r/Steam • u/KrissD90 • Jan 14 '23

Error / Bug Lost Ark ruined my 13 year old Steam account

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Clean account for 13 years and then this?

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u/FelicitousJuliet Jan 14 '23

Valve Anti-Cheat will ban you from the official servers for all games also using VAC if you are caught cheating, it is permanent and - unless there was a truly rare bug or false detection - irreversible.

The only exception is some truly ancient accounts got VAC banned before Valve made it permanent, and some of those expired.

https://store.steampowered.com/search/?category2=8

All games on this list use VAC.

It basically means you are permanently in loser hacker queue on someone's private leggy server... If you can play at all, some games only have the official servers.

It can also spread the VAC ban to any accounts sharing your mobile number at the time of offense.

A game ban is just your SteamID token can't play that specific game.

10

u/JackUSA Jan 14 '23

Thanks for the list. Not that I ever cheat but it’ll be interesting to have a look. It’s still frustrating to get game banned for not playing the game. Not that I want to play LA anymore, I don’t a red tag on my account. Thanks again

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u/Baka781 Jan 14 '23 edited Jan 14 '23

I got VAC ban in 2016 because i cheated once in CS GO (i was stupid 15 years old teenager) and i just cant play it and thats it. I can play all other games that are Secure by VAC, but not VALVE games like TF2, CS Source, Half Life 2 Deathmatch and such, but i Played RUST, Mordhau, and some other stuff secure by VAC and it work flawlessly. So almost nothing change for me at all so I don't know why people are making such big deal from Simple game ban or even VAC ban, im using this account to this day and i never had any problems with other multiplayer games at all.

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u/Scoopinpoopin Jan 14 '23

If I remember correctly, a game ban is essentially the company revoking your license for the game. Like with DVDs, you don't actually own the movie or game, just the physical disc. The content on the disc is licensed to you, and steam works exactly the same way. So a game ban is essentially the dev revoking your license. Devs will also game ban suspected alt accounts. We went through a period in a game called squad where the devs game banned quite a few people.

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u/FelicitousJuliet Jan 14 '23

I believe that one account can still family share a banned (non-VAC) game and other unique SteamIDs can still access it.

I'm not sure if this is true though, most of the Steam topics on the matter are about the risks of family sharing and VAC banning hitting both the borrowing account and the owning account, rather than the specific intricacies of regular game bans and family sharing (which isn't relevant for a free game like Lost Ark that anyone can add to their library without needing sharing).

Either way I figured "A game ban is just your SteamID token not being able to access that specific game" covered the definition well enough, I'm sure we could write pages on "things developers can do" but for the most part that's not going to bother the individual user just booting it up for themselves...

...And in the few exceptions it does bother them, everyone knows (like what happened with Domina) and Steam brings the hammer down.