Unfortunately, games involving human reflexes or difficulty-to-see visual clues aren’t very fun against strangers who can run what they want on their devices. Because cheating.

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.

An overwhelming number of players who do play these games regularly would not pay for or play them if the vanishing minority of potential users like you who care about hypothetical freedoms had their way.

If you don't trust the anti cheat why would you trust the game?

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.

Afaik you can still run cs if you're vac banned, just not connect to servers with vac enabled (which is the vast majority; nobody wants to play with cheaters).

You can cheat all you want in counter strike, you just can't do it on a VAC verified server. Which is most servers because people don't want to play with cheaters. But you can go host your own server and disable VAC.

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.