Valve Anti-Cheat
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Valve Anti-Cheat, abbreviated to VAC, is a proprietary anti-cheat solution developed and maintained by Valve Corporation as a component of the Steam platform. Although predating Steam, VAC has been fully adapted to its network and, since the release of VAC2, has seen considerable success in the constant battle against cheating in online games.
VAC was first released with Counter-Strike 1.4 in 2002,[1] following Valve's decision to forego PunkBuster in preference of a proprietary system. The initial version, VAC1, saw success for a period, but in March or April 2004 updates ran dry as the Valve engineers maintaining it moved on to the production of its successor, VAC2. VAC1 swiftly became virtually useless during this period of development, but since its June 20, 2005, launch VAC2 has successfully overseen a decline in the number of cheating players across games protected by it.
VAC2 has been implemented in GoldSrc, Source, and Unreal Engine 2 titles. It is included in the Steam SDK for licencees.
Contents |
[edit] Advantages
- Total integration through Steam, including using the Steam framework for any update tasks
- Delayed bans deny cheat producers accurate and timely information
- As of VAC2, client-side updates are not always required to detect new cheats,[citation needed] again denying cheat producers information.
[edit] Disadvantages
- Delayed bans (see below) means that cheaters are free to disrupt other players until their ban takes effect.
- This may entice others to cheat, taking an "if they can do it so can I" attitude.
- The burden of banning individual cheaters who have been detected by VAC but not yet banned remains on server administrators.
- This also leads to the skewing of statistics and ranking systems, even if the cheaters' data is removed when they are banned.
- VAC cannot detect 'content hacks', where for example texture transparency and color are manipulated, since they do not involve modification of any program code. In the Source engine the option to create "pure" servers (
sv_pure) that prevent custom content from overwriting the game's defaults was created to alleviate this.[2]
[edit] Successes
On November 17, 2006, Valve announced that "new [VAC] technology" had caught "over 10,000" cheating attempts in the preceding week alone,[3] the first real indication of the scale of anti-cheat operations. It should be noted that not all of the accounts banned would have contained legitimate, purchased games, and also that there is no external audit on the figure.
[edit] Delayed bans, criticism & rationale
If a cheat is found the player's Steam account will be flagged as cheating immediately, but the player will not receive any indication of the detection. It is only after a delay of "days or even weeks"[4] that the account is permanently banned from "VAC Secure" servers[5] for that game, along with other games that use the same engine. (e.g. Valve's Source games, GoldSrc games, Unreal engine games).
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ "Online cheaters face games ban". BBC News Online. August 29, 2002. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2221335.stm. Retrieved on 23 August 2006.
- ^ "Pure servers". Valve Developer Community. 2007-06-06. http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Pure_servers. Retrieved on 2007-07-11.
- ^ "Steam Message". Steam Update News. November 17, 2006. http://storefront.steampowered.com/Steam/Marketing/message/837/?l=english. Retrieved on 2006-11-08.
- ^ "I've Been Banned". Valve Support FAQ. 2008-01-23. https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?p_faqid=589. Retrieved on 2008-09-18.
- ^ "Valve Anti-Cheat System (VAC)". Steam Support. November 15, 2006. https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?p_faqid=370. Retrieved on 2006-11-23.
|
||||||||||||||
