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December 2025

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[Hzza]

And how do you separate the "good" from the "bad"?

OOOH PHILOSOPHY HAPPENED.

Will give philosophic interpretation for food/crack.

First we must outline what we define as good, in the Wittgenstein-ien language games tradition. It seems apparent immediately that to know good we must also know the bad as it's comparison. Therefore a good act is one that has positive consequences for a particular party. But there must be a balance somewhere, for no action could be considered good by everyone. For example, say we are passing by a homeless man and give him half of a sandwich. Not only does negitivity pass on to us in the form of hunger unfulfilled or money wasted but the homeless man might reject it due to his possible wheat allergy. I therefore conclude that no action could ever be considered truly good as a negative effect will be impose upon another.

You missed the last part of that sentence out bro, "Also, I have a tiny tiny penis."

VAC's fine. As I said before, people would cheat, lob in a ticket saying their account was hacked, get the ban lifted and be on their merry way. It's just unfortunate that this time it happened to someone we know, I don't ever remember anyone speaking anywhere about how unjust the VAC system is when it wasn't banning our friends, so I don't see why we should start picking holes in the system now that its affected someone we know. In all my time playing TF2 I think I've only ever seen 3 legitimate "hackers", one was an aimbot and 2 speed hackers, in over 530 hours and its thanks to VAC. It's brutal, but then it has to be otherwise douchebags would rule the servers.

My 2p.

[Tommy the Cat]

Tommy is desperate for any application of his worthless education.

You won't be laughing when I prove to you the meaninglessness of existence!

And it could be worse. I could be doing media studies. Or computer science.

Edit: Or working for Heinz.

[Torgue]

Tommy is desperate for any application of his worthless education.

You won't be laughing when I prove to you the meaninglessness of existence!

Didn't Camus and Sartre already do that?

[CruelCow]

You're thinking of Brahms, Torgue!



See that tommy? You'll never own one of these!
Om nom nom nom, nom nom!

[Tommy the Cat]

Tommy is desperate for any application of his worthless education.

You won't be laughing when I prove to you the meaninglessness of existence!

Didn't Camus and Sartre already do that?

Possibly, but you're taking away my snappy comeback Torgue.

[DeadlyAvenger]

For example, say we are passing by a crippled spy and give him half of a sandvich.

phixed. this is in the tf2 chat section.

edit...woah...7 ninjas!

[Hzza]

For example, say we are passing by a crippled spy and give him half of a sandvich.

phixed. this is in the tf2 chat section.

edit...woah...7 ninjas!

Hot topic is hot, I was going to bed but then the Freebird solo started and I want to see where the debate takes us.

edit - Now that I've used the word debate, probably down a seedy seedy road.

[discordance]

VAC is too indiscriminate. For one thing chaos was hacked by someone from China?, so unless he flew to china to hack himself there should be enough evidence that it wasn't him. In fact steam itself flags up accounts when they are used in weird geographical locations compared to your normal country of use. That being the case it should be routine for them to to cross-reference this data. The only reason they're not doing it is because they can get away with not doing it and save themselves some money, and even make some when chaos has to rebuy his games.

[CruelCow]

Proxy, people creating each other accounts.
Any hole you create will be found out and used.

[Tommy the Cat]

I want a sandvich : (

[Junta]

VAC is too indiscriminate. For one thing chaos was hacked by someone from China?, so unless he flew to china to hack himself there should be enough evidence that it wasn't him. In fact steam itself flags up accounts when they are used in weird geographical locations compared to your normal country of use. That being the case it should be routine for them to to cross-reference this data. The only reason they're not doing it is because they can get away with not doing it and save themselves some money, and even make some when chaos has to rebuy his games.

I agree. The bottom line is that VAC is banning people that should not be banned. I wholly accept the "draconian" approach needed in such a security system, but there is a real flaw if you start punishing innocent people.

The basic principle for me, is that someone hacked a steam account and the original owner is banned. Sadly, IT systems don't understand this and VAC is operating to its own specification in a strict way (cheater = ban). There is no consideration for who is using the account unlawfully and the system has no way of knowing either. However, VAC could indeed be better. It could have identified a change in Jordan's details and flagged the account as a possible hijack. It could have determined that a completely different IP address was being used to the UK one. Its possible, but I am ignoring the development work / effort / technology involved here.

If I liken this to credit card fraud, the bank would have closed all of my accounts (taking whatever money I had still) and told me to f*ck off. I would have no re-dress for a service that I have paid for.

I understand the concept that people are making earlier "VAC should ignore appeals because the cheaters will just appeal anyway and we'll be back to square one". However, there is a distinction for me between a wrongful and rightful ban. There has to be and the VAC system is wrong in not being able to do this.

I don't think any meaningful appeal process could be developed without subversion or abuse. I do however, think that the VAC banning process should be much smarter than it is already - the steam system already collects data about a user and it wouldn't be hard to figure out that a user has suddenly switched geographic location in what could be a fraudulent way. As someone said earlier, the original approach to security was pretty crap when they've only just introduced the e-mail confirmation thing!

VAC must be made much smarter! It was already heavily compromised on CSS servers FFS!

[Brahms]

But like Cruel said, a geographically aware appeal could be circumvented using proxies, so Valve would have to pay the extra money (Don't know if it would actually cost more but whatever) to add an extra layer of security which could easily be bypassed. So what would be the point?

The end result would be: Valve spends more time/money and there are MORE cheaters getting away with it.

[Junta]

Don't you disclose your region when creating a steam account?

[Hzza]

Don't you disclose your region when creating a steam account?

I've changed my location before now to get quicker downloads so I don't think that'd be much of an indicator to be honest.

[discordance]

don't forget steam also collects some system information, they have this data too, oh look chaos is now on a machine where the system language is chinese and his specs have totally changed. Of course you can still circumvent it but you can't be naive enough to think the current system isnt being constantly abused and circumvented already.