2,500 Modern Warfare 2 cheats get the boot

by Steven Williamson on 30 November 2009, 09:42

Tags: Modern Warfare 2, Activision (NASDAQ:ATVI), PC, FPS

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Robert Bowling from Inifinty Ward has confirmed, via a Tweet, that a large number of Modern Warfare 2 gamers playing the PC version have been banned over the weekend for cheating.

Though we don't yet officially know what's going to happen to these gamers, a poster on Geek.com claims that the bans are permanent.

"The bans are permanent. Infinity Ward went with Steamworks, which includes Valve Anti-Chat(VAC). VAC2 bans are lifetime bans and will prevent the cheater’s account from playing Modern Warfare 2 through Steam and IWNet permanently," writes Richard Eid.

"The only way these cheaters will be able to play Modern Warfare 2 online again is if they repurchase the game on a separate Steam account.

Modern Warfare 2 Single Player should not be affected."

2,500 STEAM accounts have been targeted in the crackdown and won't be playing Modern Warfare 2 anytime soon. Good riddance!


HEXUS Forums :: 11 Comments

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Posted by matty-hodgson - Mon 30 Nov 2009 09:58
what exactly did they do?
Posted by Grey M@a - Mon 30 Nov 2009 10:03
matty-hodgson
what exactly did they do?

I think it probably has something to do with the hacks and work arounds to get the sort of sudo dedicated server stuff back. It's the only thing I can think of.
Posted by OilSheikh - Mon 30 Nov 2009 10:04
Excellent job. But, it doesnt look good for PC - on emore reason for game creators to abandon PC. :(
Posted by GheeTsar - Mon 30 Nov 2009 10:21
AFAIK, there are cheaters and hackers on the 360 and PS3 too, so I suspect these will face similar treatment.

Myself, I've not ever been certain I've been a victim of a cheat. A few times I have been surprised when someone hasn't gone down after a number of good hits, but that's my only real experience of suspicous activity.
Posted by jim - Mon 30 Nov 2009 10:31
Grey M@a;1826223
I think it probably has something to do with the hacks and work arounds to get the sort of sudo dedicated server stuff back. It's the only thing I can think of.

No, I would say almost certainly that's not it. It's VAC based, which means that only people playing the game in steam have been banned, and VAC is only active on Steam-based servers anyway.

The dedicated server hacks will probably be done with cracked versions of the game (read non-steam) because Steam would just be a hinderance - so VAC would never even be invoked.

In all likelihood, it's a portion of the people that have used aimbots, and all other sorts of hacks in Steam-based MW2 games. And it's a report that's best ignored, because VAC and PB are both fairly hopeless at banning hackers from games, the hackers will generally get away with it because the whole point of the hacks are that they're undetectable. It's a bit like SecuROM vs Scene, the corporate guys are always playing catch-up. That was one of the main issues with dedicated servers being removed - it makes catching hackers absolutely impossible, so unless VAC detects the hacks, then they'll be hacking away with impunity.

I used to be a server admin for BF2, and hacking was a lot more prevalent than people tended to realise - we had hackers on our servers probably every couple of nights on average. PB would catch maybe half, the rest of them required manual methods of detection, which in turn required the use of our dedicated server.

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