some funny shit!”
I agree, again, and again.
But maybe the proper concept is SUPER VILLAINS!
Doh! :-)
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I’m boycotting people who take this sort of thing too seriously.
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@Myre, Shifteh
And one day, hyper-stylized FPSes will come back in fashion and our years of studying CYF will makes us gods of gaming. Or something.
Yeah, Aneur tol me about his work on a Vin Diesel game. It sounded rather uninteresting. Keep me up to date on your Indie work – I still remember how excellent Barfight and Hospital were.
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I remember seeing a TF2 game between Valve and some great team and few times at the end they did some funny stuff, like unlimited über and some stuff. I think it’s all good fun.
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<3 valve. I was lucky enough to be on the PCG server when robin hopped on too. Was funny to see his launcher then after he prompty fell off the map and we wer not far from losing we all had lovely ubers to finish it all.
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WAAAAAA WHAT THESE BAD BAD BOYS DID IS SO IRREPSONIBLE. THEY ARE MORALLY UNSOUND. WAAAA IM A LITTLE BITCH WHO CRIES ABOUT STUPID LITTLE THINGS THAT DONT MAKE ANY BIT OF DIFFERENCE.
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Hah, I’ve been quoted! Thank you Rock Paper Shotgun. I discovered this by accident after seeing a new article on the valve CTF match and going to wikipedia in hopes of adding a bit of notability (Some uptight guy a while back wanted to delete the article before we could even get any notoriety links in, so I would like to nip that in the bud). Surprise, i’m quoted on the wikipedia page and it linked back to this article.
If anyone wants to add me to their friends list, i’m palehorse864@hotmail.com
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Myre! Shifteh! A hoi hoi!
Bert here, me and ANTIDEAD still hang out in the ruins of the old irc channel if you ever want to drop by (#operamod on GameSurge).
Remember the dev-cheats in The Opera? I recall there being a console command that let you shoot out an explosive blue fireball, which I of course bound to a key along with ‘wait; say “Hadoken!”‘ ~_~
Sean still talks about remaking The Opera when he inevitably rises to the top and gets to design his own game. We’ll sue the pants off him for stealing our ideas yes? :D
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