2y ago

Valve is now reversing VAC bans due to AMD drivers in CS2, according to patch notes

store.steampowered.com

Counter-Strike 2 - Release Notes for 10/19/2023 - Steam News

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.

51 comments

erroneously flag
They were legitimately picking up an activity that they generally try to prevent. AMD was using a technique to apply Anti-Lag+ that was expressly monitored for, to provide anti-cheat.
The creepy thing is there is a possibility you can loose everything you bought in the worst case, maybe forever, without you being at fault. This time it ended ok, but who knows what's on the horizon.
With GOG I have all my games backed up thanks to DRM free policy, but with Steam...
- 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.
  
  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
  
  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.
- I think a VAC ban only bans you from that one game, at most from other games with VAC. I got VAC banned in modern warfare 2 10+ years ago, but it hasn't had an impact on my account/other games. More than a notice on my profile that it happened.
  ... just to add, the ban was justified. I went into a game and just held down the shoot button with a plethora of cheats on to see what it was like. It took all the fun out of it and cost me a game I liked. Not recommended. : )
  
  Yeah, nowadays I think it only affects that game, but older valve titles handed out instant bans on othet titles that used the same engine.
  Cheating in one of the following Source games or a Source mod will result in a VAC ban for all games in the list below: Counter-Strike: Source Half-Life 2: Deathmatch Day of Defeat: Source Team Fortress 2
  Similarly, cheating in one of the following Gold Source games will result in a VAC ban for all games in the list below:
  Counter-Strike Counter-Strike: Condition Zero Ricochet Day of Defeat Team Fortress Classic Half-Life: Deathmatch Deathmatch Classic
  https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/647C-5CC1-7EA9-3C29#application
  
  Depends on the game iirc. If you get banned in a Valve game, you don't get to play multiplayer in any Valve game.
  
  If there is a VAC ban on your account that people can look up servers on other games might ban you as well.
- anti-cheat and drm aren’t the same thing
  complain all you want about anti-cheat, i would rather play a game that has it than one that does not
- A VAC ban is only for online games that use VAC, and even then I think they can still use community servers.
  It doesn't lock you out of your account or anything.
  
  Unless they are VAC secured
  Even if it's an entirely different game by a duuferent publisher, you might get premtively banned from playing because the ban is visible on your account.
- A good time to share this:
  https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games
  
  That's extremely interesting, thank you!!
  Nowadays the only platform I buy my games from is gog, I made the right choice it seems.
  But people who need to play the newest games don't really have a choice.
- Happened to me on Apex Legends. Played the game on and off. Came back on aftrr a break and found I was banned. Appealled and denied. Forget about the game. Get the itch and try and appeal again. Still banned. Good thing I didn't put any money in to the game. Found out apparently a lot of accounts were compromised at one point and they all got banned. Might be what happened to me but fuck it, not worth my time to convince them.
  
  Happened to me with World of Warcraft. Went on vacation and I was banned when I got back. Put a lot of money into that. Logged in a few years ago and all of account stuff was deleted. Gotta love when you're erroneously targeted.
  All I was doing was going to a vender in the wild and buying thread for some silver and then selling for gold on the auction because high level players were lazy and didn't want to go find it. I was low level and had a ton of gold. It was fun. But unfortunately there are people that follow that pattern and are breaking rules. I matched it and got banned.
- sorry to break it to you but gog no longer has a no drm policy big example being cyberpunk
  
  I played Cyberpunk and the Add-on directly from the installer without Galaxy and had no problems. What am I missing?
They weren't erroneously flagging anything. The driver wasn't so much a driver as much as a locally hosted man in the middle attack. It wasn't necessary for the functioning of the graphics card it was literally intercepting commands and altering them, which is exactly what cheating software does.
The only way they could have patched the software to not flag it would have been if AMD had told them in advance of what they were doing. Which I have no idea why they didn't do because it was blatantly obvious this exact issue was going to happen.
- Devils advocate: they can't always know what their engineers did would interfere with something like anti cheating software because it can honestly not be something they thought about. It is also hard to know if AMD has CS2 in their testing suite.
  Realistically, they should have ran some beta testing with consumers or in house. On top of that they should have been more clear with how it worked with the public before releasing this very intrusive mechanism in their drivers.
  
  Except that they know how, anti-cheating software works at least a day theoretical level, they know how their software works, they know the thing that their software does is something that cheating software does again at a theoretical level. Just on first principles alone it should have been possible for them to work this out without having to have any expert knowledge or have the game in their testing suite.
  That's all forgetting that apparently not a single person in the software department, the management department or the QA department (assuming they have one) apparently knows anything about games development. Really?
- Haha, your telling me AMD may need new programmers for their graphics driver implementations?
  
  Pretty sure this is just a management issue, as in they they need to be doing some.
Only the right thing to do
People still play this game? I remember it was mostly hackers and some people pretending they were actually having fun while gambling their savings away on those skin sites.
- Do "people still play this game." This guy. It's literally the #1 title on Steam
- CS GO (now CS 2) has constantly been on the top 5 most played steam games globally for a decade now, so yeah, I think people are still playing this game.
  
  No it hasn’t. Counter strike 2 is a 2023 release, not CS GO
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-Strike_2
- CS 2 came out recently.
- how are you actually this dense
- Yeah it's pretty basic tbh I honestly wish that the old school stuff like doom, unreal or quake 3 got more air time, much more potential mods and additional dynamics to add to the fun
- How dense are you?
- It is a damn shame too, because there are a lot better games than this lazy cosmetic, hacker filled game.

51 comments