Anyone who cheats in old Call of Duty games will be banned on Steam.
Most of us messed up in our youth. Copied homework, stuck chewing gum under the chair, burned music CDs, slicked up our hair – and yes, some of us cheated at times. At the end of the 90s it wasn’t a big deal, when you were hung up by your panties on the LAN and that was fine.
Nowadays things look different.
In the age of digital platforms, the sins of young people sometimes remain unforgotten. For example on Steam. Anyone who cheats in one of Valve’s games gets a so-called VAC Ban
so Valve’s in-house Valve Anti Cheat
-Software banned and – what’s more – branded.
Other people can then see on your profile that you have cheated in the past, essentially a publicly accessible class register entry. At least this public brand now has an expiry date – and that is currently causing lively discussions on Reddit.
The eyesore finally disappears!
Reddit user BigSneeze0021 cheated in the old Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 around 7 years ago, 2,499 days to be exact. The PC version of CoD also ran on Valve’s anti-cheat software, so he got a VAC ban for it. Now is the time for rehabilitation – After exactly 2,500 days, Valve leaves the User was banned for cheating
-Message disappear from profile:
Link to Reddit content
However, the VAC ban itself remains permanent. Anyone who has cheated will be banned from the game forever. User BigSneeze0021 is still lucky because he didn’t cheat in any of Valve’s own games, only in a third-party game – Call of Duty, which uses the same anti-cheat software.
Because: Anyone who cheats in Counter-Strike, for example, will be immediately banned from all Valve games, for example Team Fortress 2 or Dota 2. BigSneeze0021 still has access to them, but Modern Warfare 2 is denied.
7:01
Valve Anti Cheat – VAC bans, Overwatch & Co: The endless cheater war
Discussions about the expiration date
Now we don’t know whether BigSneeze was LittleSneeze seven years ago and has long since learned from its own mistakes, but at least user LeetModule illustrates the consequences of such years-old offenses:
I’ve been banned for 4,426 days. Back then, I was an angry kid desperate to get into Counter-Strike Source. I was banned for a wall hack back then, I regretted it all those years ago and kept the Steam account as a warning to myself. Then I played an insane amount of CS:GO, got good at it without any tools and was constantly put down because of the VAC ban message on my profile. Stay away from cheats, people.
Reddit-User LeetModule
In other threads on the same topic These discussions about Valve’s handling of cheats have been going on for years. For example, user … oh dear … user cS47f496tmQHavSR was banned because he used a trainer in the single player of CoD Black Ops 3 to get through the story more easily.
Now my eight-year-old account with almost 1,400 games has a nice little ban message, even though VAC bans can actually only be issued for multiplayer offenses.
Reddit-User cS47f496tmQHavSR
Valve follows a strict approach when it comes to cheats; there are hardly any ways to undo a VAC ban as long as it wasn’t caused by a bug or technical error.
Logically, the system does not distinguish whether this offense took place five or ten years ago or how old or mature the people concerned were at the time. What do you think about that?
