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:
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“There is no history of how bad became better.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)