VAC banned by a Valve employee?

I read few pages of the thread, apparently Jag was crying because he was “only” using an exploit in sourcemod plugin, and the fact the Valve employee *maybe* couldn’t know if the guy was the admin of the server or not, if the server had sourcemod or not. Crying about getting your bottom kicked by the Punisher on FP, best idea ever sure :D

Some other posters showed you can have a speedhack (or even a wallhack) with a “simple” exploit of sourcemod, it seems pretty common.

Elbart nailed it down : VAC ban is not limited to 3rd party program or modified core executable files.

I think a Steam/Valve employee have the right to do that.

If (s)he abuses his power, (s)he can get fired, and the company can (its not forced to) repair the prejudices. That’s it.

Millions of accounts were and are banned on MMORPGs by the studio employees, despite all the time and money spent on the game by the banned, “it’s ALL THERE, BLACK AND WHITE, CLEAR AS CRYSTAL” (:D), they signed the EULA, they have to respect it.

( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDEdKzAZgko :D )

If they decide to not respect it, the anti-cheating software, the company, itself or one of its employee, a third party anti-cheating company employed by the game’s company (like Punkbuster), can ban the player from the game.

Note : employees acts in the name of the company in their mission to prevent cheating on their games.

The player sign a contract, granting him a limited license, he NEVER “buy the game”, he only get a license.

If one of the parties doesn’t respect these contract agreements, the other parties (developers, publishers) can revoke the contract without a warning notice, it’s all there, in the EULA contract.

Yea, I know it’s a totally unbalanced contract, every time I can speak up against abusive EULA and support the other licenses projects I do it (GNU/GPL, CC, etc…), but it’s the contract we accept to sign, we’re not forced to sign it (it’s only entertainment after all).

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Of course I hope the VAC bans have meta-datas about the bans and can perfectly know who banned which Steam ID, when, and for which reasons.

If there is an abuse, the VAC bans could be revoked (they say “WE CANT UNDO BANS”, because they don’t want to deal with millions of cheaters’ requests) and the employee could be fired or at least get his/her VAC power revoked.

Also, in this case the guy who cheated had an advanced understanding of how cheating and VAC works and was cheating while perfectly knowing VAC could NOT detect him (sourcemod exploit, not a 3rd party plugins), he was abusing the weakness of the anti-cheating program to gain an unfair advantage over the other players, the Steam employee did not took over the VAC role.

In fact, he exceptionally used his powers, as a representative of Steam, to revoke the VAC part of the cheater’s license, only because the VAC system could not detect and ban him in any way, only because the most probable consequences would be an inevitably ruined online experience for other players, which would be a clear damage for all the players who bought the game for a cheater-free online experience, and a damage for the company too, as its economic viability is strongly linked with the online experience it’s offering as a service.

“Liberty consists of doing anything which does not harm others”, Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, 1789.

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People think cheating/anti-cheating war is or should be like justice, but that’s not the case.

First, the people who lost several hours of enjoyable game because of the cheaters never get anything, there’s a damage and nothing is done to repair that : no free items, no points, no credits to buy games/monthly fee (mmorpg), no real-moneyz.

Second, the cheater didn’t respected the contract and he didn’t had to pay anything to repair the game company for the damages (s)he done to the online experience service !

And, the game company do not have the right to refuse the cheater, to prevent him/her from signing the same contract with the cheater : he can buy a new copy and start cheating again, and again, and again…

Where is the damn justice ?

And you can’t bring each cheating player to an e-court, with appealing and all the basic rights ! Even if you put the giant costs aside, you’ll have to (at least) prevent cheaters from buying a new game once they are banned to make a “banned pool”, to avoid having to judge the same person for the same crime billions of times, but that would be illegal and abusive in real life (in my opinion).

Team Fortress 2 cost 20 bucks. One license per month is affordable for a lot of people.

Also, VAC ban doesn’t cover the non-VAC servers.

Final words : If there are abuses of power, and it’s only a matter of time, Steam will have to make the right decision to prevent such illegitimate bans. If not, less people will buy and play Steam games, as simple as that.