There were so many great things I could name this interview: "Wimsical Interview", "Interview on a Wim", "Getting to know TheUnknownFactor". It definitely appealed to my love of puns and wordplay, but instead I went with the same boring format so people knew what the heck it was before they started reading.
But someday, there will be a pun on this website that involves Wim, or his forum handle, TheUnknownFactor. You can bank on that.
Before the questions, I just want to give a quick thanks to Wim for doing the interview, and of course all his hard work in CAL, CGESA, and on zBlock. It's an awesome program, and I can never sufficiently thank people that are willing to dedicate so much time and effort to improve the gaming experience for everybody in the community.
1) Before we do in-depth questions, I’m curious about your history as a gamer. What have been some of your favorite games to play? Do you play in any leagues right now?
Barelds: Even though I’ve always been a ‘computer addict’, there’s not a whole lot of games that I have been involved with. When growing up I always loved fighting games, FPS, and the occasional racer. Wolf3D, Doom 1 and 2, Stunts (amazing game), Dune 1 (Much better then any Dune past it), Sango Fighter, StreetFighter, One Must Fall, The Mortal Kombat series (Up to version 3, Version 4 was a poor attempt at 3D, and I’ve never been a console gamer), Duke Nukem. Past these oldtimers, I stopped playing games for a short while, doing more with PHP and things alike. I got back into gaming with the successor to OMF 2097, in One Must Fall Battlegrounds, a PC fighting game that was actually quite fun to play, however sadly the single player mode had no real replay value, and the online community for it was too small to keep people interested. After that I got into Counter-Strike: Source, which I’ve been faithful to since :p.
Barelds: I made a lot of internal as well as external rule changes. When I got the position, there was practically no communication at all, the staff forums for AC did not exist/had been unused for about a year, and none of the 3 member staff that I had to start with was used to chatting on IRC. I started off with getting the forums started, and as far as I know, all of the stickies in the admin forums that I wrote are still used to this day. I also produced and “AC test” available for new recruits to the AC department to test their skills. This AC test is something I still host for the AC staff, and is also still used to this day.
3) After you left CAL, you became part of CGESA. What’s your role there?
Barelds: My role in the CGESA is also AC manager, however since CGESA actively invests resources into improving itself, I am far less limited in how thoroughly I can do what needs to be done.
4) CAL has a stranglehold on the casual gamer, and CEVO has been the place to go for competitive online play for a few seasons, now. Where does CGESA fit into that picture? Are you trying to cater to the professional gamer a little more by offering pay-to-play and prizes like CEVO, or are you hoping to target a wider user base by improving on CAL’s model? In short, I’m wondering what the pitch is; why should teams leave CAL or CEVO (or focus less on them) to join the CGESA?
Barelds: CGESA intends to cater to any gamer regardless of his position, we will be hosting pay to play divisions as well as free to play divisions, both will come with prizes, though obviously the pay to play divisions with the far larger prizes. Not only will we stick to our online leagues, we will also be hosting LAN’s and other events.
5) I’ve heard about the CGESA for a while, but to my knowledge there’s been very little game action. When’s the league hoping to get underway? In one of the forum threads on the site I read a quote from an admin to the effect of “why would we start our league when two others are in the middle of their seasons?” But CAL is launching into another season right after this one ends, and the CEVO-P season hasn’t even started yet. Is there a set deadline now, or are you still waiting on something (site development, etc)?
Barelds: The real delay has been in the AC Client, it takes a lot of time to develop a decent application that not only is secure, and detects cheats, but also doesn’t hog resources. We realize that no one (including ourselves) could take us seriously if we were to do everything we plan on doing without providing an environment secured with AC software.
6) Although I’m sure a lot of people know you from your time as an admin with CAL/CGESA, even more are familiar with the zBlock plugin. Generally, I don’t feel comfortable speaking for the community, but I think I can safely speak for everybody when I say “thanks!” and “if you ever stop updating, there might be a riot.” How long have you been working on zBlock, and what spawned the creation?
Barelds: I really can’t give you an exact date on when it started, but I can definitely give you something for your other questions. zBlock was spawned by an exploit that allowed you to see through walls relatively easily, it started out very small, and I honestly doubted it would last more then a month at the time. After we’d started working on zBlock however we started to better realize how exactly the at that time used “CSP” functioned, we soon learned that it was incredibly simple to bypass it, and decided to add it’s functionality into zBlock. From there on out, an ever growing community has relied on zBlock to provide it’s players with a saver environment.
7) zBlock deals more with blocking console commands than detecting, say, a wallhack. I’m curious to see your opinion on the ratio between people exploiting commands and actual hackers. I’ve long thought most of the people that get accused of hacking are actually “configging” in some way. You can get some of the same advantages (seeing through walls, etc) without risking a VAC ban. Which do you think is more prevalent in leagues: outright hackers, or people that tweak the commands/game bugs for an unfair advantage?
Barelds: There used to be primarily people using material wallhacks, this issue is practically entirely resolved now (assuming sv_pure 2 is used, which many public servers do not use). Thanks to VALVe and zBlock working together a lot lately, ‘configging’ has also been reduced to a minimum. Outright ‘hacks’ have never been utilized by a huge number of people, however at this point it’s the main group thanks to recent updates and alike.
Barelds: A lot of people neglect reporting issues they find assuming we either don’t care, or already know. I’m happy to say that, yes we probably already know, however I’d rather hear a thousand people report a problem we’re already aware of, then a single person neglecting to report an issue we weren’t yet aware of. I am very open and easy to contact to anyone.
9) Out of every, say, 100 players, how many do you think are using a program or exploit that gives them an unfair advantage?
Barelds: In my opinion cheating has always been overrated, I’m sure I can speak for every single player that’s reading this when I say that we’ve all had these “Wow, what just happened there!?” moments, these thoughts often end up broadcasted on ventrilo which leads to accusations. Now a large problem is that most people really have no intentions at all to back up an accusation, if you actually bothered to record a sourcetv demo, or asked the player in question for his demos, you’ll more often then not find that this player is as legitimate as can be. Out of 100 players, I’d say there’s maybe 5 illegitimate players (which is around 1 illegitimate player for every 4 teams you play against).
10) zBlock and an AC client form a pretty effective team, but what would your idea of a perfect AC system look like? Obviously, nothing could ever be perfect, but get us as close as you can, and resources aren’t an issue. In this hypothetical, you could have 50 Wim Barelds clones reviewing every demo, if you want.
Barelds: As you said, nothing can really be perfect, however hardware solutions are often very effective. Intel recently announced that they had plans to produce a chip for the purpose of preventing cheating (That’s right, Intel), it would compare mouse input with mouse output, practically eliminating aimbots and alike. I believe things like these are really a huge step in the right direction if they’re done right, as for this solution, as with any other anti cheating solution, it’s going to be worth nothing unless it can and will be updated as exploits come out.
11) Here’s a question for the general community, and probably one that anybody in CAL-Open or Intermediate has faced: what do you do when you think somebody on your team is hacking? Are AC admins generally willing to watch demos if you submit them, or should you handle it “in-house”? What are some things that you look for in a teammate’s play if you think he might be cheating?
Barelds: Sadly AC admins are often restricted from doing private services, when 1 AC admin reviews a demo as community service and publicly says “hey this guy cheats”, and later a dispute is cleared on that same base of that demo or player, all hell breaks lose (“Corruption!”). Every so often I get a request to review a demo myself, if I have time for it, I’ll usually do it, the problem is people who ask you to watch a demo, and entirely disregard your opinion if you disagree with them, even if presented with facts about why you say what you’ve said.
12) What’s your impression of the CGS thus far? Things they’ve done well, things they should improve upon, etc? Should we start a movement to nominate you as one of the GMs if they decide to expand the number of franchises?
Barelds: Things they’ve done well are marketing and setting up relations with the communities (at least in the US), especially seeing people like Yoi (The Asian interviewer) come onto the CGS forums and responding to threads about her is really great to see. Things they could improve upon are gameplay coverage (Especially CS, which in my mind is also the most difficult to cover properly), and further relations with the community members. I can’t really see myself as a general manager, I believe I could be far more valuable in other positions.
13) Last question, and it’s only limited by the depths of your imagination. You’ve spent a lot of time catching cheaters. If you could mete out any punishment you wish, what would it be? Just a couple thoughts to get you started: banning from the whole internet, moderating the CAL forums and manually changing every swear word to ****, being Chuck Norris’ training bag. I encourage you to explore your vengeful side, while keeping it PG-13, hopefully.
Barelds: I believe making them think is the best way to go about it, a reformed cheater is much more valuable then a punished, however still cheating cheater. It’s hard to say how exactly you’d make them think, something a European league (ESL) has is an “admitting forum”, where if you properly “confess to your sins” you can get back into the game. Now, they really do a poor job at it, and I believe their idea really doesn’t go near as far as it should, but I do believe it’s a good start towards reforming a cheater.
