Talk:Valve Anti-Cheat

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Isn't the external link kinda stupid since it references Wikipedia? 86.142.104.176 13:34, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

You are quite right. I've removed it. --Tom Edwards 14:12, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] November Bannings 2006

Do you think that it may be a good idea to have a link to where Valve stated that 10,000 accounts had been flagged i.e the 18th Of Nov 2006 weekly news update?

As with this, you're missing the footnotes that provide that exact information you want. --Tom Edwards 12:01, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "Is Valve Banning Innocent Steam User Accounts?"

What do people make of this? I've seen more than enough falsified crap on the VAC forums to dismiss it, but their claims that the accounts are unbanned a few days after the alleged infraction make me uncertain. The post is from a year ago, but the comments go up to 2006-11-11. --Tom Edwards 23:02, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

I think there's a large disparity between actual Valve staff and the people that run their support system and forums (generally, it appears that some of the people writing FAQ questions for the support system are also forum moderators). The moderators/support workers don't really understand too much about what's going on but they're very vocal and will defend Valve to the point of locking threads, deleting posts, and posting outright lies. If you actually get to talk to someone within Valve, they're usually a lot more understanding and reasonable because they're smart enough to know that mistakes can and do happen, and no system is perfect. They also have enough technical knowledge to give decent advice rather than the completely misleading stuff given out in the FAQ/on the forums (eg. "VAC only bans for modifications to game DLL/EXE files"). I don't think anyone can really claim that false positive bans are impossible at this point (though the Steam forum moderators/support staff continue to do so) since there have been several separate occurrences of them throughout VAC's history. I don't remember anyone on Valve's staff ever claiming false positives were impossible -- just that their new scanning methods made them more unlikely than before (before meaning the time when they banned for every hook or memory corruption, before the HLAmp bans). I would give Valve the benefit of the doubt and simply discount claims made in their FAQ/by their forum moderators.

In this instance, while the story isn't verifiable there doesn't really seem as if there'd be any reason for an actual cheater to claim that he was banned and subsequently unbanned at a later date. I remember reading a few threads to this effect on the Steam forums as well so I think it's pretty likely to have happened and been relatively widespread, though whether the exact cause was a problem with VAC's cheat detection or a problem with the banning system I'm not sure. Deaf-mute 09:50, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

Was there a specific time when these ban reversals were taking place? --Tom Edwards 15:26, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure of the time, or whether the problem was with the VAC system itself or just the Steam client. It seemed that different people claimed to be affected over a period of a few months. Valve haven't talked about it at all and I don't think any technical information or reliable data is available. Deaf-mute 22:31, 8 December 2006 (UTC)