Ranked Left 4 Dead 2 gaming

The Anticheat update

Our Anticheat is stepping up its game with deeper and more thorough cheat detection. As part of this update, VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat) will now be disabled both on our servers and for players, as it has proven to be completely ineffective. Moving forward, our Anticheat will take over VAC’s role by actively scanning the game’s memory for cheats. This means you won’t be able to play on VAC-secured servers while using our Anticheat, it won't let you connect to them. Similarly, if you join L4D2Center with VAC enabled in your game, the Anticheat will not function.

---

Before this update, our Anticheat was limited to basic checks. Without deep analysis of the game’s process, it could only verify the integrity of game files and detect a handful of popular cheats that didn’t bother hiding themselves too well. But even with this limited functionality, the statistics we’ve gathered are disheartening. From March 14 to March 29, a total of 573 unique players used the Anticheat on L4D2Center. Out of those 573, 49 (9%) had cheats installed on their computers. And of those 49, 24 (49%) were actively using cheats while playing on L4D2Center.
Looking at these numbers, two questions come to our mind:

• What would the stats look like if we could detect all cheats?
  
• If so many of players required to use the Anticheat are using cheats while it is active, what percentage of the players not required to use the Anticheat are using cheats?

This data was the wake-up call we needed to finally make a decisive move. We’ve come to the conclusion that a cheat-free gaming environment isn’t possible without requiring all players to use the Anticheat. Over the next four months, we’ll be rolling out a gradual transition where all players will gain the “required to use Anticheat” status in order to participate in L4D2Center lobbies.
Of course, even with our active development of the Anticheat, over time there will be cheats that update to remain undetected, but we plan to work proactively to always stay ahead of this potential race.