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Comment by AustinDev | Hacker News Reader

Good luck bro... I cheated at games especially MMO's from 2000 to 2005. Since then, with all new emails and account ID's I've seen more false positive bans than I saw positive bans in that previous period. I once left wire shark open and got battle eye and VAC banned. I was not attaching either to active network traffic or processes at the time. Just last week I got banned for having Charles proxy running by accident on my 5th DayZ account. I guess I should segregate my dev and play boxes... the problem is I make games.

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I use CheatEngine and other memory debugging tools as part of reversing/modding single player games for fun. Recently I had a browser tab open to a CheatEngine doc page, not even the executable open, and Fortnite wouldn't let me launch, said I had cheating tools open.

There was a battleye ban for this that got a bunch of uproar once. I think it was for the domain 'unknowncheat.me'if you had visited that you got banned from whatever game you were playing the BattleEye iirc.

I'm pretty sure I've played VAC secured games with Wireshark open in the background many times without issue. In my experience VAC is pretty lenient on what you do outside of the game to begin with.

I did get shadowbanned from Modern Warfare (2019) for two weeks though. At first I couldn't figure out why my game suddenly would keep crashing on the main menu every time I started it. After a reboot of my PC it stopped crashing, but now the game was taking forever to find a match and when it finally did I got put in a lobby with high ping players from across the world, half of which were obviously cheating.

I managed to figure out that I had HxD (a hex editor) open in the background before I rebooted because I was messing around with the save files of another game. Simply having a process running called "hxd.exe" will cause the game to "crash" and shadowban you for a while. I verified this by renaming notepad to hxd.exe and observing the same thing.

Correction, it was a Battle Eye ban that got replicated to a VAC ban.

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