They claim to never make mistakes, but that's obviously bullshit since they make mistakes time and time again.
Just because you paid to access someone else's servers doesn't mean that you can do anything you want, with no way for the owner of the server to enforce any rules. It works like this with any kind of service on the internet. Games are not any different.
Anything else would seem to me to incentivize banning as many lifetime members as possible before significant consumer retaliation (e.g. maybe we'll just ban the lifetime members with low social clout), to reduce costs and maximize profits.
Overall though, when you make a Steam account, you agree to their terms of service, where you agree not to engage in "modification of content and services" in the context of multiplayer games. You also agree that the owners of the game the modification was made to can report you to Valve, that Valve can put that info on your profile, and that other games can decide to deny you online services for that. You still retain access to offline stuff and any online games which don't care about your VAC bans.
It sort of sucks in the sense that sometimes you might not know that something is modifying your game executable, thus getting you a ban, but otherwise a reasonable means of dealing with cheaters.
Thus, they expect that the average user is likely to only be running "average" things like Discord and the graphics driver, which should be using the benign way of injecting themselves rather than breaking into trusted mode.
My friend has auto hotkey installed for volume control automations and immediately got banned for single player call of duty. Valve at least is trying to be fair vs. Activision just saying "too bad"
(They killed all community servers two weeks ago btw)
Do you also think it's okay if a car that you bought prevents you from driving it, but oh don't worry, it's okay because you're still allowed to open the doors?
Some online games don’t have anti-cheat, and they become nothing but a cheating cesspool. Which consequently drives away actual players, and then you have a dead game except for essentially bots.
No, and neither am I ok with anticheat software doing it. Afaik, most anticheats don’t do that. They just make sure that nothing is modifying/injecting into the game code. Which is imo reasonable, as the anticheat is just monitoring for any injections/modifications to the game that it came with.
EDIT: Why would you just downvote this, I already suspected you're one of those idiots who thinks everyone is cheating. Now I'm just convinced, and that's enough of this self masturbating forum for the month. Most cheat accusers in games are literally clueless slobs who just sign on to level up or some idiots in a closed circle of friends and think anyone who doesn't use their basic immediate method of naive play like walking into each other and clicking on each other is cheating.
Have you played TF2 recently?
Yes, many do. Especially ones with poor anti-cheat, which tend not to be very popular - because of the aforementioned cheating. Even non-overly competitive games are rampant with cheating, take a look at GTA5 online for an easy example. Without VAC games like the counter-strike series would be completely unplayable, I have over 1000 hours in the game and have ran into my fair share of extremely obvious cheaters over the years. I suspect you don't play competitive games very much if that's your view on the matter.
> Why would you just downvote this, I already suspected you're one of those idiots who thinks everyone is cheating.
1. I can't downvote you, as you're a reply to my comment. Not that I would have anyway.
2. I've never cheated in an online game (my Steam account is 17 years old..), and I'm well aware that many players are not cheating and are simply better than me.
3. No need to resort to attacking me because you disagree.
https://www.floridasafetycouncil.org/ClassName/ignition-inte....
And yes, I think that's okay.
Naturally, if you want to drive your car on your own private property, you won’t need a valid registration or license, so it won’t fall under that rule. So no, this law wouldn’t strip your rights to that.
Wait that's exactly what you say is wrong?
For certain traffic violations (including DUI in some states), your car gets impounded and your license taken away on the spot, way before you get your court hearing and get charged with anything.
This is such a pedantic argument that misses the point and short circuits the entire discussion. I don't think there's a single reasonable person who mistakenly believes that they're buying the IP itself when they "buy" a game on Steam.
Of course it's "just" a license to play it, what's being questioned are the terms of those licenses, both from moral and legal perspective.
Most current EULAs boil down to: "We reserve the right to suspend your account and revoke access to the software you paid for for any reason, no refunds". To the best of my knowledge these EULAs haven't been tested in court so they shouldn't be taken at face value.
There's a lot of room to balance the rights of customers who should be granted the same rights they would enjoy when buying a physical product, and the practical needs of platforms which need to ensure a fair environment for other players.
Should cheaters be allowed to ruin the experience for other players? Obviously not.
Should platforms be allowed to permanently ban suspected cheaters without a fair and transparent appeals process and without offering refunds? I don't think so.
unless games are written from scratch with security around preventing cheating first they are left with grasping for virtual straws at what is an exploit or not. in a lot of cases it's low level drivers that are suspect, game code changing in ram such as by a hook into the code, etc.
a few friends and I sat down and pondered what it would take to make a game like quake 2 robust enough and we gave up after deciding it'd be a ground up rewrite of both the client and server sides to only send specific data the client needs but no more so even wall hacks don't work and sending encrypted code to run in a VM inside the game from the server and if that memory is touched assume it's kick worthy but even then bit flips can happen etc. Could we trust video drivers from being tweaked to show wireframe renders and other things like that came up. Given this was like 1998 so I'm sure some of this has been implemented these days, I haven't kept a pulse on the tech.
I have read that even secure systems such as the PS4 have cheating going on with rooted systems so who even knows.
And admittedly their grandstanding of "VAC is always right, we never make mistakes and bans cannot and will not be reversed" hits a nerve, because that is just a blatant lie.
They actually banned players for using Windows 7, and now they're doing it again to AMD users. Both were obvious mistakes on their end.
I don’t think a good solution exists except to keep those games to locked down consoles only.
But maybe a more transparent appeals process could help, even if it gets expensive.
Other people like to play competitive games, do you have another option other than anti cheat?
They didn't ban people for using win7, they detected something that ran on win7 only. Where is this grandstanding? They've had false bans before and they reverse false bans now and then no? Usually it's a group that is banned so pretty obvious when a bunch of people starts complaining.
Or another way to look at it is, you CAN do whatever you want with the software on your computer. But Valve can do whatever they want with the software on THEIR computers. They have no obligation to network with you.
Carrying your request even further, you're sort of saying websites cannot moderate content because that interferes with your ability to use your browser freely.
Just go back to private servers, no matchmaking, no competitive ranking. And no I haven't played multiplayer since around the time Battlefield 1942 added punkbuster and vote kicking.