Massive wave of bans issued on Steam

Steam got a bit cleaner this week with a massive rise in the distribution of VAC bans.

According to third-party stats database Steamdb.info, the last seven days have seen nearly 100,000 known bans leveled against players. What’s more, the number continues to climb as Steamdb scans more profiles to count the total number of cheaters caught.

The crackdown began on July 18 with the issuing of nearly 30,000 VAC bans. The next day, the anti-cheat software flagged over 60,000 more players, the single highest number of bans ever distributed in a 24-hour stretch in VAC’s 16-year history. The final tally of accounts to receive the black mark is not yet known but may climb above 100,000.

Spikes in activity by VAC are not unusual. On an average day, VAC will flag between 3,000 and 6,000 accounts for aim cheats, wall hacks, or one of any number of other cheats covered by the service.

As Valve rolls out tweaks to the program to combat new methods of cheating, it sometimes results in noticeable upticks in the number of accounts banned. Numbers mayl suddenly jump into the tens of thousands for a single day, then drop back down to normal levels.

These spikes rarely last longer than a single day. What’s more, no other spike has ever reached 50,000 accounts banned, making this tally of 60,000 the biggest day for VAC bans by a considerable margin.

There are few details on what specifically led to the uptick. It is not currently known what methods of cheating were addressed, nor is it known which game’s community was most affected.