Do you trust VAC because Valve is a reputable company?

[Sharpie The Dragon]

Yes or no? There are several anti-cheat systems out there that give you zero power to appeal anything; It is essentially a system of guilty before proven innocent.

I do not. It seems to me that over the years a sort of culture has formed where VAC bans are considered near unanimously legitimate. Yet there is little to no evidence to back this up.

How do you know that the anti-cheat in question isn't falsely flagging users on a large scale?

How do you know that Valve will investigate or reverse these bans?

Out of the twelve million VAC banned accounts out there, how many do you believe are flagged correctly?

Where is your evidence for said above? How do you know that Valve didn't screw up thousands/millions of these bans and just abandon those that were flagged or were never even investigated?

You are never given a reason for your ban. It is simply 'Our systems detected that you cheated in a game'. Asking them to provide evidence is impossible, and attempting to make a case out of this is also impossible. You are putting your entire trust in a company not to flag your account and if you were to be flagged, to have them also investigate why the VAC ban happened.

If Valve VAC banned you today that you know that was falsely flagged, the community would overwhelmingly be in favour of the system. Yet this sub-forum is plagued with threads saying they were 'unjustly VAC banned.' I would be willing to imagine that some of these accounts are actually unfairly banned and will never be investigated.

Sadly, there is no evidence to go on for anything, even in the Reddit thread made by Gabe years ago; Don't worry; Trust us. - Over the years I have been reporting content on Steam, I have noticed a trend where reports are either ignored or backlogged by a massive amount of reports. In the L4D2 workshop for example, reports are never investigated; Because there is nobody there to go into the game and investigate the malicious content inside workshop items. I wonder if the VAC team is the same, perhaps being overextended with other things and having a really small team, and when false VAC bans trigger weeks later, they're already working on the next VAC update for a different game.

ArenaNet also had false bans that were never investigated until a certain player snooped around thanks to GDPR regulations (and even the company in question attempted to refuse this request).

I can't even compare VAC to anything else. Even Youtube's terrible copyright system has some sort of appeal process. You literally are at the mercy of a company with a trust system.

[Snaggle]

I trust Valve enough to believe they act on false bans in a timely manner and not just because they said so but because I've been browsing these discussions and the old Steam forums (SPUF) long enough to see for myself.

It is documented on many websites (wikipedia included) that VAC has banned many accounts that weren't cheating. I've seen it myself from just 1 account here and there to thousands of accounts when the MW2 ban wave hit. But these accounts were unbanned within a few days.

I don't deny that VAC makes mistakes, I've seen it happen and it will happen again in the future. But I'm also confident enough in Valve to audit the bans frequently and to unban those that were wrongly banned.

Should it ever be revealed that Valve were not investigating bans properly or were knowingly not unbanning accounts it would be a massive scandal for them. It would cost a lot of money and damage their reputation.

[C²C^Guyver |NZB|]

How can I find out what I was VAC banned for?
We do not disclose the cheats that were detected while connected to a VAC secured server that resulted in a VAC ban. We have detailed records for each VAC ban, however, releasing this information would only benefit cheat developers. The VAC team regularly investigates claims of false VAC bans to increase the effectiveness of Valve Anti-Cheat.

If a VAC ban is issued incorrectly it will be automatically removed by our servers.

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=4044-QDHJ-5691&l=english#reason



Unwritten Rules of Conduct


Within any online community there are a set of common sense rules that should always be followed. Typically they fall into multiple categories of the previous sets of rules.

Unwritten Rules
Do not post any of the following:


VAC Bans are permanent: Do not ask to be unbanned

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=143962136


All of these unban threads aren't supposed to be here.....not our fault people refuse to read rules.


This forum is for VAC discussion, not ban appeals.

[Sharpie The Dragon]

Diposting pertama kali oleh Snaggle:

I trust Valve enough to believe they act on false bans in a timely manner and not just because they said so but because I've been browsing these discussions and the old Steam forums (SPUF) long enough to see for myself.

It is documented on many websites (wikipedia included) that VAC has banned many accounts that weren't cheating. I've seen it myself from just 1 account here and there to thousands of accounts when the MW2 ban wave hit. But these accounts were unbanned within a few days.

I don't deny that VAC makes mistakes, I've seen it happen and it will happen again in the future. But I'm also confident enough in Valve to audit the bans frequently and to unban those that were wrongly banned.

Fair enough.

Diposting pertama kali oleh Snaggle:

Should it ever be revealed that Valve were not investigating bans properly or were knowingly not unbanning accounts it would be a massive scandal for them. It would cost a lot of money and damage their reputation.

The problem is, how would it ever be revealed? They are the only ones that seem to know.

[C²C^Guyver |NZB|]

Diposting pertama kali oleh Sharples:

Diposting pertama kali oleh Snaggle:

I trust Valve enough to believe they act on false bans in a timely manner and not just because they said so but because I've been browsing these discussions and the old Steam forums (SPUF) long enough to see for myself.

It is documented on many websites (wikipedia included) that VAC has banned many accounts that weren't cheating. I've seen it myself from just 1 account here and there to thousands of accounts when the MW2 ban wave hit. But these accounts were unbanned within a few days.

I don't deny that VAC makes mistakes, I've seen it happen and it will happen again in the future. But I'm also confident enough in Valve to audit the bans frequently and to unban those that were wrongly banned.

Fair enough.

Diposting pertama kali oleh Snaggle:

Should it ever be revealed that Valve were not investigating bans properly or were knowingly not unbanning accounts it would be a massive scandal for them. It would cost a lot of money and damage their reputation.

The problem is, how would it ever be revealed? They are the only ones that seem to know.

Everything is out there these days...someone would find it.


and...
https://web.archive.org/web/20170518101403/http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showpost.php?p=33811431&postcount=36

[Sharpie The Dragon]

Diposting pertama kali oleh C²C^Guyver |NZB|:

How can I find out what I was VAC banned for?
We do not disclose the cheats that were detected while connected to a VAC secured server that resulted in a VAC ban. We have detailed records for each VAC ban, however, releasing this information would only benefit cheat developers. The VAC team regularly investigates claims of false VAC bans to increase the effectiveness of Valve Anti-Cheat.

If a VAC ban is issued incorrectly it will be automatically removed by our servers.

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=4044-QDHJ-5691&l=english#reason



Unwritten Rules of Conduct


Within any online community there are a set of common sense rules that should always be followed. Typically they fall into multiple categories of the previous sets of rules.

Unwritten Rules
Do not post any of the following:


VAC Bans are permanent: Do not ask to be unbanned

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=143962136

Yes, Valve claims that they do no disclose information based on benefiting cheaters, yet something can be said that giving no information to the potential victim is equally as bad, because if such a flag was never investigated by Valve, there would be nobody else to look into it.

Diposting pertama kali oleh C²C^Guyver |NZB|:

All of these unban threads aren't supposed to be here.....not our fault people refuse to read rules.


This forum is for VAC discussion, not ban appeals.

To be fair, you are given conflicted statements. One saying that VAC bans cannot be lifting by Steam support, and another that states that you must make Steam support aware of the issue; And given the fact that there could be false flagging out there, users would understandably be pissed.

To me, Valve seems to be overextended. Too many users are on Steam for the number of employees they have, (last I checked it would around 300-400), and this is for everything regarding Steam, not just VAC. I have suspicions that given all VAC games out there that are still updated, only a handful of VAC people are actually involved with it.

[Snaggle]

Diposting pertama kali oleh Sharples:

The problem is, how would it ever be revealed? They are the only ones that seem to know.

If it were the case that Valve were doing that I would assume the only way to know would be if someone from Valve came out and said so.

I guess there has to be some element of trust between Valve and the consumer just like with almost any company/government or whatever else you can think of.

Like I said I've been around the VAC forums for a long time and I've seen your average Joe get unbanned. If Valve are capable of investigating and reversing his ban I'm confident enough they do it for the rest.

Slightly related, but here is a thread from last year where a person came to these discussions claiming to be falsely banned. Turns out he was right and his ban was removed.

https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/9/3315110799620432332/

Diposting pertama kali oleh Sharples:

To be fair, you are given conflicted statements. One saying that VAC bans cannot be lifting by Steam support, and another that states that you must make Steam support aware of the issue; And given the fact that there could be false flagging out there, users would understandably be pissed.

It's not conflicting. It means exactly what it says. Support cannot remove bans but you should make them aware if you think your ban is a mistake. Support will forward your concerns to the VAC team.

[C²C^Guyver |NZB|]

Diposting pertama kali oleh Sharples:

To be fair, you are given conflicted statements. One saying that VAC bans cannot be lifting by Steam support, and another that states that you must make Steam support aware of the issue; And given the fact that there could be false flagging out there, users would understandably be pissed.

"....and another that states that you must make Steam support aware of the issue"

i said no such thing, nor does it say that anywhere, because Steam Support cannot remove VAC bans.


Get out of game and start reading.

[Snaggle]

It actually does say you should contact Support in the pinned thread which is linked in almost all threads posted here.

If you believe you have been banned for an unjust reason then you must raise the issue with Steam support.

It's valid advice and users should contact Support if they feel their ban is a mistake.

[Sharpie The Dragon]

Diposting pertama kali oleh C²C^Guyver |NZB|:

Diposting pertama kali oleh Sharples:

To be fair, you are given conflicted statements. One saying that VAC bans cannot be lifting by Steam support, and another that states that you must make Steam support aware of the issue; And given the fact that there could be false flagging out there, users would understandably be pissed.

"....and another that states that you must make Steam support aware of the issue"

i said no such thing, nor does it say that anywhere, because Steam Support cannot remove VAC bans.


Get out of game and start reading.

The link you gave me contained the following information:

I've been VAC banned
VAC bans are permanent, non-negotiable, and cannot be removed by Steam Support.

But yet if you believe you are falsely VAC banned, you are told to direct yourself to Steam Support to make them aware of the issue.

[C²C^Guyver |NZB|]

The flipside of that is....users are always going to use that excuse of 'it says right there that I should do this if I think it's a mistake" then when Support stops replying, the user is like "Valve screwed me"

The actual end to that story is, the ban is correct.


Correct bans outweigh false positives....every regular here knows this.

[C²C^Guyver |NZB|]

.........and EVERY person that posts here says their ban is false. Very few admit to cheating.

[Sharpie The Dragon]

Diposting pertama kali oleh C²C^Guyver |NZB|:

The flipside of that is....users are always going to use that excuse of 'it says right there that I should do this if I think it's a mistake" then when Support stops replying, the user is like "Valve screwed me"

The actual end to that story is, the ban is correct.


Correct bans outweigh false positives....every regular here knows this.

Maybe, maybe not. We do not have sufficient evidence for this. The VAC team could get the request via Steam support, could be hours, days, weeks; We don't know. We also don't know how many reports were about VAC. It could in the hundreds, thousands.

Investigating these, in combination with the low staff and amount of games, makes me really question how trustworthy they actually are. I understand that it will hurt them economically (though I doubt with a distribution platform as massive as Steam, it'd hardly put a dent in it). But rather at the fact that the work isn't being done, the investigation on the false flag never happened, or that it was abandoned entirely.

I'm also seeing the same people month after month in Left 4 Dead 2 consistently evade VAC on secured servers, it looks like these priorities are focused on more demanding games instead, this tells me they're lacking in people.

[Sharpie The Dragon]

Diposting pertama kali oleh C²C^Guyver |NZB|:

.........and EVERY person that posts here says their ban is false. Very few admit to cheating.

On a scale as big as Steam and as dis-informational as Valve, the same can be said to the system.

[C²C^Guyver |NZB|]

You have a VAC ban somewhere, so it's not hard to see where this is coming from or why you made this thread. Further, if you're so distrustful of VAC and Valve, why have you spent 8 years on Steam?

[Snaggle]

Diposting pertama kali oleh Sharples:

I'm also seeing the same people month after month in Left 4 Dead 2 consistently evade VAC on secured servers, it looks like these priorities are focused on more demanding games instead, this tells me they're lacking in people.

Honestly that's just business priorities in action and you'll get that with almost any company.

L4D2 is an old game now and generates little revenue for Valve. CSGO and DOTA are the big players these days and it's in Valves interest to focus their energy on these titles over the others. Valve isn't going to hire a big group of devs for each and every game that uses VAC. They are a business afterall and a business needs to make money. Hiring extra people to work on detecting cheats for a game with a small userbase compared to others isn't exactly the best choice.

Diposting pertama kali oleh Sharples:

Investigating these, in combination with the low staff and amount of games, makes me really question how trustworthy they actually are.

Neither you, me or anyone else here knows how the VAC team investigate bans. To assume it's down to staff or that bans are manually checked or whatever is simply guess work. It might be that way, or it might be that a system that has been in existence for 10+ years actually has a fairly quick and streamlined method for dealing with what could be hundreds of potential support requests each day.