Nick Shaffner of Valve Software has posted a reply on the Steam forums that indicates a new, aggressive effort to ban cheaters from Half-Life/Counter-Strike.
Nick said that the Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC) has been updated eight times within the last week and a half. Although many updates target specific cheats, VAC has also been updated with more general routines to detect clan-specific or private hacks.
Responding to a recent controversy about an increase in bans, Nick's public response is that in each case, Valve has been "satisfied that use of a cheat was the direct cause of the ban"[break="full post"]
Nick said that the Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC) has been updated eight times within the last week and a half. Although many updates target specific cheats, VAC has also been updated with more general routines to detect clan-specific or private hacks.
Responding to a recent controversy about an increase in bans, Nick's public response is that in each case, Valve has been "satisfied that use of a cheat was the direct cause of the ban"[break="full post"]
Just a quick note or two on the increase of the number of VAC related bans.
We naturally expected there to be a large increase in the amount of ban related email and postings, due to the fact that we recently started updating VAC very rapidly. For instance, we've updated VAC about 8 times in the past week and a half.
In fact, not only has VAC started updating more frequently, but we also have new techniques for detecting cheats, including new generic methods for detecting clan and private cheats quite effectively.
Couple the above points with the fact that basically all cheats accessible via search engines are presently detected and banned. Even the most 'up to date' cheat sites are usually at least 48 hours behind, many are weeks or months behind.
The upshot of this is that we are banning a lot more cheaters, thus it's natural to expect a larger forum response.
Having said this, we are always extremely careful about avoiding false positives. There have only been 2 occasions during VAC's history where false positives were generated. In both cases, the error was quickly detected by our auditing tools, the bug rectified, and all false bans removed. In the case of April 1st, the false bans were only active for approximately an hour. before being lifted.
We also regularly audit people who claim to have been falsely banned by VAC. Aside from the 2 occasions mentioned above, in every situation we audited (and were able to close), we were satisfied that use of a cheat was the direct cause of the ban.
If anyone *who has posted on this thread thus far* would like me to audit their account personally, I would be happy to do so. Send your steam-id along with your forum handle to me at nicks@valvesoftware.com. Anyone else who wishes to have their account reviewed should use the standard submission form.
Thanks for your time,
Nick
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