I haven't followed recently, but what I have understood is that clear known old public hacks can result immediate ban. For newest hacks they will gather cohort and then do them in wave. Thus making it harder to evade detection or notice what exactly was detected this time.
Re:Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)
by david422 on Wednesday June 18, 2025 @05:10PM
(#44313303)
Blizzard's battle.net used to do that. They'd ban in waves. I imagine immediate bans would make it much easier for cheat authors to figure out which cheats were detectable and which weren't.
Unlikely. Last I looked, VAC only looks at a few gross elements, like the names of the DLLs loaded into the game's process. If you don't match a blacklisted name, you're probably not detected.
Re:Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)
by fc417fc802 on Wednesday June 18, 2025 @10:30PM
(#44314915)
And user account names. At least at one point you could catch a ban for having an account named "catbot" when running on a linux box. Admittedly that was probably quite a reasonable litmus test in practice even if not in principle.
Re:Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)
by antarctician on Thursday June 19, 2025 @07:54AM
(#44317789)
I have a suspicion that that was FUD spread by the cheat creators. Back then I decided to test that by creating a user named like that and running Steam from there. My account did not receive a ban.
Re:Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)
by DrillShopper on Thursday June 19, 2025 @09:31AM
(#44318530)
If people want to test these kinds of exploits, you can do so on a server that is not VAC-secured. That won't risk your account being VAC banned. (Of course, if you really want to be sure, use a secondary account and a server that's not VAC-secured)
in this case id also recommend goldsrc games.
a) more info is readily available b) dedicated server u can run locally even on a potato
no need to test against online folks, there's fine bots available.
The thing is, VAC doesn't immediately ban you. Or anyone else. It's looking for suspicious patterns and collecting evidence over weeks if not months to make sure they got relatively low false-positive rates and don't end up banning people for a Windows update gone wrong... and additionally, it raises the iteration time for cheat developers as well, and that's the true point. Show cheaters immediately that they're spotted and the only thing you enter is an immediate arms race.