Recently there was a thing where VAC would erroneously flag AMD’s antilag+ feature as cheating, and issue a ban.
AMD then quickly disabled the feature by default but now Valve also patched detection for it and is now, at least according to these patch notes, reversing the bans.
Vac bans mean you can’t play on vac secured servers. Nothing happens to your other games. For a competitive multiplayer game some anticheat detection is wanted. People changing their dll’s to gain a competitive advantage is cheating. AMD making and distributing this unintentional cheat doesn’t change that.
I agree that buying directly or through GoG and backing up your games is the best thing to do. But this incident isn’t really related to that.
It wasn’t just Valve banning people.
https://www.windowscentral.com/gaming/pc-gaming/amds-anti-lag-feature-is-wreaking-havoc-for-counter-strike-2-apex-legends-and-call-of-duty-players
People weren’t changing their DLLs, they were activating a feature on a well known and respected hardware company. (I do argee with you though that AMD is hugely at fault here though, they should have worked with online game companies about this as these cards are sold more for gaming than anything else.)
Sure, my comment is directly aimed at a comment stating Valve would basically brick your steam account for this, though. It’s disinformation I’ve seen at too many places this week or oddly enough. While Valve as the CS2 publisher preemptively told players they would unban people once their dlls were normal again.
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Trade bans scare me. With thousands of dollars of virtual skins, if you get banned, you can’t sell anything.
Nah but valve is huge and they’re a big community host so to speak, getting kicked or locked out would be like getting blacklisted from visiting the USA simply because your last name is Hitler
Wrong analogy. There is nothing preventing you from just making another account.
By that logic buying a better pc is cheating because it gives you an advantage. We need some nuance here. All modifications to game files are not cheating, (even if not allowed in any case), because well, not all modifications are cheats. This is a great example actually, because AMD sanctioned, graphics card driver latency reduction isn’t a cheat. Obviously the way it was implemented was clearly very problematic and should’ve never been greenlit.
However, this isn’t an unintentional cheat and detecting it as such is incorrect. It is, however, a modification and those are reasonably disallowed, it is totally fair to disallow that.