As the Steam Summer Sale drew to a close last week, Valve decided to end its annual event with a bang. Or rather a ban. A lot of bans.
The day after the sale closed on 6 July, Valve banned over 40 000 accounts on Steam, the largest number the developer has ever suspended at once. It’s almost three times the size of the last mass VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat) ban ever issued, which took place last year on 16 October, in which around 15 000 accounts were banned.
According to a report on dotesports, the reason Valve lowered the ban hammer on the day that it did was that players were snapping up games on the cheap on separate accounts in order to test out cheats without putting their main Steam account at risk – or at least, that was the plan. Unfortunately for them, however, this flurry of activity turned these would-be cheaters into rather obvious targets for Valve’s anti-cheat software.
According to figures tracked on Steam Database, Valve effectively banned 40 411 users. While the VAC ban software targeted the lion’s share of these users, Valve also suspended around 5 000 accounts in response to complaints made by other players.
All told, skins, cosmetics and other in-game loot to the value of $8 674 was essentially lost in the purge, according to vac-ban.com. Naturally a lot of players caught in this ban avalanche are rather upset, but hey, don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.
