Is TSA Dead?

Hey Everyone

I've noticed that this forum is dead. None of the game boosting areas have people willing to Help. Its kinda disappointing to see that.

The difference is simply that since the games are on steam as compared to console there is no need for an external site to ask for boosting.
Most of the time you'll see more active discussions for boosting in the steam discussion forum for that game.

Think another issue for TSA compared to the others nothing is valued properly, likely cause all the spam games but even one that aren't are labelled so low in term on score compared to TA and TT.

Other than the people who can get away with blatant cheating of their profile statistics here where it's likely a competition between them to remain at the top of the leaderboard, I think a lot of people registered just to see where they placed on said leaderboard and then moved on. I check in every so often, but there's other alternatives for boosting achievements or finding gaming session buddies, including other websites which have much more fairer moderation.

No offense to the website creator, but TSA is kind of a joke simply due to its implementation of a leaderboard and how it is managed. This is because many of the top 100 people have very obviously relied on third-party tools such as Steam Achievement Manager but are allowed to remain unmarked from non-stat tracking status where it would thereby remove them from the leaderboard. It sort of destroys any credibility of this being a serious website for just about anything when there's apparent favoritism and bias. It also wouldn't surprise me if many of them are actually part of the moderator and administrator team and so they are immune to punishment. But I do think that does create an impression on your average users and they might just go elsewhere.

My account was even marked as such because a long time ago I joined an achievement server on Team Fortress 2 thinking that I could find some people to help with boosting, and ended up typing a console command that, unbeknownst to me at the time, unlocked all of my missing achievements back in like 2014. I could have asked moderators to remove the game from my profile but most of the achievements were actually obtained legitimately and at that point, I realized how corrupt the system here was as pretty much everybody else 'cheated' their TF2 achievements similarly. There's definitely special treatment for certain users.

I can't even lodge reports against any of them (one of them is on the top 5 slot but I'm not going to point out any names) even though there's multiple games in their 100% completion list with a 1-minute playtime track. Sometimes somebody will have completed a video game with a suspiciously fast playtime and you go to look at their achievement unlock times on their profile and it's hidden information so you can't prove your suspicion. Some people I've reported before and yet they still remain at-large. There's obviously an internal issue where certain people are given protection or a guaranteed spot and so anybody else who surpasses their leaderboard ranking will be removed so as to not upset an ego, or something. They quickly found a way to remove me from the leaderboard when I was position 250 or so about two years ago to having become top 70; granted, I was going to ask to be removed at some point anyway as I didn't care much for it as a feature, and didn't really need people snooping around to try and find my Twitch stream or YouTube channel, etc.

But leaderboards are innately competitive and when you can't keep the competition fair, it results in TSA having the reputation that it does among achievement hunters. People recommending something like AStats (which I've registered on with no issue despite my apparently having "time duplicate" achievements according to this website) will result in people just joining that community instead.

In all honesty this site has died due to the admins allowing ridiculous amounts of cheating to go on with no punishment whatsoever.

As Placenta Salad said, TA Score and the leaderboards are inherently a competition, with people wanting to be proud of their positioning and score. However, even a cursory glance of the profiles of the top 300ish players on the leaderboards show that the overwhelming majority of them are both using achievement spam games that allow you to unlock thousands of achievements in mere minutes (which even at their tiny TA score of 10 still means your getting 50,000-100,000 in a couple minutes with each game) as well as plenty of use of third party software to unlock achievements that they didn't legitimately get.

It's blatantly obvious if the admins would take even 5 minutes to look, plenty of the top players have games where they've unlocked every achievement in the game at the exact same time, a clear indicator of using third party software to spoof achievements. Similarly, while I'm not going to name and shame for fear of getting banned, I have personally seen tens of dozens of profiles in the top 200 players on the leaderboards that have unlocked achievements in games faster than is humanly possible.

A perfect example of this was a a guy I found in the top 150 who had completed a game that I am intimately familiar with as it was one of the first games I ever completed, that being Unturned. I completed Unturned legitimately in roughly 90 hours, which is right in the average completion time listed on the site. This man completed it in less than a quarter of that time. Now this in itself isn't a surefire guarantee that he was cheating, however when you go deeper and look at the achievements, it removes all doubt. As an example of this, the time between when this individual unlocked the achievements for killing 100 and 1000 zombies was a mere 106 minutes, meaning this man was killing on average a zombie every 8 seconds for almost two hours straight, something that I can definitively state is physically impossible without cheating. The only way to even approach that level of zombies killed in such a short period of time takes a horde beacon which is an endgame item that takes very high skill levels and tons of materials to craft, something that he wouldn't be able to get in the less than 2.5 hours since he unlocked this very first achievement (which is for merely loading up the map), especially when almost 2 hours of that 2.5 hours would have needed to be spent killing those zombies, so this man somehow managed to loot thousands of rounds of ammo, a high tier gun, and all the rare crafting mats required to make 8-9 horde beacons as well as nearly max out his skills in roughly 30 minutes, something that would take most player several hours.

Or then there's my personal favorite, the fact that he unlocked getting 1000 headshot kills BEFORE he unlocked getting 1000 kills total... explain that one to me.

So in summary, why would people continue using this site when their score and leaderboard position are meaningless as someone can come along and just use third party software or achievement farming games to overtake you in mere minutes? Why would people continue using this site when their leaderboard position is probably 300-400 positions lower than it should be if the admins would actually remove all the cheaters?

If you suspect someone of cheating and/or using third-party software, please use the report function on the suspects profile. The IM actively checks all reports and acts accordingly.

We do have an automated system that flags suspicious unlocks, but we need the communities help in finding the harder-to-detect profiles.

Honestly no offense but I'm gonna call cap on that. As I said, there are dozens of accounts in the top 2 to 3 hundred on the leaderboard that even a cursory glance shows they used third party software and no doubt these accounts have been reported dozens of times yet still remain tracked for the leaderboards.

In my opinion based on the flagrant cheating that I've seen getting through, there's only two possibilities as to why:

A) There is no automated system and the manual reports aren't taken seriously. I mean seriously, I have seen profiles on the leaderboard with games that have every achievement unlocked at the exact same time down to the second. If your automated system can't detect that then what exactly does it detect? Likewise if a manual review after a report can't determine that someone unlocking hundreds of achievements all at once isn't legit then how useful are your manual checks? Hell, I found an account in the top 100 that supposedly completed both Mass Effect 3 and Titanfall 2 in less than a minute. If your automated system and manual reviews can't realize that's BS... I don't know what to say.

B) Like placenta said above, there's some special treatment going on between the TSA staff and the people at the top leaderboard positions where their obvious cheating is overlooked. Let's talk about that same person in the top 100 that I mentioned above. There is no way you can honestly tell me that if TSA does have automated systems to detect cheaters and manual reviews that both work at finding and banning cheaters when there is someone in the top 100 with multiple games completed in less than a minute unless there's people on the staff that are specifically protecting these people from being banned.

EDIT (11/20/23): Also, BS on that claim that whole "the IM actively checks all reports and acts accordingly." part. Remember that particular user that I mentioned above who had several games completed in less than a minute? Yeah, when I was checking their profile before initially writing this comment, I went to go report them only for it to tell me that they had already been reported. That was 2 weeks ago and it STILL says they already have a pending report, so the report on that individual has sat untouched for AT MINIMUM two weeks. Doesn't seem very "active" to me.

I also filed reports against three other users with clear, inarguable evidence of cheated achievements 4 days ago now and none of them have been touched either, so we'll see how long those go without being handled.

I can see why the site is struggling to gain traction, since Steam itself has a community section for forums, guides, achievements, etc. The insane amount of ads probably doesn't help, either. I mean... without an ad-blocker it looks like your browser has been hijacked or something. Why would anyone stick around?

That said, the layout and functionality of TSA is infinitely better than Steam (in my opinion.) So it's a bit of a shame.

Well, it feels extremely dead lately. I know it's holiday season and all but none of the games added to the missing achivements thread has been updated all december, none of the people who asked for a Full rescan in December has gotten one.- Bit quiet i'd say

Compared to what I remember the site being a few years back, yeah, feels pretty dead... I'll keep using it for all the neat features it has, so I hope it will at least be mantained :')) Those missing achievements are bothering me a little for this reason, ngl :'))

Definitely report suspicious users. Any "cursory glance" can find cheaters, but you still have to report them. the people running the site aren't looking for cheaters, they are trying to keep the site running.
The automated flagging system is not great, unless they are unlocking discontinued achievements.
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Also, all i can say is - don't focus on the leaderboards.
Stick to you and your friends profiles, and you'll have a better time.
Cheaters are going to cheat, and even though valve has paid employees working around the clock, you still see leaderboards in their games chalk full of hacked scores and cheaty cheatertons.

This site is run by volunteers, so it may be slow to deal with them, but things do get done.
They've even asked for more volunteers recently on their discord, so i'm sure the backlog's atrocious. 80,000 people's accounts and posts aren't an easy thing to manage, not to mention adding and managing all the achievements for all of the games. All for free.

Only 5 people are listed as staff on their discord.
If there's 5 people checking the site a week - then forum moderation, new and old game achievement updates, "help this is broken"s, and rescans take precedence over "i think this guys a cheater".
That's just the way it has to be.
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As for boosting groups on the site, i've been on here for two years and i've never tried to use it for that feature. Steam forums are frequented by players of that game, and i myself post on those to find partners.
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Lastly, the site's not dead, you're reading this right now.
And writing some guides can't hurt either, could only really help site traffic. ;d

I can address some of the points brought up about reports and investigations.

-Admins and moderators are not part of Investigations, so as far as I am aware there is no collusion or special treatment of top leaderboard ranked users.
-As of writing this, there is no automated system for flagging suspicious users. Only reports are acted on.
-Not everyone checks the site on a regular basis. Reported users are given 7 days between each response. Along with doing the actual investigating, reports on average take a minimum of 7 days to process.
-Sometimes people are unaware of all of the methods available for achievement hunting on Steam. Cross-platform save importing, offline play, depot downloading, in-game console usage, multiple instances (online & offline), custom servers, etc.
Achievements unlocked with these methods will sometimes look suspicious.
-There is a cooldown on a user when an investigation is complete. This cooldown lasts for 3 months, and they are not able to be reported again within that timeframe.

Hope that clears some things up. You can always drop by Investigations Questions Forum to ask any questions.