That's mostly how bans work. Which is unfortunate for players in the short term. But long term it is important.
You ban someone as they are cheating, they will know that cheat engine is compromised, and they can warn others to stop using it or to switch to another.
You ban everyone that uses a certain cheat engine at once, same thing.
But you ban in waves, random users using different sofrware. It becomes much much harder to track which software was compromised.
The real issue is how you quarantine the cheaters from regular players between being detected, and being banned.
I would say counter operation is more critical in destabilizing the engine cheaters.
IF there are 10 types in use, I would ban 9/10 getting users comfortable with how solid the last bastion is. Then I would pull the rug once confirmed the other 9 are dead.
Now on the other side, in a 10 to 1 ration you have that many working against you, and their creativity is what subverts your walls. still very cat an mouse until one wins.
> The real issue is how you quarantine the cheaters from regular players between being detected, and being banned.
Simple, once you identify a cheaters account, you you put them into a different match making queue with other identified cheaters.
They wouldn't notice after one game. Cheaters don't run cheats all the time. Some people just flip on wall hacks or whatever every now and again.
Besides even if they did notice after one game, what difference is there between them making a new account after that game or after the ban message?
Tbh I'm not convinced the turnaround time needs to be that long. I've no material complaint about ban waves unto themselves, but if you're waiting months or years between waves you're just letting cheaters run rampant.
The only reason it should be 3-5 months is if Valve is gathering evidence to file civil suits against the individuals engaging in software use outside of agreed-upon license terms.
It's an industry standard to wait that long. It gives the anti cheat team time to collect a bunch of cheaters and fix the vulnerability in the game they use to cheat. Of course this would mean they'd need an anti cheat team that does the infamous treadmill work.
> The real issue is how you quarantine the cheaters from regular players between being detected, and being banned
The best method I saw from some other game I can't remember now, was to pair them up with other cheaters.
GTA4 did this. Cheaters were all put into the same lobby. Anyone who even tried using modified game files were also put into said lobbies. This could be bypassed though.
Source: I used trainer menus in GTA4 when I was younger
In my match history, it was an average of 1.5 cheaters per match that would later get VACCED, in 1200 games of competitive CSGO. So if you don't include myself that's around 2 cheaters per match that are either cheating or go onto cheat later on.
They're probably getting the low hanging fruit right now, people who just pay for cheats from others.
But the people who program their own cheats...well Valve's anti-cheat simply isn't equipped to handle them. Even EAC, BattleEye, and Vanguard can't stop a determined cheater from owning the system and its memory space (including that of the game in question).
Even Vanguard's anti-BIOS-trickery stuff can be bypassed with some knowhow.
As far as I know VAC is entirely server-side and client-side-usermode, and has no local kernel mode anti-cheat. With the cheat arms race in its current state, that simply isn't enough to prevent cheating.
Heck, even kernel anti-cheat isn't enough, and in cases where people are unable to work around it (by exploiting a vulnerable kernel driver, running their own UEFI cheats or whatever) they can go buy a direct memory access card, bypassing the CPU entirely for memory access, which bypasses almost all anti-cheats, kernel or usermode.
IMO the best defense against cheaters especially in the modern landscape of advanced kernel cheats and anti-cheats is community run servers rather than matchmaking. People cheated in the community server heydey, but they also got banned *by the server operator* which means it was much easier to keep such servers cheat free, since automatic detection wasn't needed.
I remember in early CS:GO days I would get a notice that says "your report helped lead to a ban of a cheater."
I wish they still do that. Hunting bots would be my new meta for TF2.
This happened the last SaveTF2 campaign too, the problem is that they didn't continue banning bots afterwards. This means nothing if Valve doesn't run the treadmill of keeping up the fight against bots.
the original savetf2 movement just resulted in 1 (one) VAC wave, which is pretty trivial in the grand scheme of things. this ban wave is much more elaborate, not only pushing out multiple VAC waves within the last few days to catch any stragglers but also manually pinning down and banning bot hosters, closet cheaters, and shutting down new accounts that are being created.
of course, time will tell if this actually sticks just like you said. if this is *all* they're doing, then its simply a performative gesture to get people to shut up just like it was last time. it means nothing without long-term solutions being implemented. people shouldn't stop talking just because the bots die down for a week. but a ban wave of this scale is unprecedented and that's promising news.
Worth waiting to see if they do it again in a few weeks time, rather than celebrating now.
Valve has lamented about "treadmill work" but it's unfortunately something they'll have to put up with if they really want to deal with cheaters. There will never be a perfect solution, when your opponent is always working to circumvent whatever you put up.
Considering what we now know about the real player count of TF2, I doubt it's a real money earner, doubly so in the sense of money that Valve operates on
The amount of money being spent in the game, versus the amount it costs valve to run the game, they can certainly afford to pay a person to keep on top of bots.
Those findings showed that the real tf2 concurrent playercount is usually around \~10-25k per day. This is still an incredibly massive game that naturally generates tons of revenue through key sales, new cosmetics, mvm tickets, steam marketplace trading volume, new accounts getting unf2p'd etc. There are far less active multiplayer games that still get regular developer support and make enough money to sustain new development.
A couple of months ago I was checking TF player base and I was surprised how the game is so popular after so many years... turns out a lot of them were bots, after watched a youtube video about it.
That's not really true. First, most of the bots outlined in the video are idle bots, not aimbot. Secondly, even without the bots its still a popular game(otherwise there woudlnt be bots). Id aruge its amazing how popular it is considering the aimbot problem as of late. Its not impossible to find a bot free server, but its annoying.
This is what I watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnuxHZm73PU
this amount of botting for such a game is just wild, and he also mentioned that this is happening in other games like lost ark
It happens with any free game that has item drops. A few years ago there was a free game called Geneshift that became the number 1 game on steam, above even pubg, because it dropped trading cards.
Valve made them remove the trading cards and it was down to 1k or so players after that.
TF2 is unique in that its one of the few free games where a drop can actually be worth something
Yup and it's even happening in CS2 now. I've seen clips of people in Russia or wherever running 40 CS2 accounts on maybe 5 computers. They afk and get the weekly drop and then a script logs in the next account. Probably farms them a few hundred cases a day.
And yet, there has been a massive influx of like 40-50k players, making the total reach 100k. Those have to be majority bots as well, since you still don't see any sort of natural day/night player fluctuation that you see in games with real players.
I'm also pretty sure TF2 is being used for something related to the Counter-Strike Marketplace too. Something to do with TF2 keys being worth $2.50'ish and having no cooldown on being traded again while Counter-Strike and Dota 2 items supposedly have a 7 day cooldown after being traded before they can be traded or sold. It's this whole convoluted mess from my understanding where tf2 keys are being treated as currency.
Yeah that has been the case since tf2 items have existed. There are smaller pieces of money, metals that basically act as cents to the keys' dollar (if there were only 1, 3 and 6 cent coins and 1 dollar was like 200 6 cent coins). The main reason that Dota and Cs keys can't be used as de facto currency and have the 7 day cooldown is because esports betting, and esports betting scams exist (and other casino type sites using skins). That and their economies are more centered around real life money while tf2's kind of stayed on the keys system.
If you think that's crazy, you will love the fact that the largest piece of currency back in the day in tf2 used to be earbuds, a limited tiny ass cosmetic that mac users received when tf2 got support for mac. Also idle bots 100% ruined this weird economy. When the game became f2p, a single tf2 key used to cost 3.33 refined metal. It's a bit of a weird notation but essentially, you get x amount of weapons every week for playing the game, you can smelt 2 weapons into a scrap metal, 3 scraps into reclaimed metal and 3 reclaimed metal into refined metal. Essentially you could buy an entire key worth 2.99$ for 3 refined metals and 1 reclaimed metal. Today, as I mentioned you'd have to give like a hundred refined metals for a single key. Idle farmers pretty much caused virtual inflation and now the basic piece of "money" in tf2 virtual economies shifted to being the keys. Also I think the earbuds were shifted out of the economy because turns out, you can't run an economy on effectively what is infinite 6 cent coins, 2 dollar bills and about 10,000 100 dollar bills, 2/3s of which has been hoarded by a small amount of people who probably don't even play the game or participate in the economy anymore.
I used to have so much fun with the economy part of this game and like 2k hours was spent in my childhood virtual hussling on trade servers before hussle culture was cool. It was wild.
The TF2 economy has been a shambling corpse of its former self since at least 2014, when the Backpack.tf owners started artificially increasing the price of keys to make a fortune and basically ruined trading for anyone that wasn't willing to put in some real cash.
Also, bots have always been a part of TF2s economy. It's nothing new, and given how worthless metal and hats are these days its really not harming anyone
They don’t, really. Since they just go to dedicated idle community servers. If they tried to go into matchmaking or other community servers where people were playing, they would get booted for being idle/just sitting in spawn
Hey Valve, cancel that cartoon hero shooter generic bs you are working on and port TF2 to source 2. Fans cant even do it because of Nintendo-esque litigation by Valve. Or delist all the marketplace Bs and give everyone access to every item. Bots will have zero reason to be there if there is no way for them to farm real world money
I have mixed feelings on this whole issue with the bots and towards TF2 as a whole. On one hand I have good memories with the game, I played it a lot growing up and it definitely holds a special place in my heart even if I don't play it anymore, and seeing it overrun by bots is heartbreaking. On the other hand, I see the broken, buggy mess this game has become and Valve's lack of effort towards supporting it and feel its time to let the game go.
If Valve can't, or won't, make the effort to curb the bots plaguing their game then it's time to shut down the official servers. Prop up community run servers instead who *are* making an effort to stop the bots just because they love TF2 and want a safe space to play it away from these issues.
I completely quit PC gaming for about 4 years until I tried Valorant because EVERY SINGLE FPS I was playing even semi-seriously was overrun with cheaters.
Rust, Tarkov, CS, PUBG, etc.
Valorant really is the saving grace of the PC genre because of how clean it is, yet still a very active and maintained FPS. So I have Valorant as my main game and tried experimenting with other games and I'm astounded at what I see.
Apex.. holy fuck what a shit show. Played it for about a month. At first I thought I was just trash. Then I thought everyone was cheating. Then I realized everyone is using a fucking joystick like a toddler and the game gives you built-in aimbot for using it. ON PC!
What the actual fuck happened to this industry, I don't know - but Riot is the only company that currently gives a fuck about the state of PC competitive gaming for multiple genres.
The question what are they gonna do about all those damn annoying 255 ru servers on TF2, CS Source and etc... Those servers are likely malicious. There are like 500 of those servers just on Counter Strike Source alone.
What I don't get is why don't they go after these people doing this? They are actively trying to disrupt their business and causing them to lose money.
It made the steam marketplace look more active, and raised playercount, so Valve didn't really care that much before.
Now, after "Banana" and "Cats", it looks like they are finally starting to take bots more seriously.
They're just going to make new accounts and come right back. TF2 needs to cost some nominal amount of money or getting banned is just a minor inconvenience.
And while we're at it, give all accounts all of the non-cosmetic unlocks. It's only a couple of dollars to get everything from a third-party store, but new players won't know that and it's a pointless hassle anyway. More people playing the game means more people buying cosmetics which means more money for Valve.
That's mostly how bans work. Which is unfortunate for players in the short term. But long term it is important. You ban someone as they are cheating, they will know that cheat engine is compromised, and they can warn others to stop using it or to switch to another. You ban everyone that uses a certain cheat engine at once, same thing. But you ban in waves, random users using different sofrware. It becomes much much harder to track which software was compromised. The real issue is how you quarantine the cheaters from regular players between being detected, and being banned.
I would say counter operation is more critical in destabilizing the engine cheaters. IF there are 10 types in use, I would ban 9/10 getting users comfortable with how solid the last bastion is. Then I would pull the rug once confirmed the other 9 are dead. Now on the other side, in a 10 to 1 ration you have that many working against you, and their creativity is what subverts your walls. still very cat an mouse until one wins.
I could say raiding their homes and smashing a chair in their faces right there destabilises them much better. But you made a good point.
*Everyone liked that*
> The real issue is how you quarantine the cheaters from regular players between being detected, and being banned. Simple, once you identify a cheaters account, you you put them into a different match making queue with other identified cheaters.
So they would notice after one game they're in the cheater queue and its purpose is immediately defeated.
They wouldn't notice after one game. Cheaters don't run cheats all the time. Some people just flip on wall hacks or whatever every now and again. Besides even if they did notice after one game, what difference is there between them making a new account after that game or after the ban message?
Maybe add in some bots that aren't cheating to pad the game numbers, they still get easy kills but still don't notice they are in a cheater queue
>Some people just flip on wall hacks or whatever every now and again. Is "some people" in the room with us right now?
Is there something wrong in acknowledging that some cheaters don't cheat 100% of the time?
Come on, just admit it
Tbh I'm not convinced the turnaround time needs to be that long. I've no material complaint about ban waves unto themselves, but if you're waiting months or years between waves you're just letting cheaters run rampant.
It definitely doesn't need to be the 1 year+ Valve is operating at. 3-5 months at max should be good enough.
The only reason it should be 3-5 months is if Valve is gathering evidence to file civil suits against the individuals engaging in software use outside of agreed-upon license terms.
It's an industry standard to wait that long. It gives the anti cheat team time to collect a bunch of cheaters and fix the vulnerability in the game they use to cheat. Of course this would mean they'd need an anti cheat team that does the infamous treadmill work.
> The real issue is how you quarantine the cheaters from regular players between being detected, and being banned The best method I saw from some other game I can't remember now, was to pair them up with other cheaters.
GTA4 did this. Cheaters were all put into the same lobby. Anyone who even tried using modified game files were also put into said lobbies. This could be bypassed though. Source: I used trainer menus in GTA4 when I was younger
i'm pretty sure cs2 does that but they are putting "toxic" players in the same queue which feels like it should be illegal.
Titanfall
I'm sure it's been done in a few, but I think you're right - that's the one I remember. Awesome.
[удалено]
In my match history, it was an average of 1.5 cheaters per match that would later get VACCED, in 1200 games of competitive CSGO. So if you don't include myself that's around 2 cheaters per match that are either cheating or go onto cheat later on.
They're probably getting the low hanging fruit right now, people who just pay for cheats from others. But the people who program their own cheats...well Valve's anti-cheat simply isn't equipped to handle them. Even EAC, BattleEye, and Vanguard can't stop a determined cheater from owning the system and its memory space (including that of the game in question). Even Vanguard's anti-BIOS-trickery stuff can be bypassed with some knowhow. As far as I know VAC is entirely server-side and client-side-usermode, and has no local kernel mode anti-cheat. With the cheat arms race in its current state, that simply isn't enough to prevent cheating. Heck, even kernel anti-cheat isn't enough, and in cases where people are unable to work around it (by exploiting a vulnerable kernel driver, running their own UEFI cheats or whatever) they can go buy a direct memory access card, bypassing the CPU entirely for memory access, which bypasses almost all anti-cheats, kernel or usermode. IMO the best defense against cheaters especially in the modern landscape of advanced kernel cheats and anti-cheats is community run servers rather than matchmaking. People cheated in the community server heydey, but they also got banned *by the server operator* which means it was much easier to keep such servers cheat free, since automatic detection wasn't needed.
Took too long thou
I remember in early CS:GO days I would get a notice that says "your report helped lead to a ban of a cheater." I wish they still do that. Hunting bots would be my new meta for TF2.
It's been years since I played TF2, but isn't it infested with official aimboting bots?
yes. I'd be reporting them instead of playing the actual game.
This happened the last SaveTF2 campaign too, the problem is that they didn't continue banning bots afterwards. This means nothing if Valve doesn't run the treadmill of keeping up the fight against bots.
the original savetf2 movement just resulted in 1 (one) VAC wave, which is pretty trivial in the grand scheme of things. this ban wave is much more elaborate, not only pushing out multiple VAC waves within the last few days to catch any stragglers but also manually pinning down and banning bot hosters, closet cheaters, and shutting down new accounts that are being created. of course, time will tell if this actually sticks just like you said. if this is *all* they're doing, then its simply a performative gesture to get people to shut up just like it was last time. it means nothing without long-term solutions being implemented. people shouldn't stop talking just because the bots die down for a week. but a ban wave of this scale is unprecedented and that's promising news.
Pirate software has a good video explaining things. It's not really a long term solution to ban every cheater at once.
Worth waiting to see if they do it again in a few weeks time, rather than celebrating now. Valve has lamented about "treadmill work" but it's unfortunately something they'll have to put up with if they really want to deal with cheaters. There will never be a perfect solution, when your opponent is always working to circumvent whatever you put up.
God forbid they have to do work on a game that prints them money.
Considering what we now know about the real player count of TF2, I doubt it's a real money earner, doubly so in the sense of money that Valve operates on
The amount of money being spent in the game, versus the amount it costs valve to run the game, they can certainly afford to pay a person to keep on top of bots.
Those findings showed that the real tf2 concurrent playercount is usually around \~10-25k per day. This is still an incredibly massive game that naturally generates tons of revenue through key sales, new cosmetics, mvm tickets, steam marketplace trading volume, new accounts getting unf2p'd etc. There are far less active multiplayer games that still get regular developer support and make enough money to sustain new development.
You don't need to run the game to use the community market
I must say, I haven’t seen any bots in 24 hours now - so something has worked
A couple of months ago I was checking TF player base and I was surprised how the game is so popular after so many years... turns out a lot of them were bots, after watched a youtube video about it.
What is the appeal? Like the person that sucks in the game and has no friends in real life suddenly feels powerful?
I think it was about some boxes with items. I am not sure what the deal is because if there are no people, to who you will sell these items?
I don't know why they would feel that way. A bot is just ai playing the game with no human input.
I’m asking what is the point, what are they benefiting from by running the bot in the first place?
That's not really true. First, most of the bots outlined in the video are idle bots, not aimbot. Secondly, even without the bots its still a popular game(otherwise there woudlnt be bots). Id aruge its amazing how popular it is considering the aimbot problem as of late. Its not impossible to find a bot free server, but its annoying.
This is what I watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnuxHZm73PU this amount of botting for such a game is just wild, and he also mentioned that this is happening in other games like lost ark
Lost Ark botting was insane. I think the estimate was somewhere around 500k active bots when that game first came out on Steam.
It happens with any free game that has item drops. A few years ago there was a free game called Geneshift that became the number 1 game on steam, above even pubg, because it dropped trading cards. Valve made them remove the trading cards and it was down to 1k or so players after that. TF2 is unique in that its one of the few free games where a drop can actually be worth something
Yup and it's even happening in CS2 now. I've seen clips of people in Russia or wherever running 40 CS2 accounts on maybe 5 computers. They afk and get the weekly drop and then a script logs in the next account. Probably farms them a few hundred cases a day.
And yet, there has been a massive influx of like 40-50k players, making the total reach 100k. Those have to be majority bots as well, since you still don't see any sort of natural day/night player fluctuation that you see in games with real players.
Yeah, teamwork.tf shows only 13k players while on Steam, almost 100k. The issue isn't aimbots, but idling bots farming drops.
are they an issue though? I fail to see how idling bots hurt anyone
It hurts the player-driven economy
what's that one british guy gif, "oh no! anyway..." imagine that here
Nah, the economy is important and part of the reason the game has stayed around for so long
I'm also pretty sure TF2 is being used for something related to the Counter-Strike Marketplace too. Something to do with TF2 keys being worth $2.50'ish and having no cooldown on being traded again while Counter-Strike and Dota 2 items supposedly have a 7 day cooldown after being traded before they can be traded or sold. It's this whole convoluted mess from my understanding where tf2 keys are being treated as currency.
Yeah that has been the case since tf2 items have existed. There are smaller pieces of money, metals that basically act as cents to the keys' dollar (if there were only 1, 3 and 6 cent coins and 1 dollar was like 200 6 cent coins). The main reason that Dota and Cs keys can't be used as de facto currency and have the 7 day cooldown is because esports betting, and esports betting scams exist (and other casino type sites using skins). That and their economies are more centered around real life money while tf2's kind of stayed on the keys system. If you think that's crazy, you will love the fact that the largest piece of currency back in the day in tf2 used to be earbuds, a limited tiny ass cosmetic that mac users received when tf2 got support for mac. Also idle bots 100% ruined this weird economy. When the game became f2p, a single tf2 key used to cost 3.33 refined metal. It's a bit of a weird notation but essentially, you get x amount of weapons every week for playing the game, you can smelt 2 weapons into a scrap metal, 3 scraps into reclaimed metal and 3 reclaimed metal into refined metal. Essentially you could buy an entire key worth 2.99$ for 3 refined metals and 1 reclaimed metal. Today, as I mentioned you'd have to give like a hundred refined metals for a single key. Idle farmers pretty much caused virtual inflation and now the basic piece of "money" in tf2 virtual economies shifted to being the keys. Also I think the earbuds were shifted out of the economy because turns out, you can't run an economy on effectively what is infinite 6 cent coins, 2 dollar bills and about 10,000 100 dollar bills, 2/3s of which has been hoarded by a small amount of people who probably don't even play the game or participate in the economy anymore. I used to have so much fun with the economy part of this game and like 2k hours was spent in my childhood virtual hussling on trade servers before hussle culture was cool. It was wild.
You think it would be for the game itself
This might blow your mind, but those two things aren't mutually exclusive.
Well they seem to not mind the bots all that much affecting the gameplay, while letting the economy exist.
I couldn't give less of a fuck about the "economy".
The TF2 economy has been a shambling corpse of its former self since at least 2014, when the Backpack.tf owners started artificially increasing the price of keys to make a fortune and basically ruined trading for anyone that wasn't willing to put in some real cash. Also, bots have always been a part of TF2s economy. It's nothing new, and given how worthless metal and hats are these days its really not harming anyone
They don’t, really. Since they just go to dedicated idle community servers. If they tried to go into matchmaking or other community servers where people were playing, they would get booted for being idle/just sitting in spawn
I mean they deflate the value of the items in the game but that only matters if you care about that.
I hope they won't abandon the game immediately after this.
Besides being able to falsely feel good at a game, what benefit is it to these people running the bot accounts?
Some of them sell the accounts to other players so _they_ can falsely feel good at the game.
Hey Valve, cancel that cartoon hero shooter generic bs you are working on and port TF2 to source 2. Fans cant even do it because of Nintendo-esque litigation by Valve. Or delist all the marketplace Bs and give everyone access to every item. Bots will have zero reason to be there if there is no way for them to farm real world money
10 million karma in 5 years? you need to go outside goddamn.
They've got a long way to go until ~~Bot~~ Team Fortress 2 is seen in a positive light again.
I have mixed feelings on this whole issue with the bots and towards TF2 as a whole. On one hand I have good memories with the game, I played it a lot growing up and it definitely holds a special place in my heart even if I don't play it anymore, and seeing it overrun by bots is heartbreaking. On the other hand, I see the broken, buggy mess this game has become and Valve's lack of effort towards supporting it and feel its time to let the game go. If Valve can't, or won't, make the effort to curb the bots plaguing their game then it's time to shut down the official servers. Prop up community run servers instead who *are* making an effort to stop the bots just because they love TF2 and want a safe space to play it away from these issues.
OP you mean bots not aimbots.
They need to go after cheat developers
TF3 when?
Man it’s good to see people still play TF2. I was never huge into it (tribes 1 guy at the time) but it’s a classic game.
It's working, boys! Don't let up.
I am a little concerened some legitimate players will end up getting banned.
I completely quit PC gaming for about 4 years until I tried Valorant because EVERY SINGLE FPS I was playing even semi-seriously was overrun with cheaters. Rust, Tarkov, CS, PUBG, etc. Valorant really is the saving grace of the PC genre because of how clean it is, yet still a very active and maintained FPS. So I have Valorant as my main game and tried experimenting with other games and I'm astounded at what I see. Apex.. holy fuck what a shit show. Played it for about a month. At first I thought I was just trash. Then I thought everyone was cheating. Then I realized everyone is using a fucking joystick like a toddler and the game gives you built-in aimbot for using it. ON PC! What the actual fuck happened to this industry, I don't know - but Riot is the only company that currently gives a fuck about the state of PC competitive gaming for multiple genres.
The question what are they gonna do about all those damn annoying 255 ru servers on TF2, CS Source and etc... Those servers are likely malicious. There are like 500 of those servers just on Counter Strike Source alone.
What I don't get is why don't they go after these people doing this? They are actively trying to disrupt their business and causing them to lose money.
Probably hosting in countries where it's difficult to sue them. A majority of the idle bots are in Russia, for example.
It made the steam marketplace look more active, and raised playercount, so Valve didn't really care that much before. Now, after "Banana" and "Cats", it looks like they are finally starting to take bots more seriously.
Yeah, "games" like those really give the impression that Steam is becoming a free-for-all for scammers.
If it's in the news, how is it being done quietly?
They're just going to make new accounts and come right back. TF2 needs to cost some nominal amount of money or getting banned is just a minor inconvenience. And while we're at it, give all accounts all of the non-cosmetic unlocks. It's only a couple of dollars to get everything from a third-party store, but new players won't know that and it's a pointless hassle anyway. More people playing the game means more people buying cosmetics which means more money for Valve.
Valve: IM COMMING FOR YOU!