Valve Apologizes For 12,000 Erroneous Anti-Cheating Bans 202
Earlier this week, there were reports that large numbers of Modern Warfare 2 players on Steam were getting erroneously banned by Valve's Anti-Cheat software. While such claims are usually best taken with a grain of salt, the quantity and suddenness caused speculation that Valve's software wasn't operating correctly. A few days later, Valve president Gabe Newell sent out an email acknowledging that roughly 12,000 players had been inappropriately banned over the preceding two weeks. "The problem was that Steam would fail a signature check between the disk version of a DLL and a latent memory version. This was caused by a combination of conditions occurring while Steam was updating the disk image of a game." Valve reversed the bans and gave free copies of Left 4 Dead 2 to everyone who was affected.
Re:Customer service (Score:3, Interesting)
You can play Counter strike with bots, but I don't think you'll see many people playing it that way. I still think it will be firmly in the minority.
I actually know of a lot of adults who do exactly this. They cant be bothered playing online due to all the people who have too much time to dedicate to being FPS ninjas. I have always found that if you are not willing to dedicate an hour per day to playing online games you will probably not get that much enjoyment out of it due to the insane amount of dieing you do for very little killing.
An hour per day might not sound like much, but with a full time job, travelling to work, family, sleep and other commitments finding that hour can be hard. I used to spend at least 2 hours per day gaming, and pretty much all day at weekends. Battletracker lists my longest session on AA2 as 10 hours straight. (http://battletracker.com/playerstats/aao/289831/-GuNS-Nohax/)
Now I have a girlfriend and a job I barely fit in an hour a day to learn BFBC2. Even this hour is partly at the expense of boozing with my mates after work. If I ever have kids I am fairly sure the gaming will have to be knocked on the head for more than an hour per week, let alone per day.
However some people still love FPS games, even though they cannot keep the ninja reactions tuned. So they set an army of bots up where they can tune them to make them a challenge but not impossible.
In my youth I used to use the bots on UT for training, try playing against 5 or 6 of them all set to "Godlike" on a small map.
Bad RAM? (Score:3, Interesting)
Sounds to me like this could also give a ban to someone who had bad RAM. One bit wrong in an area that gets a signature check and you're gone. Doesn't even have to be bad RAM, if a cosmic ray flips a bit.
Better run that memtest86 NOW.