BOOM! Headshot! Steam VAC Bans 40,000

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
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It seems as though cheaters love a Steam Sale as much as the rest of us. Over 40,000 Steam accounts were VAC banned the day after the sale ended. The graph is fairly impressive.

July 5 was the last day of the Steam Summer Sale; subsequently, Valve cracked down on cheaters the next morning, knowing that they’d want to get their game on another account at a discount. Cheaters have been an unrelenting force, especially during the summer, in Dota 2 and even more prominently in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive because of this cheap workaround.
 
They got what they deserved for being dumb enough to chat on their main accounts.
 
You mean being dumb enough to cheat at all.
no, they probably ment it the way they said it. Folks today, many including church going folks, think it ok if you DL your favorite mp3 by Elvis or whoever without having to pay for it. It's not called the Worldwide WEB for nothing ...
 
Have there ever been any false positives with VAC? It'd be pretty upsetting to have your account banned if you never actually cheated with no way of pleading your case or getting it re-instated.
 
I wonder which game they were banned for.. (hope it's lame cheat bots in TF2)
 
I don't see how you can get to this number this fast without false positives, but I don't know their algorithm for determining it. No way it's a person creating that list.
 
I don't see how you can get to this number this fast without false positives, but I don't know their algorithm for determining it. No way it's a person creating that list.
On a normal day they issue 3,000 to 4,000 VAC bans. The algo's did'nt change, just the number of cheaters.
 
KarsusTG - Steam has an API you can pull data from. There also includes a 'vac ban' flag. Pretty simple to pull data, compare, and get a number.
 
Take the sales and... wait for it.. sale almost over...BANNED!
 
Have there ever been any false positives with VAC? It'd be pretty upsetting to have your account banned if you never actually cheated with no way of pleading your case or getting it re-instated.

If you run steam from within a VM it violates VAC...even if you don't do anything to cheat.
 
If you run steam from within a VM it violates VAC...even if you don't do anything to cheat.

What the hell?
So does that mean if you run steam from a VM, you are likely to get a VAC ban?
...or is it a just a violation of terms and condtions?

I guess I'm asking if it's likely to occur, simply from using a VM?
...if so - that seems pretty retarded (as VM's can be really useful for lots of things - I made Steam OS VM a while back, but never got around to actually using it).
 
Awesome business model.

40k end-user revenue and zero strain on the infrastructure to handle those people.

Pretty sure this happens with every sale.
 
I've run Steam through Parallels on the Mac, and still have an account in good standing.

This is one of the reasons why I've moved over to consoles mainly for FPSs. I'm just hoping for the day when they allow real mouse and keyboards, as I'm terrible with a controller.
 
The VM thing concerns me. Why would they even care about that, especially if I'm, say, on a Mac and want to run some low-spec Windows games.
 
I don't see how you can get to this number this fast without false positives, but I don't know their algorithm for determining it. No way it's a person creating that list.
A big part of it these days is simply smurfing the hack forums and waiting for the cheats to reach critical mass and then issuing a ban wave. There's no room for false positives, they already had the accounts flagged with certifiable detection of a cheat Valve had in their possession.
 
They got what they deserved for being dumb enough to chat on their main accounts.
some of them have no choice. Some girl gamer got caught cheating on stream because she didnt hide all her hack GUI's and had full blown wallhax running in game on stream lol. This bitch was making money from idiotic twitch donators. Heck probably making a damn living. But this is her job or whatever so she has to use her main account. Really frustrating too because she made PSA's prior to getting caught basically saying "look just because im a girl doesnt mean im cheating, you guys gotta quit thinking everyone who's better than you cheats" after receiving hack accusations, all the while cheating the entire time. Fucking cunt.
 
Taking it personal are ya. lol
People like her just made it much harder on the rest of us, especially since I didnt know hax could be hidden from streams. Pro-gamer streams were supposed to be the proof of skill, only to learn that hax can be configured to hide their overlays so the stream never catches their elements in the video buffer. I've had friends point me to certain streams and say "hey bro this guy has to be hacking right?" and I'm like "damn thats some oddly inconsistent aim, goes from smooth tracking to jittery at all the right times, looks like he followed someone through a wall inadvertently, but cmon he's streaming, he cant be hacking, he wouldnt be hacking on stream". Apparently anything is game now.
 
People like her just made it much harder on the rest of us, especially since I didnt know hax could be hidden from streams. Pro-gamer streams were supposed to be the proof of skill, only to learn that hax can be configured to hide their overlays so the stream never catches their elements in the video buffer. I've had friends point me to certain streams and say "hey bro this guy has to be hacking right?" and I'm like "damn thats some oddly inconsistent aim, goes from smooth tracking to jittery at all the right times, looks like he followed someone through a wall inadvertently, but cmon he's streaming, he cant be hacking, he wouldnt be hacking on stream". Apparently anything is game now.
The youtubes and twitches are probably not your most reliable sources for truth, justice and the Armenian way.
 
People like her just made it much harder on the rest of us, especially since I didnt know hax could be hidden from streams. Pro-gamer streams were supposed to be the proof of skill, only to learn that hax can be configured to hide their overlays so the stream never catches their elements in the video buffer. I've had friends point me to certain streams and say "hey bro this guy has to be hacking right?" and I'm like "damn thats some oddly inconsistent aim, goes from smooth tracking to jittery at all the right times, looks like he followed someone through a wall inadvertently, but cmon he's streaming, he cant be hacking, he wouldnt be hacking on stream". Apparently anything is game now.

It's been like that for awhile (at least the past 6 years). Even watching a person first hand and not seeing anything doesn't mean that they're not cheating. There are cheats out there with absolutely no HUD, and have been used in pro tournaments, that are subtle and used mainly for getting those hard shots.

You've got a problem that there are two groups of players who make it harder for everyone (excluding the cheaters). The type who accuse everyone and anyone, and the type who think that cheats don't exist. Several people have gone through accumulated games, and they pretty much agree that 5% of the players are using cheats. They'll come back a few months, or even a year later, and go through ever player to see who has acquired a VAC ban. Now, this isn't perfect by any means, as the player could have been cheating and gotten banned in another game, but one common line of thought is a cheater is a cheater, and because they are known to cheat in Overwatch, why should I trust that they're legit in Counterstrike? But 5% still means that you will run into a cheater every 3-4 matches in CS:GO. Now, this too isn't perfect, as you could have one match with 8 cheaters, and 24 in a row that are totally clean.

And there was a thread on reddit a few years ago, where the person posted a Spot the Aimbot in Quake 3, and half the people chose wrong. Even amongst the people who got it correct, there were a few people who admitted they just guessed.

The only real way you're not going to have cheaters is if the actual system is locked down and users don't have access (consoles), or if you provide a system to a person to play on, and you watch them like a hawk.
 
Cs go should be rewritten for multiple reasons. The physics in that game are mind boggling bad as well as the tick rate.

Cheating is just icing on the cake.
 
I don't see how you can get to this number this fast without false positives, but I don't know their algorithm for determining it. No way it's a person creating that list.
Vac bans aren't not always instant typically they will discover a cheat and confirm many cheaters as possible and then ban in a wave. Makes it harder for hackers to develop their hacks as well because of it.
 
The VM thing concerns me. Why would they even care about that, especially if I'm, say, on a Mac and want to run some low-spec Windows games.
afaik the vac bans are only when you play certain games in competitive/ranked matches...i dont' think they care if you play single player or oddball games in a vm.

My son has been playing solo lego star wars for hundreds of hours over the last year, streaming from a vm to a steam link with an xbox 360 controller. 0 issues...
 
I've run Steam through Parallels on the Mac, and still have an account in good standing.

This is one of the reasons why I've moved over to consoles mainly for FPSs. I'm just hoping for the day when they allow real mouse and keyboards, as I'm terrible with a controller.
Anyone who believes they are safe from cheats by playing on consoles instead is incredibly naive.
 
Have there ever been any false positives with VAC? It'd be pretty upsetting to have your account banned if you never actually cheated with no way of pleading your case or getting it re-instated.

Actually yes. I got banned due to glitches with the installer of Punk Buster long ago because of different versions being installed by different games and they reversed it after I had them look into it. They were reasonable about it all. Although I don't know how it all works today in comparison as that was quite a long time ago.
 
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