History
VAC was first released with Counter-Strike 1.4 in 2002, following Valve's decision to forego PunkBuster in preference of a proprietary system. The initial version, VAC1, saw success for a period, but in March or April 2004 updates ran dry as the Valve engineers maintaining it moved on to the production of its successor, VAC2.
Valve does not normally discuss VAC, and very little is known about its internal workings. However, on November 17, 2006 they announced that "new technology" had caught "over 10,000" cheating attempts in the preceding week alone, the first real indication of the scale of anti-cheat operations. Not all of the accounts banned would have contained legitimate, purchased games, and there is no external audit on the figure.
As of 2010, unofficial sources estimate that over a million Steam accounts have been banned by VAC.
Read more about this topic: Valve Anti-Cheat
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“It’s a very delicate surgical operation—to cut out the heart without killing the patient. The history of our country, however, is a very tough old patient, and we’ll do the best we can.”
—Dudley Nichols, U.S. screenwriter. Jean Renoir. Sorel (Philip Merivale)
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)