If you only know one thing about Valve’s anti-cheat system (VAC), you probably know that a ban issued through it lasts forever. As Valve’s support page makes clear, “VAC bans are permanent, negotiable and cannot be removed by Steam Support.”
Now, apparently, there is a considerable exception to this rule, at least when it comes to e-sports. A post to Counter-Strike: GO Yesterday’s blog notes that some banned VAC players will now be able to participate in events around the next season of the major regional rankings (RMR).
CS: GO The team notes in the post that the event’s guidelines were originally written around the launch of the game in 2012, when “all CS: GO VAC bans were relatively recent. “Now, however, the team has decided to update these guidelines to reflect that” VAC bans may be more than eight years old now. “As such, VAC bans older than five years, as well as VAC bans that precede the date of a player’s first participation in a Valve-sponsored event, will no longer be considered in assessing the eligibility of the RMR event.
This is quite a big change for a system whose defining feature is the consequences that should be “permanent” and “negotiable”. And those other VAC consequences – including the loss of the game library bought by a player, achievements, tradable vanities, etc. – will remain in place. “The only change is how they influence your eligibility to play in Valve-sponsored events,” the blog post notes.
Is the past over?
For years, Valve’s zero-tolerance approach to the application of VAC has suggested how serious evidence of cheating is in the hundreds of games that use the system. A verified cheating offense was enough to ruin your credibility in the game on Steam forever, without exception, even considered by Valve’s enforcement team.
When it comes to CS: GO However, sportingly, it now appears that Valve believes that adequate old evidence of cheating should be seen as a kind of youthful indiscretion, which should not be held against current players. It is a surprisingly strict and specific description of a policy that was previously inviolable.
some CS: GO observers suspect that the rule change could be affected played that Elias “Jamppi” Olkkonen, who received a VAC ban in 2015, when he was 14 years old. Olkkonen claimed that the prohibited account in question had been lent to a friend of his at the time of the alleged fraud. He sued Valve in Finland in 2019 for the impact of this ban on his professional career in sports, including his role in preventing him from signing a contract with the OG professional team.
A Finnish court ruled in Valve’s favor in this case in November last year. And in February, Olkkonen seems to give up CS: GO entirely and connected with Team Liquid as a pro level ASSESSMENT player (although the name “CSGO” still appears on his Twitter handle). “I thank all those who have supported me in the last years of CS, let’s start the new road [Valorant], “el he was writing at the time.
Yesterday, however, Olkkonen wrote a Twitter “thank you” for its status “Official … Forbidden” in CS: GO. Petri, Olkkonen’s father added via Twitter that Valve’s lawyer confirmed to him that “due to the time elapsed since the crime occurred, it will no longer affect [Elias]”Eligibility to be invited to a Valve-sponsored e-sports event.”
In 2016, Ars collaborator Rich Stanton wrote in depth about the crowdsourced process used by CS: GO community to reliably identify fraudsters. It is a process that involves several experienced human investigators who agree with evidence of fraud, writes Stanton. It is also a trial in which investigators “assume the suspect is innocent” and in which “never making a mistake is more important than always being right,” Stanton wrote.
“The warranty required by the Overwatch system creates a small portion of cases where you are convinced that the player is the hacker, but you can’t say for sure – and if there is any doubt, you have to let it slip,” Stanton continued.
It is unclear whether this new CS: GO the policy suggests that Valve could further weaken its VAC consequences system in the future (a Valve representative has not yet responded to a request for comment from Ars Technica). In any case, this is the first visible crack in a system that previously served as an impenetrable shield against deceivers.