777
I really hope valve can get VAC into a good space so it can be an example of doing anti-cheat well without having to be a rootkit. Looks like we're heading towards that point. Hopefully this change will last
this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2025
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John Macdonald is cooking the best fucking server-sided anticheat with all that compute power in Bellevue. Lets see him become a master chef!
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You love to see it.
Nice.
The cheating bastards need to git gud.
Wauughhh!
Uaughh!
Ahahaha!
Cry some more, kernel anti cheat stans!
... cry some more.
I've yet to meet one that can outsmart bullet
Brrrrrrrrrrrrzzzzzzzzzzzzzzraaaaaaaaaarahahahahahaugh
Not sure if this was intentional but your comment reads like classic Halo Elite death screams. I love it. Fits perfectly with imagining execs at denuvo seeing the success of VAC.
Close.
It costs $400,000 to hire me as a ghost writer...
... for 12 seconds.
OMG thank God, finally VAC is working??? The cheating was getting so bad. I kick and report people as much as I can but it felt like it never did anything.
Knowing this, I am not as upset about getting caught in the crossfire the other day. VAC flagged my game session after like 2 seconds and I had to reinstall completely.
I should go read some of these cheater forums and maybe talk a little shit. Little fuckers.
During a GDC conference held by John Macdonald (Engineer largely in the data side of Valve's affairs), he stated that the training of VACnet was largely a "war of datasets", and he expected the quality to improve as time went on and Valve labelled and processed more internal data for their anticheat.
Considering the leak for "referring to your training manual" for the employee-access version of Overwatch match reporting for CS2 might be an indicator that they were labelling the data the whole time with contractors. Now seems to be the release moment :)
The problem is the arms race escalates forever - cheat developers will just regroup, analyse what the new VAC is doing, and start finding new exploits.
Not saying Valve should just give up; quite the opposite. The war never ends.
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This explains why I get killed so much… right? Right?
Yeah! Me too! It's all the cheaters, not my complete lack of coordination, speed, and skill.
It's the damn cheaters!
git gud (at blocking cheaters)
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It's possible that Adwaita for Steam causing VAC issues now. I suddenly started getting VAC warnings on CS2 and it didn't go until disabling Adwaita for Steam.
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You're not good, you just forgot what it's like to lose.
Hell fucking yeah.
I can only hope this affects TF2 as well. I used to play competitively and the line between cheater and god-tier is so blurry sometimes, especially with how hard it is to spectate now. The one and only time I was certain someone was cheating was when I tried to rocket jump around a corner and got killed by a prefired airshot from a direct hit, aka they couldn't even see me when they fired and still hit me 50 feet in the air the same instant I came around the corner.
And of course their team wouldn't kick em because people still think it's impossible to cheat with projectiles :(
I'm not saying they definitely weren't cheating, but I have definitely hit some shots in my time that seemed impossible. If you fire enough rockets at corners that you think someone might come around, or in games with snipers that penetrate cover, take blind guesses through walls, you're going to get lucky eventually.
Edit to add: just saying, the line is blurry indeed. But I think if I got kicked over it, I'd be a good sport about it! "Got kicked for cheating because I was too l33t" would be such a good story. I'm sure some people have had it happen.
Oh, getting kicked even when you're not cheating has definitely happened, it's even happened to me. But that cheater was suspicious even before that shot, that one is just the one that sealed the deal for me. Using the direct hit is also part of the evidence! Projectile cheaters like using it because the rockets move faster so the cheat engine is more accurate against people who can airstrafe. also it was citadel (a new map, the good prefire airshot spots are far from clear) and they would have had to be randomly firing rockets up at the sky for no reason. I get owned plenty often, this was not that.
I was never at the top of the comp scene, but I've spent my fair share of time playing pugs against the best of the best and not even soooapymeister hits shots like that person was.
I played 1.6 competitively way back in leagues. There were spots where you learned to shoot at like 20-30 seconds into a match. If someone ran from the "other" start you knew they would be coming around certain corners.
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It's probably more difficult than you think, Shounic (Youtuber) explained in several of his breakdowns on the bot crisis about how far removed TF2 is compared to simplistic (mechanically) shooters like CS2, making much harder to create a VACnet style solution.
It's believed that the update that removed the bots was more of a manual approach.
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good.gif