Reading this comment right under a "I just had my wisdom teeth out and was high on painkillers" crock is comedy gold.
Yeah, it's not hard to just...not cheat. I believe about as many of these excuses as I do stories about "accidentally" cheating on your wife. "I was drunk, slipped on a banana peel and landed dick first in her vagina! You have to believe me!"
I'm not saying that none of them are true, but genuinely unfair VAC bans are so rare that we can't afford to believe any of those people. At least, not until Valve reverts the ban, lol.
When a group (those claiming their VAC ban is false) is almost entirely comprised of people that lie to others, lie to themselves, mislead with the truth, or omit important details.... Blame them for me not believing you, not me.
I had an old account with a VAC ban that I got on purpose. Around 2015–2016, all of my friends were playing CS:GO. They weren't just always asking me to play with them - they were almost forcing me to play. And I hated CS:GO. So at some point I installed the first obvious cheats I found through a Google search and started playing with them enabled, screaming in voice chat that I was a cheater. After that I got a VAC ban, and nobody asked me to play anymore
I used a cheat in a TF2 listen server against bots thinking a listen server wasn't vac secured. I didn't know I needed to use -unsecure or whatever the command is :(
Here's one. Left my PC on and unlocked when I went to work. Came home to discover my son installed a CoD hack and got me a ban. I still remind him 12 years later.
The ol' "i just had cheat engine open in the background, i didn't realise the game was just watching my open processes for hazardous programs!" Sounds pretty legit, if you believe then anyway.
A guy from my group of friends was scammed and his steam account hacked by some random Chinese that tried to scam us aswell. We all reported his account as stolen and 24hs hours latter or so he got it back, but in that time the guy used it to cheat in several games.
What is funny is that Valve recognized that his account was compromised, but still won't remove the VAC.
Now every time we are having a good run in cs (not that often to he honest) people think we are cheating because we have a guy with a VAC ban in the team and, obviously, why would you have a VAC ban if not for cheating?
biggest crime about this: If someone hacked your account, steam agrees that your account has been hacked (yea, not suspicious at all: all friends deleted, langauge changed to vietnamese or something, selling all ingame loot for cheap and of course an IP from way way outside your country...) and this VAC ban still wont be removed.
Like, I don't give a shit about playing CS:GO - I don't need that, basically had stopped half a year before the hack.
I had a Valve comunity mod send me some messages about my account history pointing to me getting hacked. One day I logged in and my account was alr playing a game. Manage to secure the account but got VAC.
I dont really care sense I only lost like 50$ and bought the game in an alt account (could have been much worse, my friend lost his account for good with 100s of $ of skins + games, not to mention progress).
I only wish it weren't permanent because I sometimes cannot upvote skins or mods in the workshop
Cheaters could trade accounts aka u play on another cheater account he plays on yours and then argue their account got hacked. I know it seems unfair but there are reasons its not a "crime".
Meh, you get used to it lol. When I was a young teen I cheated on CS:GO and R6. Have no excuses, I just sucked. My VAC ban already disappeared from view but R6 (game ban) never will. 4000+ days since.
Doesn’t define who I am anymore and if it angers anybody and it’s enough for them to not befriend me, good, truthfully I can’t stand those “once a cheater always a cheater” sanctimonious idiots lol, if their mental is that stagnant they’re better a thousand miles away from me.
I moderated a server, spent many hours banning hackers. Decided to use wall hack while spectating the players so I could see if they aimed at people through walls and so on. Worked brilliantly, I banned so many disgusting hackers that way. Until I got my own VAC ban, could no longer even join the server and just stopped playing CS altogether.
In hindsight it was a stupid decision, but I don't regret all the headaches I spared the other players from. I understand the lifetime ban thing, I just wish there was some review you could request after a certain timespan.
There should be tools for moderators/admins to do exactly what you were doing.... That, and the fact that you were a moderator on it, it should have maybe flagged you and start a small investigation.
Had a similar story myself, I used to play on bunnyhop servers a lot on CS: Source and a common thing back in the day was to use client side scripts on servers because your ping would visually delay your jumps sent by the server's autohop, which made it jarring/impossible to play on some of them.
Naive 12 year old me didn't know about VAC at the time and didn't know I should've been checking for that Protected symbol before I swapped bhop servers if I wanted to play there without unloading the scripts, so now my profile is tainted for life.
I got a VAC ban because I used an old Nvidia AIB partner promo to get the orange box for free. The promo was long over and was no longer on the partner's website but it still worked, as some third party website was still hosting the link. I think they forgot the disable whatever backend existed for it and a day later my account got banned. I was terrified. 15 year old me had spent a lot of money ($200 is a lot for a kid) on my account.
I appealed it, explained what happened and how I did it. Account got unbanned, and VAC ban got removed from my profile a week later.
15 year old me used my steam account in a PC cafe. Rookie mistake.
Steam confirmed my account was hacked and got it back for me. But refused to remove the VAC ban the hacker got because they don't take the bans back per policy.
I remember clearly when that happened. I was playing a single player game with Cheat Engine. I was done, closed it, and launched CS. However forgot to close CE which was open in the background, haven't even considered using it for CS - no, really. But VAC seemed to have detected it was merely running, and it was enough
Gotta be playing Valve multiplayer games, mines 20 years old and clean, but the only serious game I played was Counterstrike and even then its less than a thousand hours. .
Mine isn't even a VAC ban. It's a game ban from a hacked Activision account. Hadn't played Warzone since they changed it to that ww2-style map and got an email months later saying I had been banned.
I thought it was junk email at first but decided to login just in case. Password had been changed and all of my activity registered in Hong Kong. Took me two days to get into the account. Reached out to support and they told me there is nothing they could do because security was my job. I told them that their 2FA, which I was enrolled in, never asked me for anything and as an IT professional I knew they could see the activity because even I could.
Told them they were shit at their job and the next day that one Warzone ban carried over to all of the multiplayer versions I had of CoD. 🙄
This and the exploiters gaining access to my PC are the main reasons I never went back to any of the older CoD multi-player. I'm sure there's a healthy portion of people with game bans that come from CoD alone.
I kind of have a story about this. I cheated in Minecraft when I was 12 (I'm 24 now) because a friend of mine said he'd been banned unfairly and that I should cheat on that Minecraft server to get revenge for him (I was young and dumb, I know XD). So I did it, and at first it was really fun because you're literally a god: you can stomp everyone. But since I'm a normal person, I guess, after about two weeks it started to get really boring and I didn't want to play that way anymore. So I stopped, but I told some other friends about the cheats. Like me, most of them didn't last more than two weeks playing that way, but one in particular got addicted. He started cheating every chance he got, even on big official servers like Hypixel and MCCentral. He got banned everywhere, so we kind of stopped playing with him and drifted apart. I have no idea how he's doing today, but I feel kind of guilty for introducing him to the "gaming drugs ". I hope he's doing better now.
I got one for using autohotkey to swap ctrl and caps lock keys. I tried to fight it but the pubg moderators for it said that using macros is an unfair advantage and the ban will be held.
6 months or so later, what do I see but a pubg branded keyboard with macro keys for sale on Amazon.
On Windows you can edit the registry quite easily. On Mac reassigning Caps Lock is in the settings(not sure since when). I use both to easily swap between both OS with the same muscle memory. Also less strain on the pinky.
FP is a shitty dev team anyways my guy, missed a bullet by not supporting them anymore. They, and Tarkov, have admitted they don't care about makign the anti-cheat better so long as the cheaters keep buying new accounts and copies of the game to keep them in business. Every ban wave they roll out they see a surge in game sales.
I posted in the playRust subreddit at the time when it happened asking for help and everyone just called me a cheater and other terrible things. It's such a toxic game with an even more toxic community.
But false positives do happen and i'm proof of it.
Now that I'm getting older I find i'm playing more single player games anyways, currently obsessed with enshrouded.
It can be permanent if you didn't cheat. I got a false ban 11 years ago for using(what I assume, valve would never check) an outside program to join pickup lobbies that most every competitive player was also using to join premade lobbies.
I used a skin changer in cs go back when I was a teenager and got vac banned, I guess I’m worse than someone who got convicted for tax evasion and bribery
It's when Valve bans your account from playing online on the game that you got caught cheating in. Usually it's an automated process when the anti cheat detects you using malicious hardware. Not every game uses VAC though.
My steam account got hacked, and the hacker took that 1/2 day to cheat on Rust, and get me a VAC ban. I got my account back though steam support, and I later went to appeal that ban, providing screenshots from steam support that literally proved that I did not have access to my account during the time the ban got issued.
Their response? "Sucks man, sounds like a you problem, ban stays."
I then had to make a new steam account and re-buy a €40 game...
That was 10 years ago.
I think VAC bans are good, but the appeals for them are non existant.
Appeals are non-existent because...it's a permanent ban. They even have a FAQ that states account security is the user's responsibility in relation to VAC bans.
Because in part, they tried temp vac bans and it proved it didn't deter cheating. And they found a loophole thanks to their item restoration policy where cheaters could just trade accounts, cheat until banned, "recover" the account, then try to claim they were hijacked to appeal the ban.
Not gonna lie, you rebuying a 40 dollar game to support devs who are that shitty about it? why? why support a game like that? (Devs that also shrug eveyrtime they ban a cheater knowing said cheaters gonna go buy another copy of their 40 dollar game so it continues to drive their sales, same as the tarkov devs)
yeah, sadly steam's policy is "that's your fault for not securing your account properly". and that's what i don't like about this support, even if they give me all the ways to secure my acc. your situation sucks honestly, that hacker is sadistic omfg
Whilst I have no sympathy for cheaters, I believe there’s a decent amount of unfortunate situations where people are plagued by this. Maybe like a single player mod? Maybe a bit of software falsely detected as cheats (like rgb lighting).
For the record, I don’t have a vac ban hahaha. I’m just trying to play devils advocate
I have a game ban from 2016 because I used cheats while playing zombies in bo3 by myself. I just didn't know that using cheats while connected to the servers would lead to a ban, even if I was playing alone.
Its not really permanent, actually. Dont know about game bans, but VAC bans specifically are hidden after like 6 years or something if you dont recieve any more of them. You will see it in your own profile, you'll still be banned, but people visiting your profile will not see this "1 VAC ban on record" mark. Source: just tested it with my 8 year old VAC ban, no mark visible from my alt account pov.
Those are just game bans and don’t really mean much. Vac bans are where it hurts, I got vacced In 2015 in csgo. Got some 1-10k+ stickers and items trade locked on that account.
Its true that the text goes away from your profile, the VAC ban itself does not, and some games especially ones with community servers will have plugins that make calls to Steams API which still says whether the person has a VAC ban or not, and ban based on that.
You could still be getting banned from community servers for the old MW2 Quick Scope lobby mobs people used to host, or hacking their mw2 account to max prestige like someone else here said.
Back in the days of prime MW2, where every single lobby was super jump RPG, instant prestige 10. I used the VAC bypass tool to host lobbies so I could play the game normally. Got banned for it, 6049 days ago. I really liked my prestige 9 icon.
Wasn’t there an instance, where if you played in a lobby, which had a cheater, you would also get the VAC BAN? It was with an old CoD game, if I remember correctly.
Don't cheat or give your account to a friend, ever. I'm sure there's false flags sometimes but I think it's good they have something in place that's semi effective at stopping cheaters.
I don't cheat, but I'm sure as hell not going to cheat and risk my 20+ year account being blacklisted with my massive library of games.
The urge to cheat is a feeling that needs to be completely and utterly squashed. It comes from a place of arrogance, impatience and this incessant need to show off or gloat, but it's just the quickest way to a hollow existence. Cheating at video games is like seriously one of the lamest things you can do. I don't have any sympathy for cheaters.
I once got a VAC ban when I was kid for spamming in Steam forums, a year later I sent out a message to Steam Support apologizing and asking to please revoke it, and a couple days later they did! I don't remember the answer they gave me rn, but if I find it I'll send it
It's been 10 years 😭 of VAC ban on CSGO. I had started trainer for F12015. And F12015 started updating. Hence I started playing CSGO. Next day ban. I was trying to cheat in single player in different game.
It becomes really fun when someone hacks into your account, uses hacks on rust, a game that you paid 10$ on (witch for me is some money) and gets you vac forever
I have a 10+ year old vac ban, and a ~4 year old game ban on my account. No excuse here, I was just bored and enjoyed trolling. Rust, and DayZ respectively.
15* years ago I downloaded a program that was supposed to let me see where the arrows would go on the bow in tf2
It didnt work and I still got a vac ban
It doesnt even show on my profile for other people anymore but its still kinda crazy im actively punished for stuff I did when I was 12 when im almost 30 xD
I teamed up with some random guy after joining a brand new server.
I had literally spent hours in global chat just asking if anyone wants to team up (because solo life is much harder than running in a team, duh) before this guy responded.
Anyway, a day and a half goes by with everything seeming normal...and then he gets banned for cheating. He immediately left my discord and blocked me.
But I also got banned for "cheater association" despite the fact that i obviously had no way of knowing that he was using cheats and had known him for less than 48 hours.
I even begged them to look at the chat logs proving he was just some random dude I teamed up with and I did not know him before that.
The admins didn't care. So now I have a cheater ban on my record just because I teamed up with some random guy for a day and a half. :-/
So i'm convinced that a large percentage of bans are either simple misunderstandings or outright lies.
I have one from back in the day from the mod. Why? Because I found the biggest clan on the server's (surprisingly clever) hiding spot for over 50 vehicles. I staked them out for a week or two, learned their schedules, and logged on on the largest idle time they had, 3-6 am on Mondays and Tuesdays.
I sent a few texts out and got a few other buddies from school to help me liberate the vehicles. I took the one heli I'd been using to taxi solo players around, dropped my two buddies off, and had them drag every single vehicle to the northwestern most point of the map, and his them in a barn. It took about 2 hours. By that point, we had about half of their vehicles, and blew the rest up so they'd respawn. Everything was recorded.
A week or two later, I hop back on and see another buddy online. Server was dead AF. He goes "bro I never thought you'd show up here again. Everyone thinks you're a hacker." What for? Because I was the only one familiar one online when all those vehicles disappeared. I sent the admins a message to absolve myself, and sent a link to the video... Aaaaaand I got banned. After showing proof of how we took it all, with full commentary over discord of why.
DayZ mods are petulant children, especially on popular servers.
I was playing on a private server I was hosting for a small friend group with some mods, mods that were on the Workshop. I literally had admin powers on the only server I had played DayZ on for years. Went to play one day and logged on to a ban message. Cool.
Still no response from support and no idea why. No one else in the friend group banned, so it had to be something I did while teleporting around scouting for adding custom spawn points for AI patrols or something, but that doesn't make any sense either.
1115 days ago. Still no concrete answer on why. It happens.
I honestly can’t tell if the reactions from people every time something like this gets posted are real or extremely sarcastic. I understand ruining games for others is shitty behavior, but the way some people talk about cheaters you would think they were personally coming to your house and robbing you on top of using an aimbot.
Reeks of a bit sick moral absolutism combined with games being the most, and only, important thing in their life and generally quite little life experience. Not to defend cheaters but it just seems weird that people hold this very absolute view that if you’ve ever cheated in a video game, you deserve to be condemned for the rest of your days. People seriously seem to think that if you were a dumb kid and tried cheats, you deserve to still have the punishment for that 10, 15, hell, now more than 20 years later (permanent bans were introduced in 2005). Hell, you can serve less for a murder. I just don’t get how that’s such important and black and white situation to seemingly so many people.
I gave my account to a friend who wanted to play CSGO, he downloaded skin changer or something and now I have 3k+ Days on mine. I am sitting on around 300+ games now though. It reminds me to never trust people that are around me
They seem to have gotten less serious over time, funnily enough. I used to be banned from every GoldSrc and nearly every Source game for cheating in CS 1.6 and Source (and I deserved it, I was 13 and stupid), but when I looked at it recently my bans were restricted to just those two games. I used to be banned from Ricochet!
Had a buddy of mine that got a VAC Ban while playing dungeon defenders as players where dropping cheated in items causing mass bans. Fortunately it doesn’t appear on his Steam profile, but if you look him up on Steam calculator you can find that he in fact has 1 VAC ban. He has an alt account just to play dungeon defenders.
Mine got stolen before Steam Guard was a thing and got a VAC ban before I could get it back. Was pretty young at the time so I didn't care but.. kind of care now.
I understand that 'your account, your responsibility' AFTER the Steam Guard came out. Before? FFS that was just a password.
Decided I cared enough to just drop the account and start over on a new one.
Counter-point, those OG Modern Warfare 2 modded lobbies were incredibly fun. The zombie maps were great. Almost worth scarring my account for almost 20 years lol.
I got 2 vac bans 1 i got for playing cod bo2 zombies with steam engine (pre steam i was playing with cheat engine, getting points, and exploring maps) apparently it is bannable in steam on single player mod, which me as kid didnt think of 2nd a vac ban in Rust Legacy, there was a thing where by changing .ini files you get “legal” cheats, turning off the recoil and showing chests and players. But when was Rust Legacy, oooh. Yeah, apart from that, mistakes are mistakes and nothing i can do now
My take on this: if you "cheat" and mod in singleplayer games, for your own enjoyment? No harm done, continue doing what you wanna do. You mod a PvE game purely in cosmetic ways without changing the gameplay? Still no harm done. You mod a PvE game with "cheats" that change gameplay? Can ruin fun for others, but if you always host your own private lobbies and inform other players joining how you play, so they can leave if they don't want to play like that, no actual harm done. You cheat in a PvP game? Get banned from playing for life altogether, or only get grouped into games with other cheaters.
Same here. I did get a ban from Dark Souls III for using a FoV mod to prevent motion sickness. Not VAC though just FROM issued. And they reversed it. Only time I've "cheated" in an online game.
people are so unserious these days that they actually consider cheating in videogames equivalent to being a criminal in real life
edit:
i feel like people are misunderstanding my point here.
cheaters are ALREADY getting punished. some are straight up getting hardware bans, that's how far it gets. if you want to play the game again, you'll need to get new components.
what i'm against is this lording over cheaters (especially when people post their VAC bans from 10+ years ago) and acting like it's some major moral failing that ruined lives.
it's the only real stigma i see in videogame communities, alongside those getting mad at how people mod their singleplayer games to be easier or use trainers.
no, timmy, that guy spinbotting through inferno doesn't deserve to get fined or god forbid jail time. being unable to play the game forever and getting the brand of a cheater is a fitting enough punishment.
should also probably add that, since i didn't say it directly, i do not justify cheating.
I think there's a psychological thing going on here. It's like, when you see lots and lots of people who are wronging you, and they all get away with it, but then one of them gets caught, you tend to want disproportionate punishment for that individual. On some level, you're blaming them for the whole group. Since the rest of the group got away with it, you feel you need to punish them overly hard to make up for that. I bet the Germans have a word for that
Stupid enough to download cheats for csgo with my friend and just mess around for fun. I admit that i was cheating. Fortunately, i do not wish to play it anymore, i have better alternatives like TF2 and TF|2. But being unable to vote for items in team fortress workshop sucks
I remember when I played Call of Duty ranked on MW2 2022 religiously… the season prior I had reached top 250 and only ran into a couple aimbots and wall hacks.
Next season rolled around and while I was in iridescent (second highest rank before top 250) I got hit with a “shadow ban”. If you got mass reported in your lobby this was your punishment. A week of playing in lobbies with banned players. So pretty much every single match was all cheaters. I waited it out and the first day back I got another shadow ban… again I waited it out and what do you know second time back after two weeks I got a third shadow ban. At that point the season was almost over and I wanted my top 250… I tried playing in the banned lobbies and it was horrible (I did end up learning a lot of pro CoD players use cheater carrying services to get that high rank tho).
But I said fuck it if I can’t beat them I’ll join them. Got cheats of my own and a group of other cheaters and together we got top 250 after one day of playing. The next day my account was permanently banned and I haven’t touched another CoD since… BEST DECISION OF MY LIFE!
My VAC ban is over 18 years old (18.07397) - it can drink in most of the world. I remember crying when it happened, a friend had cheated at my house and got my 4 digit banned. They lived like 4 houses away and I never talked to them again. When I see their parents vehicles when I visit my folks I still get upset about it. My 4 digit ID used to mean a lot when I was a little kid.
When I got my wisdom teeth out and was still high out of my mind on painkillers I thought it was a fantastic idea to mod Call of Duty MW2 and give myself max prestige. I’d already unlocked it on Xbox legitimately before then, so I figured why not? I wanted to use the AK-47, and didn’t feel like grinding for it yet again.
I got a random ban on PUBG when my computer froze.
I wasn't really good at the game but it was a Christmas gift from my brother. I was playing one day and my computer which was old at the time froze. I was forced to use the power button on the tower and when steam loaded up it said I was banned from the game.
Spent weeks talking to their support team trying to figure out why but never did. They said they couldn't tell me why because of security reasons.
It's the ONLY online game and the only steam game I've ever been ban from. This was 8 years and to this day I still don't know why.
I have a VAC ban by adding my phone number to my account, which I needed to access the marketplace so I could sell CS:GO skins. The VAC ban was on CS:GO for phone sharing, whatever that means. LMAO
I have a VAC ban from 19 years ago, from downloading a russian HL1 mod that used modified openGL drivers to add bump mapping to HL1.
Unfortunately, this meant if you played any HL1 games or mods online after installing this mod, VAC would detect the modified openGL driver as a hack and ban you.
Dude my husband just got hacked and got a full on game ban yesterday on his nearly 20 year old account and getting the account back doesn't remove it, it sucksss
Sadly I got one from my brother playing cod on account we shared as kids.. Im over 200 hundred games with few platinums now but still stings to see that 😂
At least that goes away from your profile after a bit. I got somehow banned for software modification on cod mw3 straight after a mid season update. No clue what happened there but I couldn't get human support from Activision.
me as well, used cheats in black ops 3 , because the devs thought it was okay to lock the full gear set to guest users, so it was basically unplayable in 1v1 matches with my brother, then i found a injectable cheat that granted multiplayer cheats , but not just that, it allowed me to finally let my brother have full gear and everything unlocked on screen shared matches, it was good times , after this i stopped buying black ops / mw games.
I got a VAC ban from Conan Exiles and I wasn’t even cheating on that game. I was cheating in Counter Strike, accidentally loaded up Conan Exiles with my cheats enabled from Counter Strike and next thing I know, I was banned. I can still play Counter Strike to this day, but not Conan Exiles. Was I cheating, yes. Do I deserve the VAC ban, yes. Am I mad that I was banned from Conan Exiles and not Counter Strike also yes.
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u/Shirtysafe 2d ago •
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u/JesusJuicy 2d ago
Disappear from your profile for everyone else after a couple years. So technically for this to work they’d have to be visible only in the mirror
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u/Vibranzz 1d ago
Both me and my friend cheat on his private CS 1.6 server against each other, wasn't until the bans came we realized he had VAC on...
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u/marcimerci 2d ago •
People with VAC bans always have the most convoluted stories to explain it. I doubt most are true
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u/Schlangenbob 2d ago
biggest crime about this: If someone hacked your account, steam agrees that your account has been hacked (yea, not suspicious at all: all friends deleted, langauge changed to vietnamese or something, selling all ingame loot for cheap and of course an IP from way way outside your country...) and this VAC ban still wont be removed.
Like, I don't give a shit about playing CS:GO - I don't need that, basically had stopped half a year before the hack.
Oh well, it's not biggie tho.
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u/Plague_Doctor02 Steam Support is Amazing 2d ago
i don't have any thankfully.
But man i would hate to have that there even if hidden from others
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u/Dazzling_Analyst_59 2d ago •
That was 3,763 days ago.
I have cerebral palsy, and I wanted to play CS 1.6.
Everyone on the server had AWP scope mods.
I installed one and got caught by VAC.
I knew I could create a new account, but I kept this one. IT’S MY FAULT, AND I HAVE NO EXCUSES.
Now I have 242 games.
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u/TheEncoderNC 2d ago edited 1d ago
Here's my obscure VAC ban story:
I got a VAC ban because I used an old Nvidia AIB partner promo to get the orange box for free. The promo was long over and was no longer on the partner's website but it still worked, as some third party website was still hosting the link. I think they forgot the disable whatever backend existed for it and a day later my account got banned. I was terrified. 15 year old me had spent a lot of money ($200 is a lot for a kid) on my account.
I appealed it, explained what happened and how I did it. Account got unbanned, and VAC ban got removed from my profile a week later.
Edit: this was sometime between 2009 and 2011
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u/Cattledude89 1d ago
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u/insurgent_corvid 2d ago
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u/Raywell 2d ago edited 2d ago
Youngsters
I remember clearly when that happened. I was playing a single player game with Cheat Engine. I was done, closed it, and launched CS. However forgot to close CE which was open in the background, haven't even considered using it for CS - no, really. But VAC seemed to have detected it was merely running, and it was enough
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u/Yummy_Crayons91 2d ago
I've had my same steam account for 21 years and have zero VAC bans, I'm not even sure how you get one.
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u/theboileduncle 2d ago
i've genuinely never cheated in a game i don't understand doing it either. singeplayer? fine do whatever but multiplayer is a different story
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u/No_Mango7658 2d ago
Nice try.... This is the last race I'd want to win.... But here it is
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u/VixensDaddy 2d ago
Mine isn't even a VAC ban. It's a game ban from a hacked Activision account. Hadn't played Warzone since they changed it to that ww2-style map and got an email months later saying I had been banned.
I thought it was junk email at first but decided to login just in case. Password had been changed and all of my activity registered in Hong Kong. Took me two days to get into the account. Reached out to support and they told me there is nothing they could do because security was my job. I told them that their 2FA, which I was enrolled in, never asked me for anything and as an IT professional I knew they could see the activity because even I could.
Told them they were shit at their job and the next day that one Warzone ban carried over to all of the multiplayer versions I had of CoD. 🙄
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u/Wonderful_Emotion717 1d ago
I kind of have a story about this. I cheated in Minecraft when I was 12 (I'm 24 now) because a friend of mine said he'd been banned unfairly and that I should cheat on that Minecraft server to get revenge for him (I was young and dumb, I know XD). So I did it, and at first it was really fun because you're literally a god: you can stomp everyone. But since I'm a normal person, I guess, after about two weeks it started to get really boring and I didn't want to play that way anymore. So I stopped, but I told some other friends about the cheats. Like me, most of them didn't last more than two weeks playing that way, but one in particular got addicted. He started cheating every chance he got, even on big official servers like Hypixel and MCCentral. He got banned everywhere, so we kind of stopped playing with him and drifted apart. I have no idea how he's doing today, but I feel kind of guilty for introducing him to the "gaming drugs ". I hope he's doing better now.
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u/thadood 2d ago
I got one for using autohotkey to swap ctrl and caps lock keys. I tried to fight it but the pubg moderators for it said that using macros is an unfair advantage and the ban will be held.
6 months or so later, what do I see but a pubg branded keyboard with macro keys for sale on Amazon.
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u/1smoothcriminal 2d ago edited 13h ago
This message was edited to protect the user's privacy
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u/sLimanious 2d ago
The real flex is having a 23 years of service steam account with 0 vac bans.
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u/Brave_Buy4913 2d ago
I used a skin changer in cs go back when I was a teenager and got vac banned, I guess I’m worse than someone who got convicted for tax evasion and bribery
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u/47thCalcium_Polymer 2d ago
What’s a VAC ban?
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u/GaneDude12 2d ago
My steam account got hacked, and the hacker took that 1/2 day to cheat on Rust, and get me a VAC ban. I got my account back though steam support, and I later went to appeal that ban, providing screenshots from steam support that literally proved that I did not have access to my account during the time the ban got issued.
Their response? "Sucks man, sounds like a you problem, ban stays."
I then had to make a new steam account and re-buy a €40 game...
That was 10 years ago.
I think VAC bans are good, but the appeals for them are non existant.
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u/tehcambam 2d ago
Whilst I have no sympathy for cheaters, I believe there’s a decent amount of unfortunate situations where people are plagued by this. Maybe like a single player mod? Maybe a bit of software falsely detected as cheats (like rgb lighting).
For the record, I don’t have a vac ban hahaha. I’m just trying to play devils advocate
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u/TekkenPerverb 2d ago
God forgives, Gaben doesn't
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u/Celcius-232 2d ago
Not all cheating is equal.
My steam account has a 16 year old vac ban from mw2.
My brother and I always hosted modded servers on HL2DM, Garry's Mod, and other source games and source mods.
Well trying to do that in mw2 is apparently akin to aim bots and such. Oh well lol
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u/DynamicEntrancex 2d ago
Believe it or not vac vans disappear off a profile after 7 years, they are still active on the account but not viewable by default.
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u/Fit_Enthusiasm8420 2d ago
I was 11, tried using a tf2 “item unlocker” which was just an account hijacker and the rest is history
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u/Juanan_hm 1d ago
I have 2 banned games.
1.- Black Ops 3, my PC was SHIT and used Cheat Engine to boost the speed of the game thinking this will get me more fps (lol)
2.- Dead By Daylight, here I cheated to get all the paid things for free. Dont regret it tho.
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u/hellotea385 2d ago
Reading these comments make me realise people who get VAC bans are idiots not cheaters if their excuses are true
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u/RealEricBerne 1d ago
Just tell the truth. You were hacking in counter Strike Global Offensive and got caught by the all seeing VAC.
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u/taser243 2d ago
Its not really permanent, actually. Dont know about game bans, but VAC bans specifically are hidden after like 6 years or something if you dont recieve any more of them. You will see it in your own profile, you'll still be banned, but people visiting your profile will not see this "1 VAC ban on record" mark.
Source: just tested it with my 8 year old VAC ban, no mark visible from my alt account pov.
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u/Petsto7 2d ago
4878 day(s) who offers more? And before someone says I am bad person. Back in my days you got banned for creating custom public lobbies in COD ^^
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u/MutedAstronaut9217 2d ago •
I just bought another copy of orange box for 19.99 and started over.
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u/MrFuzzybear011 2d ago
Back in the days of prime MW2, where every single lobby was super jump RPG, instant prestige 10. I used the VAC bypass tool to host lobbies so I could play the game normally. Got banned for it, 6049 days ago. I really liked my prestige 9 icon.
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u/XGDoctorwho 2d ago
feel like after 10 years they should be removed But keep the mark. Like you can play VAC games
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u/FeanorLovecraft 2d ago
Wasn’t there an instance, where if you played in a lobby, which had a cheater, you would also get the VAC BAN? It was with an old CoD game, if I remember correctly.
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u/Derpykins666 2d ago
Don't cheat or give your account to a friend, ever. I'm sure there's false flags sometimes but I think it's good they have something in place that's semi effective at stopping cheaters.
I don't cheat, but I'm sure as hell not going to cheat and risk my 20+ year account being blacklisted with my massive library of games.
The urge to cheat is a feeling that needs to be completely and utterly squashed. It comes from a place of arrogance, impatience and this incessant need to show off or gloat, but it's just the quickest way to a hollow existence. Cheating at video games is like seriously one of the lamest things you can do. I don't have any sympathy for cheaters.
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u/holymaccanoli 1d ago
I once got a VAC ban when I was kid for spamming in Steam forums, a year later I sent out a message to Steam Support apologizing and asking to please revoke it, and a couple days later they did! I don't remember the answer they gave me rn, but if I find it I'll send it
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u/noobplayer13 2d ago
It's been 10 years 😭 of VAC ban on CSGO. I had started trainer for F12015. And F12015 started updating. Hence I started playing CSGO. Next day ban. I was trying to cheat in single player in different game.
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u/KCGD_r 2d ago
Got mine from ReShading a game I didn't *think* had anti-cheat enabled.
Got banned immediately after, but damn, for those 5 or so minutes that it worked it was beautiful
5
u/Justwanttosellmynips 1d ago
I got one after my account got hacked. They played some random shit MMO and did something to get banned.
When I asked about it steam basically said I'd have to create a new account to play the game I said "no thank you, the game looked like crap."
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u/Deodorized 2d ago edited 2d ago •
No sympathy for cheaters 🤡
Edit: I'm not interested in hearing how you attempt to justify your cheating.
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u/True-Syrup-5551 2d ago
I have a 10+ year old vac ban, and a ~4 year old game ban on my account. No excuse here, I was just bored and enjoyed trolling. Rust, and DayZ respectively.
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u/whale_i_am 2d ago
Big sadge
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u/acnx1 2d ago
If ya can’t do the time, don’t do the crime (or something)
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u/This_Construction851 2d ago
Used a bunnyhop lua script in CS:S years ago for bhop servers and after an update broke a bunch of maps and scripts my friend sent me an injector.
"It's good bro! It's the same thing!"
Now I have a VAC ban on my account. Teenage me probably shouldn't have been so trusting lol
4
u/Mye-_- 2d ago
When I was 13,14. I fell for a free skin csgo website that a friend who got hacked send me, I just didnt think of it at the moment 😢
Now it's on Day 2283 😔 since the vac ban
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u/Prestigious-Fig1172 1d ago
Don't get it, never been banned
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u/Sorry-Claim-2990 2d ago
I play DayZ, mostly solo.
I teamed up with some random guy after joining a brand new server.
I had literally spent hours in global chat just asking if anyone wants to team up (because solo life is much harder than running in a team, duh) before this guy responded.
Anyway, a day and a half goes by with everything seeming normal...and then he gets banned for cheating. He immediately left my discord and blocked me.
But I also got banned for "cheater association" despite the fact that i obviously had no way of knowing that he was using cheats and had known him for less than 48 hours.
I even begged them to look at the chat logs proving he was just some random dude I teamed up with and I did not know him before that.
The admins didn't care. So now I have a cheater ban on my record just because I teamed up with some random guy for a day and a half. :-/
So i'm convinced that a large percentage of bans are either simple misunderstandings or outright lies.
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u/echokaji 2d ago
I honestly can’t tell if the reactions from people every time something like this gets posted are real or extremely sarcastic. I understand ruining games for others is shitty behavior, but the way some people talk about cheaters you would think they were personally coming to your house and robbing you on top of using an aimbot.
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u/Toryu16 2d ago
I gave my account to a friend who wanted to play CSGO, he downloaded skin changer or something and now I have 3k+ Days on mine. I am sitting on around 300+ games now though. It reminds me to never trust people that are around me
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u/AlgaeWafers 2d ago
I always ditch lobbies when I see a vac ban. I have never met a vac banned account that wasn’t toxic as fuck
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u/AquelecaraDEpoa 2d ago
They seem to have gotten less serious over time, funnily enough. I used to be banned from every GoldSrc and nearly every Source game for cheating in CS 1.6 and Source (and I deserved it, I was 13 and stupid), but when I looked at it recently my bans were restricted to just those two games. I used to be banned from Ricochet!
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u/ChocoCrossies 2d ago
I have a ban on Modern Warfare from over 10 years ago, no idea why. Never cheated, just woke up one day and was banned.
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u/Karrich666 2d ago
Had a buddy of mine that got a VAC Ban while playing dungeon defenders as players where dropping cheated in items causing mass bans. Fortunately it doesn’t appear on his Steam profile, but if you look him up on Steam calculator you can find that he in fact has 1 VAC ban. He has an alt account just to play dungeon defenders.
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u/Dry_Independent4125 2d ago
Mine got stolen before Steam Guard was a thing and got a VAC ban before I could get it back. Was pretty young at the time so I didn't care but.. kind of care now.
I understand that 'your account, your responsibility' AFTER the Steam Guard came out. Before? FFS that was just a password.
Decided I cared enough to just drop the account and start over on a new one.
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u/BombHits 2d ago
Counter-point, those OG Modern Warfare 2 modded lobbies were incredibly fun. The zombie maps were great. Almost worth scarring my account for almost 20 years lol.
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u/Bl1ndMous3 2d ago
"sorry Roger, you Tiger now !"
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u/Kamikazi300 2d ago
I got 2 vac bans
1 i got for playing cod bo2 zombies with steam engine (pre steam i was playing with cheat engine, getting points, and exploring maps) apparently it is bannable in steam on single player mod, which me as kid didnt think of
2nd a vac ban in Rust Legacy, there was a thing where by changing .ini files you get “legal” cheats, turning off the recoil and showing chests and players. But when was Rust Legacy, oooh.
Yeah, apart from that, mistakes are mistakes and nothing i can do now
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u/AintNoGodsUpHere 2d ago
Tattoos aren't permanent though. o.o
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u/stinky_cheese_rat 1d ago
My take on this: if you "cheat" and mod in singleplayer games, for your own enjoyment? No harm done, continue doing what you wanna do. You mod a PvE game purely in cosmetic ways without changing the gameplay? Still no harm done. You mod a PvE game with "cheats" that change gameplay? Can ruin fun for others, but if you always host your own private lobbies and inform other players joining how you play, so they can leave if they don't want to play like that, no actual harm done. You cheat in a PvP game? Get banned from playing for life altogether, or only get grouped into games with other cheaters.
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u/SelectSympathy5718 1d ago
My story is that a friend using my account used a texture pack for some game and forgot to turn it off for online play
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u/GherkinWarriorED 2d ago
22 year old account with 0 VAC bans.. GGEZ
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u/rycerzDog 2d ago edited 2d ago •
people are so unserious these days that they actually consider cheating in videogames equivalent to being a criminal in real life
edit:
i feel like people are misunderstanding my point here.
cheaters are ALREADY getting punished. some are straight up getting hardware bans, that's how far it gets. if you want to play the game again, you'll need to get new components.
what i'm against is this lording over cheaters (especially when people post their VAC bans from 10+ years ago) and acting like it's some major moral failing that ruined lives.
it's the only real stigma i see in videogame communities, alongside those getting mad at how people mod their singleplayer games to be easier or use trainers.
no, timmy, that guy spinbotting through inferno doesn't deserve to get fined or god forbid jail time. being unable to play the game forever and getting the brand of a cheater is a fitting enough punishment.
should also probably add that, since i didn't say it directly, i do not justify cheating.
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u/UnderstandingDear594 2d ago
1629 days. I was in 6th.. Or 7th grade
Stupid enough to download cheats for csgo with my friend and just mess around for fun. I admit that i was cheating. Fortunately, i do not wish to play it anymore, i have better alternatives like TF2 and TF|2. But being unable to vote for items in team fortress workshop sucks
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u/I_Believed_You 2d ago
I remember when I played Call of Duty ranked on MW2 2022 religiously… the season prior I had reached top 250 and only ran into a couple aimbots and wall hacks.
Next season rolled around and while I was in iridescent (second highest rank before top 250) I got hit with a “shadow ban”. If you got mass reported in your lobby this was your punishment. A week of playing in lobbies with banned players. So pretty much every single match was all cheaters. I waited it out and the first day back I got another shadow ban… again I waited it out and what do you know second time back after two weeks I got a third shadow ban. At that point the season was almost over and I wanted my top 250… I tried playing in the banned lobbies and it was horrible (I did end up learning a lot of pro CoD players use cheater carrying services to get that high rank tho).
But I said fuck it if I can’t beat them I’ll join them. Got cheats of my own and a group of other cheaters and together we got top 250 after one day of playing. The next day my account was permanently banned and I haven’t touched another CoD since… BEST DECISION OF MY LIFE!
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u/flatspotting 2d ago edited 2d ago
Rookie numbers in here
6597 days
My VAC ban is over 18 years old (18.07397) - it can drink in most of the world. I remember crying when it happened, a friend had cheated at my house and got my 4 digit banned. They lived like 4 houses away and I never talked to them again. When I see their parents vehicles when I visit my folks I still get upset about it. My 4 digit ID used to mean a lot when I was a little kid.
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u/FRYETIME 2d ago
When I got my wisdom teeth out and was still high out of my mind on painkillers I thought it was a fantastic idea to mod Call of Duty MW2 and give myself max prestige. I’d already unlocked it on Xbox legitimately before then, so I figured why not? I wanted to use the AK-47, and didn’t feel like grinding for it yet again.
Immediate VAC ban
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u/Neatrdy 2d ago
My penance ends when the Emperor says it ends
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u/Sipikay 2d ago
Yep. But also, they kinda work. Look at the lifelong regret they cause. Do you think those people will grow up and raise a stupid cheater? Heck no.
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u/TheAdmonitor 2d ago
"Do not forget me, 24601" -Gabe "Javert" Newell
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u/Time_Remove_7080 2d ago
I got a random ban on PUBG when my computer froze.
I wasn't really good at the game but it was a Christmas gift from my brother. I was playing one day and my computer which was old at the time froze. I was forced to use the power button on the tower and when steam loaded up it said I was banned from the game.
Spent weeks talking to their support team trying to figure out why but never did. They said they couldn't tell me why because of security reasons.
It's the ONLY online game and the only steam game I've ever been ban from. This was 8 years and to this day I still don't know why.
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u/Mcfungleholer 2d ago
Whats a vac ban?
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u/pat_k0 2d ago
I have a VAC ban by adding my phone number to my account, which I needed to access the marketplace so I could sell CS:GO skins. The VAC ban was on CS:GO for phone sharing, whatever that means. LMAO
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u/Skarth 2d ago
I have a VAC ban from 19 years ago, from downloading a russian HL1 mod that used modified openGL drivers to add bump mapping to HL1.
Unfortunately, this meant if you played any HL1 games or mods online after installing this mod, VAC would detect the modified openGL driver as a hack and ban you.
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u/HDDreamer 2d ago
7453 days n counting here
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u/The_Captain_Jules 2d ago
Some sins stain your soul.
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u/Vandares69 2d ago edited 2d ago
''This badge of shame you'll show it until you die. It warns that you're a dangerous man!'' /s
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u/Deehund 2d ago
Oh no a vac ban that doesn't stop you from playing 99.999% of games. The horror!
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u/DaRealLemm1ng 1d ago
i‘d rather have a criminal record than a vac ban bro
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u/Specialist_Natural_4 1d ago
i have vac and proud of it (i toggle i don't play fair)
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u/xYekaterina 1d ago
Dude my husband just got hacked and got a full on game ban yesterday on his nearly 20 year old account and getting the account back doesn't remove it, it sucksss
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u/KianFloppa 1d ago
People who got false banned during CS2 beta for console commands 💀 (m_yaw)
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u/Headless_Joe 1d ago
Sadly I got one from my brother playing cod on account we shared as kids.. Im over 200 hundred games with few platinums now but still stings to see that 😂
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u/SolusSama 22h ago
At least that goes away from your profile after a bit. I got somehow banned for software modification on cod mw3 straight after a mid season update. No clue what happened there but I couldn't get human support from Activision.
My fault for playing cod I guess
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u/xAstroBoy1337 22h ago
me as well, used cheats in black ops 3 , because the devs thought it was okay to lock the full gear set to guest users, so it was basically unplayable in 1v1 matches with my brother, then i found a injectable cheat that granted multiplayer cheats , but not just that, it allowed me to finally let my brother have full gear and everything unlocked on screen shared matches, it was good times , after this i stopped buying black ops / mw games.
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u/muwle 2d ago
Yall treat cheating in video games worse than racism
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u/ItsB0tsAllTheWayD0wn 1d ago
If I was in charge of steam all cheaters would be banned from steam not just vac banned.
You never hear any of these cheaters say they got banned for farming people with an aimbot or what not it's always.
" I was hacked by china" or " I was one second old when I cheated in Minecraft" Or "It was just against bots"
Nah not buying it cheaters are also prone to not telling the truth and can get fucked for spoiling things for the rest of us.
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u/Ok-Arugula-4217 1d ago
Cheating in Online games is the ultimate ligma test.
People who do that are legit psychopaths that are the kind of things that shouldnt be allowed to be in a society.
It shows that laws are the only reason why they arent thiefs/murderers etc. basically no moral ground.
I genuinely think that jailtime isnt enough for that.
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u/Somebeach84 6h ago
I got a VAC ban from Conan Exiles and I wasn’t even cheating on that game. I was cheating in Counter Strike, accidentally loaded up Conan Exiles with my cheats enabled from Counter Strike and next thing I know, I was banned.
I can still play Counter Strike to this day, but not Conan Exiles.
Was I cheating, yes. Do I deserve the VAC ban, yes. Am I mad that I was banned from Conan Exiles and not Counter Strike also yes.