January is a difficult time of yr, and whereas we have been all struggling to get again into the swing of issues after the Christmas break, Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC) was laborious at work. In truth, it labored so laborious that final month, the AI-driven service banned multiple million gamers from the platform.
That information comes from SteamDB, which has been monitoring the variety of bans issued throughout the platform for a few years (for the report, the grand complete presently sits at someplace round 26 million). While game bans – these issued by Valve on behalf of a third-party developer – have been fairly excessive since a dramatic spike in late 2017, VAC ban numbers have been far decrease. Until not too long ago.
As of November 2018, the best variety of VAC bans in a single month was 192,000, however in December, that quantity more than tripled, topping 600,000. It continued to rise final month, peaking at 1.03 million, beating out game bans for the primary time since September 2017.
The dramatic spike in VAC bans simply so occurs to comply with the developer’s resolution to make Counter-Strike: Global Offensive free-to-play in direction of the tip of final yr. The inflow of recent gamers that inspired is fairly spectacular, however no price-tag implies that cheaters are way more prevalent, particularly for gamers with low belief components.
Stay frosty: Despite some unhealthy eggs, CS:GO is without doubt one of the best FPS games on PC
VAC targets cheaters in additional than 300 games, however CS:GO is without doubt one of the AI service’s flagship titles. Some rumours counsel that Valve selected to make the first-person shooter free-to-play so as to assist VAC’s machine-learning algorithms, because the system doesn’t account for {hardware} bans, however I’d take these recommendations with a fairly huge pinch of salt.
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