Players on Steam are getting notifications of bans on decade-old games

The Valve Anti-Cheat engine is known to ban players for funny reasons that are seemingly harmless. This time, the timing of the ban and not the cause happens to be more bizarre.

As reported by u/ItzMatt415 on Reddit, the Steam Client is sending users permanent ban notifications for ancient titles that they have not played in a while. OP got a perma-ban on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2’s multiplayer version – a title they have not played in over 14 years.

ItzMatt145 confirmed that he received a ban on the multiplayer version of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, released in 2009. However, this is the first time he is getting the notification from VAC.

Steam DB, a reputed media outlet that reports issues with Steam on Twitter, has also noted this, and many players have gotten a similar message saying that they are permanently banned from a title they have not played in a long time.

One user, u/Silent189, replied under the post that they also got a ban on CS: Condition Zero from 6669 days ago. One speculation is that Valve is purging their backlog of ban messages that they never sent out.

When OP ItsMatt145 inspected the Steam page for Modern Warfare 2, the title they received a ban on, it said there was no recorded activity despite them having played the title for over 298 hours.

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Valve has recently focused only on visual fixes and UI changes in the recent Steam client updates. However, it is high time they start fixing the bugs that ruin the experience for gamers.

One more issue in recent memory was the Valve Anti-Cheat engines temporarily banning Counter-Strike 2 players because of AMD Radeon’s Anti-Lag+.

An update can soon be expected to fix the user and server-end issues. If users continue to raise their voices and report such old bans, Valve will look into it and fix it.

About Steam

Steam is a video game digital distribution service by Valve Softwares. It was launched as a standalone software client in September 2003 as a way for Valve to provide automatic updates for their games and was subsequently expanded to include games from third-party publishers. Steam also serves as an online web-based and mobile digital storefront.