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.

Comments

How about a refund.

[BitZtream]

I don't want Left 4 Dead 2. I don't like it any more than the pile of shit that is MW2. My mistake for not pirating it first, next time I will, so how about you give me my money back for that instead of giving me another game I have absolutely no interest in since I've been unable to play anything online since my account looks like its owned by cheating hack.

Dear Soulskill

[oldhack]

Are you actually trying to make a living out of this "game journalist" gig? Is it working?

Re:Customer service

[Michael Kristopeit]

they allowed something designed to make the game more enjoyable completely remove all ability to enjoy the game from a very very large number of players. the "expensiveness" of the game provided in retribution is as relevant as their claims of billions lost due to piracy. this is far more than "an error" on their part... but an apology and access to content they've already produced and can duplicate trivially at ~no cost is pretty much all they have to give.

and now the market decides: do i want to pay to play games through a service that is capable of making such "errors"

Re:Customer service

[Anonymous Coward]

They admitted there was an error and as an apology gave them all a rather expensive game. That's pretty good customer service.

And if the fucking DRM hadn't been there in the first place, 12,000 legitimate customers wouldn't have been banninated even for a single nanosecond.

Steam's the least evil form of DRM presently on the market, but just because it happens to be gilded... doesn't make it any less of a cage.

Re:Customer service

[Anonymous Coward]

Anti-cheating software is the same thing as DRM.

It's managing your digital right to play the game by the rules.

Re:Customer service

[Anonymous Coward]

And the company also bans you from their official servers. That is part of the product description which they sold to you.

Re:Customer service

[Michael Kristopeit]

there certainly exist people who have made services that haven't YET suffered errors as severe as this one made by valve.

is your vocabulary and logic always so limited when your sarcasm is turned on? why would you ever talk about the capability of errors? i think you meant possibility or proneness or potential for. being prone to errors is not a capability...

Re:Customer service

[Michael Kristopeit]

flamebait for answering a question honestly? retarded moderators. valve drones. serve your master.

Re:Actual email from Gabe

[mrmeval]

Good compensation would be refunding the full amount of the game they'd blocked and any extra paid. The owner keeps their copy of the game and it remains working.