In Team Fortress 2, there is a group of people who host multiple cheat-controlled aimbotting bots, which run around on servers, destroying everyone playing in the other team. These are called cat-bots.<p>To host these bots, you need to set up a Linux environment. Then you can use a script, which automatically prepares your system for hosting the bots. One of the things it does is it creates multiple users in Linux (to run multiple Steam instances), all of them starting with "catbot".<p><a href="https://github.com/nullifiedcat/catbot-setup" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/nullifiedcat/catbot-setup</a><p>And the script creators already changed every mention of "catbot" to "kisak" (name of the Github moderator for Valve)<p><a href="https://github.com/nullifiedcat/catbot-setup/commit/58582f8103064d63db063eef4b2d31792ebb2cd0" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/nullifiedcat/catbot-setup/commit/58582f81...</a>
> Good day, I've received word from the VAC team that this is intentional and not open for discussion on Github.<p>> In general VAC issues are not handled on Github in any capacity and further issue reports on this may result in being banned from the Valve Software issue trackers.<p>This is just incomprehensible from a PR standpoint, even for a company like Valve, especially since people on the thread have brought up legitimate concerns for users that might be caught in the flak.
As Nickodell and PlutoIsAPlanet pointed out, this "issue" was raised by a group of banned Team Fortress 2 cheaters, who are developing obfuscated aimbots.<p>In all likelihood, VAC's detection is premised on other factors in combination with the username. Like, for example, botting in online multiplayer games.<p>This may come as a surprise to half the users in these comments, but, for the 99% of gamers who are not malware enthusiasts, banning bad actors is a feature, not a bug.
As someone who plays a lot of games, I can't wait for the day when Steam gets replaced by something better. And given Steam's current state, "something better" is a really low bar to go by. At this point I would prefer individual installers for each game, without any "platform" whatsoever.
Given that all the accounts claiming to have been banned are somehow linked back to CSGO cheating on their GitHub profiles, gonna say this is just cheaters trying to get unbanned.
Remember when Valve's official stance about VAC was that it will only ever detect cheats, that it doesn't make mistakes, and that if you got a VAC ban, you had it coming?<p>And then they had a number of false positives over the years where they had to rescind the bans?<p>And now they're detecting things that aren't cheats. A username on the local machine is not a cheat, end of fucking discussion.
A Valve employee showed up on Reddit to say this bug report is not correct. <a href="https://np.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/7ndjdt/valve_will_vac_ban_you_automatically_for_having/ds2dulw/" rel="nofollow">https://np.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/7ndjdt/valve_w...</a>
So if I'm understanding this right, you can get permanently banned from all of these games (<a href="http://store.steampowered.com/search/?category2=8" rel="nofollow">http://store.steampowered.com/search/?category2=8</a>) just for having a certain username? That's crazy, no matter what the username is.
This is by far one of the strangest things I have seen HN get mad about. The commenters on the linked issue seem to be mostly aimbot users. Wouldn't be surprised if they're here too.
My answer to Valve's behavior in recent years was to just stop buying games from them, or on Steam in general, so they don't receive revenue from me.
> Good day, I've received word from the VAC team that this is intentional and not open for discussion on Github.<p>> In general VAC issues are not handled on Github in any capacity and further issue reports on this may result in being banned from the Valve Software issue trackers.<p>This is not the way to address a paying customer. These people truly are a bunch of clowns.