Valve Apologizes For 12,000 Erroneous Anti-Cheating Bans

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

[GrumblyStuff]

And gave them all a competing multiplayer game.... /tinfoilhat

cheating

[networkzombie]

I wish punkbuster worked as hard as Steam at keeping cheaters offline and making up for their mistakes. I'd get all my games for free and I wouldn't get kicked as often.

Re:Actual email from Gabe

[Necroloth]

*shameless begging* If anyone is kind enough to want to give their free copy, I'd appreciate it :)

That good

[Netshroud]

Valve's PR is so good that some people were complaining on the official forums that VAC didn't erroneously ban them - they wanted a free game.

Re:Customer service

[Ginger Unicorn]

i'm having a hard time picturing a credible scenario where a woman would be prepared to have sex in exchange for a copy of a video game.

Re:Customer service

[Narishma]

Who said anything about women?

Re:Customer service

[Anne_Nonymous]

Let her choose the cheetos or beer then.

Re:Customer service

[AtomicOrange]

You think juggling all of that and a girlfriend is bad. Try getting married, I haven't played a computer game in 2 and a half months. My homebuilt pc is calling to me, it longs for my caress.