Is VAC really as good as Valve claim?

Recently VAC banned a considerable number of players from Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 and possibly from other games as well.

Not unsurprisingly the forum posts started to appear with titles like ‘Banned – WTF I didn’t cheat’ and as usual the replies were equally helpful mainly pointing the banned person at the VAC FAQ which essentially says – TOUGH !

Valve have a zero tolerance policy on bans applied by VAC and will not lift any, they have in the past made a few exceptions but these are very rare.

Today some people have reported that their bans have been lifted with Valve blaming it on a software problem with steam.

The following is an extract from an alleged email sent to a user that has been un banned.

“The problem was that Steam would fail a signature check between the disk version of a DLL and a latent memory version. This was caused by a combination of conditions occurring while Steam was updating the disk image of a game. This wasn’t a game-specific mistake. Steam allows us to manage and reverse these erroneous bans (about 12,000 erroneous bans over two weeks).

We have reversed the ban, restoring your access to the game. In addition, we have given you a free copy of Left 4 Dead 2 to give as a gift on Steam, plus a free copy for yourself if you didn’t already own the game.”

They got a free copy of L4D for themselves and one to gift to friends. They however have not received any form of public apology from Valve. Bear in mind that a lot of these people posted on the MW2 forum and were abused by other members.

One of the moderators on the MW2 forum has confirmed the email as genuine and several people have posted screenshots of their email clients, with mail headers visible, showing that the email originated from Valve.

Rather amusingly the same mod is still saying that VAC is ‘perfect’ however this issue does raise some serious concerns

VAC claim to check every ban to remove ‘false positives’. If they did check these then they need to sack the people doing the check as they obviously have no idea what they are doing

Valve claim that the problem was caused by Steam updating the game and then a ‘latent’ copy of a DLL being found with a different signature to that on disk. VAC would have no access to any latent copies in memory, if for some reason a DLL was not released in memory then Steam would not have been able to update it on disk as Windows uses exclusive file locks.
Whats worrying here is that Valve are admitting that VAC has and therefore can make mistakes whilst still sticking to their silly rules

How many times has this happened in the past? Of course we will never know as Valve refuse to provide people caught cheating with any evidence. In fact in some of the cases I have read on the forum Valve just pumped out the standard ‘Hard luck don’t cheat email’ and then ignored the supposed cheats, only to then backtrack.

If you take the time to read any of the forums for games protected by VAC you will see countless posts from people claiming to be banned for no reason, of course a lot of these are just people trying it on but for those with a genuine case what are they supposed to do?

VAC like any other Anti Cheat technology is not and never will be perfect, despite a lot of claims made on the forums. Valve need to wake up and realise that it can make mistakes and start providing a decent method for people to find out why they were banned.

As yet there has been no official announcement from Valve and I am not sure there will be but keep an eye on the Steam VAC forum.