How To Use the Vote Menu & Spot Cheaters in Casual TF2

An easy & Informative guide on how to call a vote kick. Send this to people if they seem new, and are unaware of the vote kick feature.

Introduction

TLDR: This isn't sarcastic, this isn't ironic. This is a real guide on how to vote kick cheaters in Team Fortress 2. I decided to make this guide because I feel like a lot of people don't use the vote menu because they're either afraid of what it does, or genuinely don't know what it is / how to use it. This is a very basic guide, going step by step on how to properly use the vote menu, and also how to spot cheaters.

Hello! My name is "zenith". I am a video creator, programmer, and an avid fan of Team Fortress 2. I love this game, and I hope you are enjoying it as much as I am. Team Fortress 2 is an insanely fun, dynamic, first person shooter that is most likely irreplaceable.

With that said, modern TF2 is not the same experience that it used to be. Nowadays you may join servers infested with cheating bots, or you could be in the middle of a game, have a bot join, and completely ruin your fun. If you've been playing for more than an hour at this point, you've most likely ran into one of the many forms of bots that change their name every month or so.

There are bots that impersonate youtubers, bots with memes as their name, and even bots that steal names from players currently in the server. Not only that, but there are actually real people who play the game while simultaneously hacking themselves. I know, weird right?

The best way to combat this issue is to use the "vote kick" menu which, if enough people on your team agree with the vote, will kick the person / bot out of the server, forcing them to find a different public match to play.

In this guide you will be learning how to access the vote kick menu, how to differentiate name stealing bots from the real player, How to spot a cheater in 2020, and some warnings about abusing the menu.

Don't forget to leave a comment if I've forgotten something!

How to Access the Vote Kick Menu

Scenario. You're playing a public match, when all of a sudden three bots join your team. Two of your teammates understand how to use the vote kick menu, call votes immediately, and successfully kick two out of the three cheaters. But wait, there is still one cheater on your team. Just because a majority of them are gone doesn't mean that the game is "saved". One cheater instantly headshotting / locking onto players is just as bad as three. The mission is in your hands now.

So... What do you do?

Step 1: Go to the in game menu
Step 2: Go to the Vote Kick menu
Step 3: Pick the person you want to Vote Kick
Step 4: Vote the person out!

The in game menu can be accessed by pressing the "escape" or the "~" key on your keyboard at any time. You have most likely accessed this menu to access your backpack, look at your inventory, change your options mid game, access the console, or even to queue out of a game.
Either way, the in game menu does have a few extra options that the regular menu does not. And depending on the Heads-up Display (HUD) that you use, the vote kick menu will be in different areas.

For reference the Vote Menu Icon will normally look like this

Down below are quick videos based off of some of the most popular HUDs.

Default Hud: https://youtu.be/UDRqCldNe2s

BudHud: https://youtu.be/mVunMZQzJfk

ToonHud: https://youtu.be/8pcByAixKj8

rayshud: https://youtu.be/gd5HFueYcx4

ahud: https://youtu.be/ueUHhtAPXqw

How to Accept / Deny Votes

Normally when calling a vote, knowing who to vote out is easy. Below is a video showing how to vote someone out.

https://youtu.be/cctIP5LjnuA

The F1 key on most desktop keyboards is normally between the 1 and 2 key, and the F2 key is simultaneously between the 2 and 3 key.
If you are using a laptop, make sure you press the "Fn" key before pressing F1, as if it not activated, it will change your computer brightness, or whatever setting your laptop has instead of voting for the player.

**DO NOT** Automatically vote "Yes" on a vote kick. It could be a toxic player, cheater, or bot trying to vote kick an actual player. If you see the menu, always look at the name, the scoreboard, and see if the other team is actually calling them out for cheating.

Name Stealing Bots

Despite popular belief. Cheaters aren't brain dead. They will do anything to try to not get kicked, be it for the meme, or because they want to rank up in casual for whatever reason. Recently bots have also been joining and automatically stealing players names too. So here's what you do.

There are 2 ways to go about kicking bots that steal names. One is by checking the avatar, or if they stole the avatar of the user too, by checking their "status" in the console. I will be going over both.

Check Avatars
The bots normally play sniper and do the normal "headshot everybody they can" thing. So if the real player isn't playing sniper, it's easy to differentiate which one is cheating. If you still don't know, ask somebody what the avatar looks like. I'm sure they'd be willing to tell you so you wont kick the wrong guy.

After that, just go into the vote menu, choose the player with the avatar described before, and kick them!


Status

This is getting a bit technical for the new players, but it's the most consistent way of kicking these cheaters, especially if they stole the avatar of the actual player.

First you're going to want to enable the "Developer Console" in the advanced settings. Here's a quick vid on how to do that

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab-AWURp50k

Next you're going to want to press the tilde key (~), and type "status" in the box that shows up.

You will end up seeing a box like this. Don't worry, it looks daunting but isn't that bad.


What we are mainly looking for is the first 3 sections. The "User ID" (name) The "Unique ID" (Steam ID) and the "Time"

If there are two players with the same name, the bot is the one that ALWAYS joins later. So find both users with the same name, and see which number is lower for "Time"
Once you find the cheater, copy the entire line their name is on (ctrl + c) and paste it into the console menu (ctrl + v).
Clear out everything but the Unique ID of the user (starts with [U:***] ). and before the ID type

"callvote kick"

The command should be "callvote kick U:***"

If done correctly the vote menu should appear. Tell everyone that it is the correct person (because it is) and kick that cheater out of here!

(here's a video tutorial cus ik it may seem daunting if you've never done it before)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kpwwhTBRds


If you haven't already, Pazer has made a great program that does this automatically. I'd recommend downloading it as it does everything for you automatically (no you will not get vac banned)
https://github.com/PazerOP/tf2_bot_detector

Real Cheaters (Not every cheater is a bot / spinbotting sniper)

Nowadays due to the "bot invasion" it has been easier than ever to cheat without getting vote kicked. Most cheaters can just say "I'm not a bot" in voice chat, and a majority of people will automatically believe them. With that said, cheats all have the same settings, and after watching hundreds of cheating youtube videos, I've been able to figure out that someone is actually cheating, and not just good.

Name Command:
Cheats have the ability to change the users name in the game, while not changing it on their steam profile. This allows them to make their names slurs, curse words, or even the name of somebody else in the server without the (1) appearing.

But you can use this to your advantage. The #1 thing you should do is to check if the person has a different name than their in game one. But not just that. Steam is also really finicky with name changes, I don't know what it takes for it to be changed, but sometimes when I change my steam name it takes multiple games for the name to actually update. So what you should do is check the name history of the user. You can do this by clicking the down arrow next to the name of the user.

Examples:

Legit: (name was "ajr fan" in game, but "zenith" on steam)


Cheater: (name was WAMO in game)


*there is a very rare chance that they deleted their nickname history. But they would have had to do it after changing their name, in a tf2 pub, and again it will change within a certain amount of time. The chance of that happening unintentionally is so tiny that it's virtually impossible*


Fake Ping
This one is pretty simple. Ping fluctuates over time. Nobody's internet connection, even if it's Google Fiber, can constantly send the same amount of packets. So if you see someone with 5 ping, and it's not changing for over a minute, or if they have 1 ping (which is impossible), they're faking their ping using their software.


Bhopping (Bunny Hopping)
Bunny Hopping or Bhopping is a term for jumping frame perfectly so you don't lose momentum when strafing in the air. It was popularized decades ago, but is not something you can do in stock servers in TF2.
There is a feature for Bhopping using cheats. So if you see someone going much faster than they should be going while jumping, that's what they're doing.


Backtracking
Have you ever heard of "interp spies"? It was a term popularized by StaryKrow a few years ago, and the idea is that spies can turn their interp extremely high, making the server believe that the users hitboxes are lagging behind. (Lag compensation) This isn't a full technical analysis on the subject, but Backtracking is pretty much abusing interp.

I wouldn't normally like to advertise cheaters videos but a cheater actually made an informative video on what it is, so I'll link it here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXzkcKP_qFU
(vid is for CS:GO but it is also in tf2)

If you notice spies constantly getting backstabs far away, or while you're facing them while they're bhopping, or headshotting you way after you turned a corner, and neither your, or their ping isn't insanely high. Be suspicious of backtracking.


Killsays
A Killsay is pretty self explanatory. It is programmed so whenever the user kills someone, it will say something in chat. Don't get me wrong, I like to spam my binds too, but killsays are only accessable when you cheat.
One of the most obvious ways to spot a killsay is if the automated message being sent has the killed user's name in the message. There is no way to make a bind to grab a players name using the "say" command normally (trust me I've looked lol). So if you see an automated message that has the dead person's name right after they kill that person. That is a killsay.


Projectile Aimbot
There's a common misconception that you can only cheat as sniper. There's an even more common misconception that you can only cheat as a hitscan class, as projectiles require "prediction". Unfortunately we don't live in the early 2000s anymore, and software has become pretty good at that.
The best way to spot a projectile aimbotter is either while spectating them, or if you are against them, if the rocket / pipe they shoot is miles away from where they're actually looking. Try to see if that happens around 5 times in a game, as if it happens once, it could just be TF2 being TF2.

Conclusion

Look, I get it. Cheating is a big problem in this game nowadays. Even outside of the game, cheaters have been taking over YouTube, slowly gaining and amassing a following. Although some of them may be nice people, they are still overall hurting the community. The only thing we can do is to try to remove them from our games. But sometimes these games are far from saving. Sometimes a majority of the server is bots, or it could be cheaters queuing in a group refusing to vote kick each other. The only thing you can do at that point is to find another server.

If you want to see a full list of bots that gets updated frequently. Check this out
https://gist.github.com/wgetJane/0bc01bd46d7695362253c5a2fa49f2e9

Remember that cheating in a video game, with the sole intent to ruin others fun is a sad thing to do. Sure, you may get frustrated. Sure, there may be sometimes you want to see what it's like. Sure, the tf2 community is mega toxic nowadays. But remember that this game is incredible, although sometimes the people aren't.
Whenever I linked a cheater's video, it's for the sole purpose of information. I'm not condoning anything that these people do. But watching these videos, at least for me, was one of the best ways I was able to learn how they play, and figure out how to spot them in real games. Use their videos (that they don't get paid to make) as education. Not as inspiration.

my name is zenith, thank you for reading.

[King of Spies]

Inb4 zenny bots 😳

[Spencer]

Bhopping is actually usable ingame, as many pro players like binding the scroll wheel's up/down to jump, so they can do frame perfect hops without actually being frame perfect. I have been called a cheater for this many times, despite it just being a keybind I use to go slightly faster than everyone else. This could also be a good thing you can mention in your post.

[Raincat | レインキャット]

Nice