You can find many posts on forums such as the Steam community or Reddit, where players often report encountering cheaters. These cheaters use various hacks, such as wallhacks, to see through walls.
The Blix team sorted out what Valve is doing to combat better cheaters and what updates to the system have taken place for 2024.
Contents
Highlights
- Valve Anti-Cheat System update information for 2024.
On November 14, the game received a long-awaited update that brought back the redesigned Train map:
How Does VAC Work?
Valve Anti Cheat (VAC) is generally similar to well-known antivirus programs. When a player connects to a server with an anti-cheat program, the program checks his system for signs of known cheat programs.
In addition, it can recognize unknown cheats, such as recently appeared vulnerabilities. For this purpose, it analyzes the player’s behavior and what is happening in the game. If the game client behaves suspiciously, an additional check is run.
In our article VAC-Ban: How It Works And How To Avoid, we explained how VAC works. You can read it to better understand the system.
The problem is that despite the anti-cheat policy, some players are not banned by the system or need to be faster. As a rule, blocking in CS2 happens in waves. The last wave was in May 2024. Let’s see what Valve is doing to improve the system.
We described many cheating problems in the article CS2 Cheating Problem: An In-Depth Look.
What Changes To the Valve Anti-Cheat System
The system is constantly being fine-tuned. The peculiarity of VAC is that bans often come weeks, months, or even never after cheaters are detected. The explanation is simple: cheaters may need help understanding why they were banned. If the ban were instant, it would be easy to find out.
This is why VAC Live was introduced in the game. The system was introduced into the Counter-Strike 2 game on June 6, 2023.
Update April 2024
On April 26, Valve unveiled the long-awaited major update for Counter-Strike 2. The shooter received only a few minor patches for almost a month due to the company’s annual corporate vacation. During this time, it was flooded with cheaters due to the non-functioning VACnet protection system.
Valve listened to users’ complaints and made the first changes to the anti-cheat. A significant change in its operation was introducing the “Patrol” system from CS:GO.
It allows trusted players to view match recordings of potential cheaters and give a verdict on violations. In the last version of the shooter, most of the bans were just the work of observers.
By the way, the Patrol variant appeared not only in CS2. In Deadlock, which faced a rather serious problem of cheaters, on September 27, 2024, a patch introduced a rather comical—and effective—anti-cheating system. The system can ban cheaters or turn them into frogs for the rest of the match.
If the new anti-cheat system detects a cheater, it prompts the rest of the players to vote: They can either immediately kick out and ban the offender, ending the match, or turn the cheater into a frog for the rest of the match and then ban him.
In April, VAC Live also received an improvement: the system began to detect suspicious behavior of players in real-time and issue temporary blocks to potential cheaters and their partners in the lobby. Suspects will have to wait for Patrol’s verdict, after which they will be forgiven or receive an eternal ban.
In April, the Counter-Strike 2 community called for a boycott of the shooter because of anti-cheat. Famous content maker Anomaly launched the action —he completely refused to play in matchmaking and premier mode until the developers presented a functioning defense against dishonest gamers.
Update August 2024: VacNet 3.0
VacNet was first introduced in 2017 and officially rolled out in 2018. It remains one of the essential machine learning-based anti-cheat systems to ensure fair play in CS2.
The essence of VacNet is as brief as possible: the system collects data on players’ actions based on millions of matches and detects abnormalities. For example, it is suspicious if a user’s crosshair is in the sky most of the time but constantly makes frags. The better trained the machine is, the faster it distinguishes atypical behavior – which is a reason to issue a ban.
VACnet pays attention to all sorts of micro details: the distance from which the kill was made, the weapon, the degree of the player’s gaze at the moment of frag, and so on.
In August 2024, Valve introduced VacNet 3.0, which includes new and improved features that effectively detect suspicious activity.
VacNet 3.0 contains code related to “suspicious shots,” including:
- Suspicion
- Suspicious Shot Sample
- susHitOdds=%.2f
- hitChance=%.2f
- suspicionChance=%.2
These features indicate that the system can calculate the probability of suspicious hits and flags against players who may consistently hit with high accuracy.
The developers have also introduced an official ban on Snap Tap functions and macros. These automated actions, previously considered acceptable and necessary for professional gaming, are now considered violations.
VacNet 3.0 has begun to detect the Snap Tap feature, an extremely controversial technique that instantly gives players a jewel-precision counter-strike, restoring shooting accuracy.
VacNet 3.0 also struggles with multi-binds, controls that allow players to perform multiple actions with a single key press, such as perfect grenade throws while jumping.
This change aligns with Valve’s more general attempt to help level the playing field by ensuring that all players have equal conversions of game features without the need for deep console commands.
The main problem with VACnet is false positives. A month after release, CS 2 users complained about VAC bans due to high DPI. Players twisted the mouse while standing still and almost instantly got banned because VACnet thought such behavior was inherent to cheaters.
Previously, the VacNet system gave many players an unfair VAC ban at launch. Although details about VacNet 3.0 remain partially undisclosed, players are already noticing improvements in cheat protection and the use of automated scripts. However, there are other opinions as well:
The developers’ main goal is to improve the accuracy of offender identification so that abusive matches do not harm honest players.
October 2024
On October 23, 2024, Counter-Strike 2 developers removed Valve Anti-Cheat from the game and raised the ears of the whole community. Information about the update appeared on the shooter’s page in the SteamDB database. It was assumed that the VacNet 3.0 Anti-Cheat would finally come into play.
Valve removed Anti-Cheat from CS2, with no changes to the game’s files at first. A few hours later, Valve returned the anti-cheat to its projects. It turned out that Valve was changing how the program was displayed. Now, developers can indicate which anti-cheat is used by a particular game.
Valve’s Anti Cheat software maintains a library of already known Valve cheats that are automatically “detected”. Using already-known cheats will get you banned almost instantly.
At the moment, Anti-Cheat is developing more and more. It collects data and may not ban players for some time, so it does not reveal what exactly the blocking is for. It takes less time to process the data. There are functions that record suspicious actions in real-time, which facilitates the system and increases the probability of blocking a player.
