Over the weekend, some Team Fortress 2 communities were outraged to hear that Steam’s VAC system was banning any accounts with the word ‘catbot’ found in their user name or profile. This turned out to be false as a Valve employee took to Reddit to clarify that the only thing newsworthy of the bans were extremely high levels of salt coming from the cheaters.

Steam’s pioneering software, VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat) was behind a slew of bans targeting Linux users that were circumventing measures to stop Catbot, a headshotting bot program which seemed to exist for the sole purpose of being a dick. What followed was perhaps the largest amount of whining from people who deserved exactly what they got. Reddit was covered with the downvoted corpses of cheaters trying to justify their anger at Valve while the rest of the community laughed on and on.

If the bans proved anything, it was that tech-savvy Linux users often hold a disdain for their PC brethren, which might be why they go for the more customizable OS rather than the alternative. Most of the cheaters were extremely defensive and condescending, trying to explain to their peers how the community had it all wrong and that they were actually defenders of justice having their rights infringed upon. One cheater, by the Reddit name Fnhatic, wrote:

This was followed by an edit to his post stating:

Aside from this user’s egregious and confusing use of quotation marks – like why he would sarcastically put quotes around “trust” – he showed just what VAC is trying to protect the rest of their users from, which is the paranoid dickweeds of the world.

Although the incident was resolved, many users initially believed the false claim against Valve, which seems not only hasty, but unfair. VAC is the largest anti-cheat software in the world, running on over 300 Steam games and having banned over a million cheaters since its inception. Its functionality is a closely guarded and often updated secret to continually fight the waves of constantly evolving cheats across a myriad of games. In last July alone, over 40,000 accounts were banned by VAC in the largest VAC ban in history, something which followed a Steam sale and was planned intentionally to catch cheaters buying new games on discount as a workaround to being banned. There is even a subreddit, VAC porn, dedicated solely to the satisfaction in reading about all of the accounts that have fallen to VAC.

Suffice to say, gamers should be celebrating every new VAC update and ban, and if nothing else, they should be reading the forums to see what crazy excuses the cheaters will come up with next.