ESEA admins mined Bitcoins on player's computers without consent, stole $3602

[Trotim]

http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1dglil/popular_competitive_gaming_league_esea_admins/

ESEA's TF2 6v6 league is one of the biggest TF2 leagues and the one with the highest prize pools. You have to pay for an account and then use their client to play matches with (e.g. for anti-cheat reasons). By inserting a Bitcoin miner into their client without telling anyone they used players' computers for intensive calculations to generate Bitcoins they then converted into USD. Not only does this cause the players higher energy costs for ESEA's gain but due to the way it was implemented it forced GPUs to run at max capacity for long periods of time which may have been the cause of bad performance and several reported hardware failures.

 

[LeSwordfish]

Guys my "gamers are completely shitty" theory just keeps getting stronger.

(Also the obligatory "lol bitcoins.")

 

[A Boojum Snark]

I suppose this won't make people actually stop using ESEA? From what I gather the guy responsible is in charge of everything so you can't really fire him. So what if it's the "only" option for competitive gaming, if half the people leave (and really, it should be more, since this would have affected everyone), something else will show up. Boo-hoo you can't have your stable and reliable matches for a few months. Make 'em crash and burn.

 

[Harribo]

Yeah, there is always the UGC 6s League people can transfer into which is free too, idk how well run it is though.

 

[Bloodhound]

Too bad that most comp players still have a shitty PC.

 

[Ælement]

TF2 has lots of leagues, but as far as i could tell, the CS comp community will be in big troubles without ESEA.

 

[LeSwordfish]

ESEA are claiming it was an accident. I'd almost believe them if they hadn't previously claimed "actually nearly nothing happened", "It was an april fools day joke" and "we got hacked." Next up: the dog ate their self-restraint.

 

[A Boojum Snark]

I don't buy for a moment that it was an accident. This isn't the kind of april fools joke you actually do, you just make an announcement saying you are doing it and then go "ha ha just kidding" the next day. Moreover, how is it a joke if they never(?) actually made a joke about it on april fools?

 

[LeSwordfish]

"In a thread dated 4/9/2013, lpkane posts in a thread discussing bitcoins:
and you wonder what the client does when you're not in a server.."

Subtle.

 

[Sel]

oh so that's why they all complain that every map lags them super duper hard loll

 

[ForbiddenDonut]

Huh.

I was clicking through ESEA threads about it in that Reddit post (not even posting because I don't have an account with them) and I got banned until November for "Malicious Activity."

The fuck was I doing that was "malicious?"

EDIT: Now it seems to have...resolved itself? I think? I have no clue what's going on with their site. Probably trying to cope with this giant shitstorm.

This is totally messed up though. I wouldn't want to be paying any of their electric bills.

 

[Pocket]

It's funny how people still think they can get away with shit like this. Because, hey, if there's one group that can be counted on to not notice dramatic increases in GPU usage, it's people who are in the middle of playing a game and are hardwired to notice even the tiniest drops in framerate, amirite?

 

[phi]

Torbull's official stance on the matter: http://play.esea.net/index.php?s=esports&d=comments&id=12692

At least one of the admins is actually being professional and not joking around with something like this.

 

[nightwatch]

I don't actually know too much about how mining works, but was it just GPUs that were affected or were they hijacking graphics cards too? I remember reading somewhere that graphics cards are more effective at mining than GPUs are.

 

[Sel]

rofl

 

[LeSwordfish]

The more I read on bitcoins, the more hilarious I find them. It's like if Andrew Ryan wanted to maintain the "Sweat of his brow" philosophy without actually doing any work, or Ayn Rand was a World Of Warcraft gold farmer.

 

[A Boojum Snark]

I don't actually know too much about how mining works, but was it just GPUs that were affected or were they hijacking graphics cards too? I remember reading somewhere that graphics cards are more effective at mining than GPUs are.

graphics card = GPU (well, some cards have more than one GPU on them, but whatever)

The more I read on bitcoins, the more hilarious I find them. It's like if Andrew Ryan wanted to maintain the "Sweat of his brow" philosophy without actually doing any work, or Ayn Rand was a World Of Warcraft gold farmer.

Eh... I'll wait and see. As strange as it initially seemed when I heard about it, now that I've understood a bit more about how they work, I really don't find them any more "hilarious" than the fiat money we all use anyway that's generated by someone at a government computer making a number bigger.

Currency is currency. It has value and worth as long as people believe it does.

 

[nightwatch]

I was mixing up CPU and GPU and probably FBI and SWAT and GNU too

 

[Micnax]

Nice of them to donate all the Bitcoin earnings to charity. And give free premium access to players who were already paying for it when it happened.

 

[Pocket]

Torbull's official stance on the matter: http://play.esea.net/index.php?s=esports&d=comments&id=12692

At least one of the admins is actually being professional and not joking around with something like this.

I can't help but notice his failure to name names. Based on what I'm seeing in that Reddit article, Ipkane is both (a) the person most likely to be behind this and (b) the only ESEA staffer that Torbull doesn't have the authority to fire. Personally, unless Torbull comes forward with the name of the culprit, I'm gonna assume it was Ipkane and this is Torbull's way of covering his ass and sweeping this whole thing under the rug.