So How Good Is VAC

[Phoenix]

I can never remember COD4 who was controlled by Punkbuster being riddled with cheats like Black Ops 2 is. Night after night I just want a few games with friends and all we see are blatent cheats. So my answer is how good is the VAC system on Steam because so far i`m not that impressed TBH ???

[Satoru]

You can ask all the people on BF3 how 'good' PB is at keeping cheaters out there. Aka about as good as any other game.

[ KARR™]

Satoru님이 먼저 게시:

You can ask all the people on BF3 how 'good' PB is at keeping cheaters out there. Aka about as good as any other game.

BF3 isn't that bad. Although it is ironic to come here and read "omgz vac is soooo n0000b! Y u no use teh punkbuster" and then go onto battlelog (which... is dangerous in itself) and read "OOmgzzz pb is the (&%* VAC is so much better!"

Although DICE did allow people to have proper server admins, which does help a great deal in cleaning up people quickly!

[Zefar]

Cheaters flock to games where they can own up people a lot easily. Modern Warfare series just wins on this.

In BF3 you have tanks and then the enemy can't just kill him with a rifle. There are still cheaters in it but it's not small because of PB. It's due to other reasons.

But a good way to point how good VAC is, is by saying this. It's banned over 1.5 million Steam accounts.
http://vacbanned.com/view/statistics
Name another Anti cheat program that's up in that number. Also this is just what the community have found so far. So that's not the full number.

[Tito Shivan]

CoD series are usually a 'perfect storm' to attract cheaters. And not only because the cheaters can own a lot of people, but because thanks to the lack of dedicated servers, they don't have to worry about being kicked from a game two minutes after they start cheating.
(Non-dedicated servers are good for gamers, they said)

[nya[dc]]

Regardless of what it's intended to do, the detection methods are extremely dated and for certain games have been completely circumvented altogether by operating on levels and in ways it will never detect. VAC2 was fine in the 2005-2007 era but real coders have just become too good at making things which operate out of the detection range.

It's a very poor anti-cheat overall and is completely dwarfed by league anti-cheat methods. It's sad that organizations which in financial comparison to Valve are poor, can develop cheat detection which is easily one hundred times more effective...

[Zefar]

Nya`님이 먼저 게시:

Regardless of what it's intended to do, the detection methods are extremely dated and for certain games have been completely circumvented altogether by operating on levels and in ways it will never detect. VAC2 was fine in the 2005-2007 era but real coders have just become too good at making things which operate out of the detection range.

It's a very poor anti-cheat overall and is completely dwarfed by league anti-cheat methods. It's sad that organizations which in financial comparison to Valve are poor, can develop cheat detection which is easily one hundred times more effective...

Do you have any proof that VAC is doing worse today? Like any numbers? Because I don't think you have that.

As for the leagues anti cheat device. I wonder how well it would stand if it covered as many games as VAC did.

Also I like the part where you claim people make cheats that operate outside detection. People claimed this with a certain VAC disabler. They got banned rather quickly.

If they would have these "Undetectable" cheats people wouldn't spam this forum with post about being banned. Because EVERYONE would use them.

[nya[dc]]

Zefar님이 먼저 게시:

Do you have any proof that VAC is doing worse today? Like any numbers? Because I don't think you have that.

As for the leagues anti cheat device. I wonder how well it would stand if it covered as many games as VAC did.

Also I like the part where you claim people make cheats that operate outside detection. People claimed this with a certain VAC disabler. They got banned rather quickly.

If they would have these "Undetectable" cheats people wouldn't spam this forum with post about being banned. Because EVERYONE would use them.

No offense but you probably don't hang around the Counter-Strike community much which is what I am mainly referring to in terms of cheats, coding and anti-cheat clients. Undetected cheats stay the way they are because they are shared only in circles of friends, teams or are sold but at high prices to people that again if you were not involved with you would never find.

In terms of numbers, they are not needed and people who say things like you just did are trying to skirt the issue by giving me a loaded question you know there is no data for. It's all about experience, the places you game in and the time you have invested. Counter-Strike is a cheating cesspool, no one in normal state of mind would argue that, it's simple reality.

VAC detection methods have not changed since 2008, you should know that by now. With a freeze in the way things are detected that has given experienced coders ample time to develop ways to circumvent detection. Sure the database is still updated, but that is only catching free pub cheats that you can find in 2 minutes on any search engine.

Nearly anything private or paid is just so beyond the detection range they don't even need to update the cheat any longer, I could name a few off the top of my head which have actually spread but are still not detected years later.

In terms of a VAC disabler, of course you are going to get banned or your account disabled quickly. That is not something which is hard to detect as the client is not connected to VAC yet still in the game, you don't need to be a wizard to back track that.

[Zefar]

With Counter Strike series, I played CSS during it's prime time and the amount of cheaters wasn't that high. They appeared once in a while but if there was an admin around the problem was easy to fix.

Nearly anything private or paid is just so beyond the detection range they don't even need to update the cheat any longer, I could name a few off the top of my head which have actually spread but are still not detected years later.

I don't buy that. When people still sent me a lot of cheats to report there where those who handed me account name, account password and other things for the VAC team.

Right now people can PM a VAC account for that matter.

As for the VAC disabler. It worked at first but it didn't take long for VAC to find it. So the whole part about Detection formula hasn't changed since 2008 is most likely false.

[nya[dc]]

Zefar님이 먼저 게시:

With Counter Strike series, I played CSS during it's prime time and the amount of cheaters wasn't that high. They appeared once in a while but if there was an admin around the problem was easy to fix.

The prime for Counter-Strike: Source was 2007-2008 which completely coincides with the timing I specified. When games have massive amounts of players, cheaters usually blend in as noise in the grand scheme of things. Sure you still see them but when those numbers start to fall off though the cheaters numbers and general presence shines through much more.

Zefar님이 먼저 게시:

I don't buy that. When people still sent me a lot of cheats to report there where those who handed me account name, account password and other things for the VAC team.

Right now people can PM a VAC account for that matter.

As for the VAC disabler. It worked at first but it didn't take long for VAC to find it. So the whole part about Detection formula hasn't changed since 2008 is most likely false.

People sending you things which you then send off to Valve doesn't change what I said, it doesn't even mean they will be added to the black list as some of them operate outside of the detection method boundaries of VAC itself. You don't seem to understand that for some of these cheats they can't just add them to their list of what to flag, VAC simply doesn't have the functionality to detect these things.

As far as the cheats you are getting are concerned, you're not getting anything worth mentioning, I guarantee that. On top of that my friends and I have been sending off cheats and their hash for years to Moderators and Valve employees, these same cheats still work and do not result in a ban several years later, they are and have been checked and still function without incident.

VAC can't ban certain cheats, that's a reality man, it just can't detect them with the current functionality it has. Trying to get VAC as it sits to detect these cheats is like driving off a cliff in a car and expecting it to fly, it simply can't do it because it has limitations and is not setup for that.

As far as the VAC disabler is concerned they don't need to entirely rewrite the way things works to figure out that one is being used or not.

• Is the client in a VAC secured server and playing? Yes.
  
• Is the client not connected to VAC servers (VAC itself). Yes.

With that being said it probably does several back and forth checks to verify that it is not a false positive and the client is not simply losing their connection to VAC then issues a flag on the account.

[Zefar]

Sorry but I have more trust in Valve than some random user who claim that one Anti cheat is 100 times more effective than VAC but doesn't bother to try to sell it to other companies by showing proof of how effective it is.

VAC has gotten up in 1.5 million bans so far. It's quite the impressive number. If there really was a cheat that was truly undetected, everyone would be using it.
It would spread like a wildfire and even if people sent it in the cheaters could just keep on cheating. But that hasn't happened.

[nya[dc]]

Zefar님이 먼저 게시:

Sorry but I have more trust in Valve than some random user who claim that one Anti cheat is 100 times more effective than VAC but doesn't bother to try to sell it to other companies by showing proof of how effective it is.

VAC has gotten up in 1.5 million bans so far. It's quite the impressive number. If there really was a cheat that was truly undetected, everyone would be using it.
It would spread like a wildfire and even if people sent it in the cheaters could just keep on cheating. But that hasn't happened.

You pretty much ended this conversation right here, I'm clearly talking to someone who is way out of his element when it comes to things of this nature. I'm not trying to offend you or anything but you keep receding and have basically degraded to the point of saying "god is real and you can't tell me any differently" like someone who has been backed into a corner and has nothing else to say.

It wouldn't have mattered what I said or what I proved along the way, it would have still ended up with you saying essentially what you did in this post I am quoting.

[Zefar]

Undetected cheats would spread like a wild fire and this section would be empty.

Try and disprove that. Claiming it's only in some small special circles isn't helping because if VAC can't detect them, why are they afraid of showing them? :/

[NexTime]

i am proud to show you my copy of bf3...
http://img37.imageshack.us/img37/779/catturabf.jpg
(punkbuster is worse of vac)

[nya[dc]]

Zefar님이 먼저 게시:

Undetected cheats would spread like a wild fire and this section would be empty.

Try and disprove that. Claiming it's only in some small special circles isn't helping because if VAC can't detect them, why are they afraid of showing them? :/

If they become a large enough problem to get noticed on a massive scale that would force Valve to reengineer their detection methods thus making them detectable cheats, people who use things like this are friends with the coders, are the coders themselves or paid large amounts of money for these cheats. None of these people make these things readily available for the masses to use, it defeats the entire purpose and structure of why they still function.

Come on man that is all so rudimentary, you don't bite the hand that feeds. These are not a bunch of children who just got some pub cheat that is going to get them VAC banned in a month, these are seasoned cheaters and adults who have been in this rodeo for a long time.

[Zefar]

Nya`님이 먼저 게시:

If they become a large enough problem to get noticed on a massive scale that would force Valve to reengineer their detection methods thus making them detectable cheats, people who use things like this are friends with the coders, are the coders themselves or paid large amounts of money for these cheats. None of these people make these things readily available for the masses to use, it defeats the entire purpose and structure of why they still function.

Come on man that is all so rudimentary, you don't bite the hand that feeds...

VAC disablers was undetected at first but Valve fixed that pretty quickly. If a cheat was completely undetected Valve would try to fix that as well.

I've gotten people reporting account names and password to some quite private cheats. People with jobs might not really have a problem with that.

If you think VAC is an income of money I'd think again. Steam makes far more than VAC would do. VAC might bring in some small cash but it's hardly a cash cow.

There is also this where others would learn how to make cheats undetectable as well. It would spread. It'd be like "da bomb" of the cheater community.