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0 pointsdoctorpangloss1y ago0 comments

> VAC bans prevent you from playing on secured servers across all of Steam.

https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/571A-97DA-70E9-FF...

> Q: Can I use bans in other games to block users from playing in my game?

> A: No. VAC and Game bans should only prevent the user from playing on VAC secured servers in the game they received a ban in. A permanent ban should only be issued for your game if the user was caught cheating in your game.

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/webapi/ICheatReportingSer...

It's complicated. Valve has conflicting guidance on this. What is Valve's actual position? The 13 year olds who cheat also buy IAP. In their opinion, if there are a lot of cheaters, sell pay to win items.

Otherwise, the consensus is hellbanning, meaning putting all the cheaters together in a server, and VAC queries are used to achieve that.

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sfn421y ago· 2 in thread

I have 2 vac bans and they've never had any impact on anything other than the games I was banned from.

One was from letting my friend use my steam account, I wasn't using it and when I wanted to use it my password was changed and I had a vac ban in CS 1.6. He said it wasn't him, I'm not convinced.

The other was in Dungeon Defenders. The game had a confusing policy where you were allowed to cheat on the "Open" servers but not on "Ranked". You could copy your stuff from ranked to open, so I copied it and used cheat engine to test some things. Turned out you were only allowed to cheat using mods from the Steam Workshop or something like that, so I got vac banned.

Both bans are over 10 years old so things might have changed but I have never noticed any negative effects other than obviously I can't play DD or CS 1.6 online.

doctorpanglossOP1y ago

Your payment for the game was the smallest amount of collateral that was taken from you.

The cheating server situation is a similar concept to hell banning but poorly executed.

Hell banning is the status quo. If you try to play Overwatch they probably query VAC and might match make you with other people with VAC bans.

It’s hard to know without working for the game studio.

There is no hard technical solution to preventing cheating for many games. It depends how you describe insurmountable DRM or anti piracy measures, such as operating the only copy of the game’s backend server code. If people have no viable alternatives to playing on your remote servers, then you have an anti cheat solution. The net result is that all games, in a Darwinian way, start to look like this. Similarly on PS5, you cannot pirate their games practicably, so there is a vibrant single player business.

It all goes back to: are the only valid limitations on users insurmountable DRM? If we enforced copyright infringement in this or any country it would be a different story.

sfn421y ago

I play both CS and overwatch, no issues. I'm not sure I've ever met a cheater in OW, and in CS they're rare. In CSGO I was selected for the anti cheat review mechanic, is that also called overwatch? Something like that.

Seems strange that they would discriminate based on vac bans in game but not for the people selected to judge others. Then again maybe my bans were too old.

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