He reassures that VAC isn’t spying on us for evil, but is actually checking if ‘cheat DRM domains’ are being accessed. This is to prevent cheats requiring online authentication.
Newell cautions against letting these ‘cheat professionals’ who charge for their programs and exploits spin the story by portraying VAC as some evil entity.
”Cheat developers have a problem in getting cheaters to actually pay them for all the obvious reasons, so they start creating DRM and anti-cheat code for their cheats,” Newell explained. ”These cheats phone home to a DRM server that confirms that a cheater has actually paid to use the cheat.”
”VAC checked for the presence of these cheats. If they were detected VAC then checked to see which cheat DRM server was being contacted. This second check was done by looking for a partial match to those (non-web) cheat DRM servers in the DNS cache.”
”If found, then hashes of the matching DNS entries were sent to the VAC servers. The match was double checked on our servers and then that client was marked for a future ban. Less than a tenth of one percent of clients triggered the second check. 570 cheaters are being banned as a result,” he continued.
What started the wave of concern about the upgrades to VAC actually only lasted 13 days as cheat providers had already moved on to using other methods to circumvent the system. Valve’s ultimate goal, Newell said, ”is to make them more expensive for cheaters and cheat creators than the economic benefits they can reasonably expect to gain.”
The VAC system by its nature is ‘shifty’. ”VAC is inherently a scary looking piece of software, because it is trying to be obscure, it is going after code that is trying to attack it, and it is sneaky. For most cheat developers, social engineering might be a cheaper way to attack the system than continuing the code arms race, which means that there will be more Reddit posts trying to cast VAC in a sinister light,” said Newell.
”Our response is to make it clear what we were actually doing and why with enough transparency that people can make their own judgements as to whether or not we are trustworthy.”
”Do we care what porn sites you visit?” he asked. ”Oh, dear god, no. My brain just melted.”
”…you have to make the call if we are trustworthy. We try really hard to earn and keep your trust.”
Check out the full Reddit post by Gabe Newell to get a further explanation behind VAC’s methods.
