29 Jul, 2010
Valve are offering a generous gift to Modern Warfare 2 fans left burned, after Steam’s Anti-Cheat software left approximately 12,000 players banned over the last 2 weeks, Gamespot reports. The gift of a free copy of Left 4 Dead 2 goes out to all those erroneously affected by a mass ban, which Valve have credited to a technical problem between Steam and game itself. In an emailed apology to fans, Valve President Gabe Newell explained the issue.
“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. This wasn’t a game-specific mistake. Steam allows us to manage and reverse these erroneous bans (about 12,000 erroneous bans over two weeks).”
The software in question ‘Valve Anti-Cheat’ or ‘VAC’ is also in place for several other Valve and Steam supported titles, such as Counter Strike and Team Fortress 2, in conjunction with their zero-tolerance policy for cheats, which would usually result in a pemanent ban.
I for one think that this is a very impressive display of how much Valve value their players, other companies should take some notes here! Have any of you our readers been affected by this problem?
Gamespot report on L4D2 Giveaway
Genius move by Valve on all counts. Modern Warfare 2 is one step closer to being fun to play online, and the L4D community grows as a result! Other developers could learn a lot about valuing custom from Valve. I’m looking at you, Activision.
Wow, what a great gift!