PSA: Comp Matchmaking Can Break Your Account

[SpookyVerkaufer]

PSA: Comp Matchmaking Can Break Your Account

Posted by DarkNecrid

Since the original thread this is based on is confusing people and the title of the original means people don't click on it much, I want to kind of build awareness to this issue because it has been on-going for what is soon to be 6 days with no Valve response through every channel on offer and if it doesn't get fixed soon it is better more people are at least aware of the problem, because the longer this goes on the higher of a chance you can fuck yourself on playing matches.

Simply put, there is a problem in competitive matchmaking. The only steps any of the afflicted have in common is they close the game either during the loading process of a competitive matchmaking game at some point or they just got done playing a competitive MM game (rank up or no rank up apparently) and close the game and it causes TF2 to refuse to load with the error "CUtlLinkedList overflow (memory allocation error)". This error isn't actually important, more on that later.

Things that have been done by various people to attempt to fix this problem:
* Verifying game cache. (includes deleting shared files like Item Schema)
* Reinstalling/updating drivers.
* Deleting Steam & TF2 and reinstalling.
* Wiping their entire computer and reinstalling.
* Using different OS's.
* Using an entirely different computer and reinstalling.

None of these help as the error seems to be (by my best guess) a corrupt file on Valve's end, at the account level. If you use any other account your game will run fine. If you use the afflicted account on any computer (even a brand new computer that has never run Team Fortress 2 before, with Steam Cloud off), it will crash. The only way to launch TF2 successfully is to force Steam into actual offline mode which means you can only play on VAC Insecure servers with no item server support, as forcing Steam into actual offline mode will make Team Fortress 2 not make a network connection to Valve.

There is no known fix. One or two people have had it fix for them after a period of days with them doing nothing special, but other people have been afflicted for longer with no cure.

The reason the error doesn't matter is because it makes no sense and thanks to the original threads problem, it's obvious something is messed up with TF2's error handling, as Barycenter's problem had nothing to do with memory allocation errors or a memory leak or anything, just a corrupt Item Schema which normally has its own special VERY SPECIFIC error message. Obviously there wouldn't be a persistent memory leak or memory allocation error on PCs that have never even had TF2 installed, but then magically just be okay on another Steam account.

The only way to avoid this foolproof until Valve fixes it is to not play competitive matchmaking at all, or else you risk breaking your account, or if you really want to do it on an alt like I did because this bug is bad.

If a Valve employee happens to stumble on this one instead of the other thread, here's a list of dumps:
http://www.filedropper.com/dumps
https://www.dropbox.com/s/oru29o24qrye4g7/crash_hl2.exe_20160722185710_1.dmp?dl=0
https://puu.sh/qaQh1/8f8326c7e6.dmp
http://www.filedropper.com/crashhl2exe201607250601391
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/egj4vvhpb2yzugc/AAA-v87el2uJxJnQDmeCWAuva?dl=0
http://puu.sh/qdJeQ/3dfdef5e57.dmp
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ngnfndjzf0ly8d3/AABdRdEYq_8emPikz1DvQ63na?dl=0
http://puu.sh/qevI8/be6a2f6e07.rar

e:
If you are afflicted by this issue please post dumps of it and I'll add it to the OP. You can find dumps in your steam/dumps folder, they'll be called hl2.

If you aren't afflicted but want to actually be useful, email Valve employees about this issue, talk to them on Steam and direct them to this thread, anything to get visibility on it.

Source http://www.teamfortress.tv/35062/comp-mm-can-break-tf2

[Mengh.]

That title is pretty misleading. It seems that only TF2 won't load, not break an account of any sorts. 

Original thread: http://www.teamfortress.tv/35062/comp-mm-can-break-tf2