Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
Discussions Rules and Guidelines
Report this post
VAC bans for identifiable cheats, otherwise called known cheats. So once the cheat is known to VAC, it does not matter how many accounts they make, as they will all be banned. IP bans and HWID bans are easy to get around. Forum search for those if you wish, as that's been discussed here many times.
Those bans also have negative side effects, as innocent players can be banned by those types of bans, and they don't work anyway to ban the correct humans.
BTW I find it hilarious how this entire forum is just people asking for their bans to be appealed lol.
That also makes it hard or impossible for the user or cheat developer to know what exactly was detected, as the bans are delayed for a time, and not applied instantly. The user will not know their account is already flagged for a ban to be applied later.
And the only sure way to clean a PC after cheats have been installed, is to reformat the hard drive to clean it. Some cheats hook deep into system files and processes, and simply deleting them is often not enough. VAC will detect the code again, if that PC is used in the same way.
You would maybe be surprised at how many foolish cheaters think it only matters which account they use to cheat, not understanding that the cheats are detected from the PC that they are using, not the account itself.
Yes, it is a bit like a dog on a familiar scent, as you said. Sometimes, people do post a decent discussion here, as you have done here for example. But yes, most often, it's the same old ban appeal nonsense.
Also, VAC bans accounts from phone number sharing and Family Sharing. In the case of phone number sharing, the account does not even have to own the game, and that account will still be banned if any cheats are detected in use by an account using the same phone number.
As far as Steam/Valve goes nothing stops users from making multiple accounts. That said I'm fairly sure there are a few games on Steam that will ban new accounts if they're traced back to a previously banned account, or if they're determined to be used for smurfing.
sadly, cheaters can create new accounts, re-buy whatever game, then cheat again. I'm trying to ask Valve to stuff a cork in that, and prevent a vac banned player from creating new accounts. that would kill cheating almost overnight. but well, theres a lot of problems with the implementation, obviously.
i know some games use some means to track chronic cheaters and finish them off repeatedly, but well, these guys throw their entire paychecks at cheating, or are burning mommy and daddy's money, so it tends to continue for a long time.
despite this though, i think VAC is one of the best out there. the statistics are staggering, even the ones we pleb public users can collect even with the daily request limits.
its a good analogy. i think of it as VAC is more like an anti virus program. and the virus, is the cheaters.
its mostly automatic but its curated by a group of developers, which unfortunately cannot share many details to us because anything they tell publicly, the cheating community will use.
but, they have a devmail address to which you can snitch new cheats btw. always funny when you infiltrate a community of cheaters, take a sample of their cheat, and submit it to the VAC devmail. couple weeks later the entire community's forum is blowing up, everyone crying about vac bans and yelling at eachother over it. parasites trying to eat other parasites. never gets old.
so in that sense it might seem like a 'vac ban wave' but its really not, its just 'that many idiots were using the same cheat, and got caught' lol.
The hilarious part of cheaters coming to discuss their bans - frankly i have no idea why they think the acronym VAC is interchangeable with the word BAN. I think this is partially cheater panic and a lack of a command of english in most cases.
but well, no one said cheaters were smart. most of them are taking a terrible risk downloading questionable software from a questionable source. I know more than one dark avenger out there who releases a fake honeypot cheat to intentionally get cheaters banned.
its just a purely scum move to cheat online in a pvp game, so i say they deserve everything coming their way. its justice.
ever seen the streamers getting banned while they were streaming? one of my favorites was MissQGemini (check her legendary ban on youtube.) the ultimate trash talking female streamer, hard trashed people in her streams and in comp when they called her a cheater, and then she gets caught cheating live.
seriously, online game cheaters are really crappy people. you have to have some kind of broken mentality to be toxic to people online if you're good at a game, but its on a whole different level if you have cheats active and throw the toxicity on top of it.
Nothing happens other than the new account getting Banned as well. IP Bans (and/or Hardware bans for that matter) can be easily worked around, they are not as effective as people might think.
Understandably, the specifics of this type of information is not going to be available to the general public.
Of course, for some time now, it has been possible to actually provide cheats or signatures directly to the VAC team by way of a link provided on one of the support pages, either that currently exist or once did (I would have to search for that, but have for sure seen it before).
EDIT...Found it below
So in short, you once could and can directly provide the cheat to Valve if you think you know there is a new cheat they may not have yet.
Now, as far as what I have HEARD unofficially, VAC has the ability to flag code as "suspicious" and gain the code for play testing purposes by the VAC team.
They test the code on their own copy of the game, and if found to "give a player an unfair advantage" as Valve defines cheating specifically, then that code/cheat can be added to the database by the VAC team and then VAC can start banning accounts for using that code.
So in that case, once again, VAC would ban for a "known" (identifiable) cheat, because it is for sure known as a cheat.
VAC (automated system) would do the actual banning, but the code would be added to the database by the VAC team (humans).
I must stress that this is just what I have HEARD and have no official source to back this up.
We do know VAC is automated, so it makes sense that code and cheats could be added by a team of humans, AND that the VAC system itself would have the ability to gain the code as I explained here all on it's own.
The best thing about it, IMO, is that VAC will only ban for cheats it knows for sure are cheats as they have been "Identified" already. So mistakes are extremely rare and taken care of by VAC automatically.
EDIT.......................
This is the page that contains "how to report a new cheat" :
https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/571A-97DA-70E9-FF74#report
How do I report a new cheat?
If you know of a new cheat, especially private cheats (ones that aren't on a public website), and can provide the links or the actual binaries, please send an email with pertinent information to the following email address:
vacreview [at] valvesoftware [dot] com
All emails are read and reviewed by the VAC development team.
Sorry it's been so long, I honestly forgot about this thread lol. Full inbox, it happens.
I must stress that how the code is obtained is probably not something that we can know for sure. I have just HEARD unofficially that the VAC system itself has the ability to see strange code as "suspicious". Perhaps it's a new cheat that a player would be using but VAC does not know about it just yet.
This is verging on VACnet, a newer form of anticheat that Valve implemented a couple years ago. It uses AI deep learning behavior to "see" cheating, and in a way, does the same thing but just on a much more sophisticated level.
Theoretically, the more cheating that takes place, the more and faster it learns to spot cheating.
VACnet is a different system than VAC, though. So perhaps VAC's ability to literally grab code from a PC that is connected to a VAC secure server was the predecessor to VACnet's AI learning behavior.
Again, the specifics of this are sure to be top secret so to speak, with only a select few knowing about the inner workings under strict legal penalties for disclosing such information, I am sure.
Yes, to suggest that VAC has the ability to literally grab code it thinks "might" be suspicious or needs testing to see if it is in fact giving a player an advantage or could does seem to verge on the edge of legal issues but since the player is connecting to a VAC secure server, that as well as the SSA :
https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/
allows for it to gain the code, IF that is within its ability to do so.
Otherwise, I would have to guess that the VAC team (humans) find out about cheats through some other means, if also by simply going to cheat sites and downloading them or purchasing them on their own.
The VAC team, in this case, would ultimately decide if the code does in fact give a player an advantage, as cheating is defined by Valve. They would adhere to strict guidelines to decide this, I am only guessing. The other interesting aspect of this is, how VAC "unbans" accounts that were banned by mistake in the most rare cases.
Apparently, a code or process was found to give an advantage but later it was decided this was a mistake. This also adds to my belief that VAC can gain code on its own without human intervention. It would just perhaps be the humans that test the code on a copy of the game in question, as many games use VAC as an anticheat.
But again, the exact nature of how that works is surely not going to be something that we can know for sure. We just know that VAC is automated from the support pages, so to think it has the ability to gain cheat code on its own just makes sense to me, in addition to what I heard unofficially.
I just realized this is probably one of the most polite and intriguing conversations I've had on the forums. Ironic, considering this is VAC discussions of all places.
Nothing wrong with having a different opinion or anything, but just that people should try to base their opinions on facts, at least from what I think.
VAC is not perfect by any means, but it is a good anticheat. I have always maintained the opinion that the best feature of VAC is incredibly rare false bans, and when they do happen, they are removed automatically.
Most just think of an anticheat doing its job banning cheaters, but often enough, many don't consider the false positives that some anticheat methods can bring to innocent players.
This is why I think Valve uses this type of anticheat, as they want to be as sure as they can that the fewest false bans are issued. I once saw a user post here that they would rather see cheaters go free in games, than for one false ban to be applied on an innocent account and not automatically removed later on.
That's a bold statement, and I have to agree. When one considers that it could be their own account incorrectly banned this way, it's hard not to agree with that statement.
And this is exactly how VAC works. It's more of a middle ground to fight cheating, and due to delayed bans, cheats cannot be play tested to see if they get immediately detected or not.
Thanks for the kind words and for taking the time to post this here. Feel free to reply as you have time and you wish. Others may hopefully join in also.
It's funny also when the ban appealers, so to speak, don't even pay attention and post their unban requests in threads like this. Sooner or later it usually happens.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC6JXAO8sT4
It is not the full original but it gives a lot of info into what it does....