vac -hftd

VAC is a system that tries to ban cheaters with absolute, 100% certainty with minimal invasiveness. You don't have that kind of assurance with anticheats like BattlEye or ESEA.

To preface: you're talking out of your ass about the heuristics.

BattlEye is willing to give a large amount of their users bluescreens in order stop a vulnerability of windows that the anticheat developer himself doesn't fully understand. BattlEye is willing to ban innocent users so long a great amount of cheaters are banned to balance it out. These are "necessary evils" as he calls it.

How many times have you been inconvenienced by VAC? That's a fat 0. How many times have you been falsely banned by VAC that wasn't reversed? I'm not talking about that one time your little brother plugged in a USB you had no idea cheats were on and they didn't lift your ban. I'm not talking about those large waves like TimerResolution that were swiftly fixed. I'm talking about a ban you and your friends get from a new anticheat update that the support of the distributor refuses to fix or even review.

How many times have you worried about the trustworthiness of VAC? I can say that I've never worried if VAC is stealing information from me, and after investigating myself with some basic RE, I can safely say they don't. What about for an anticheat like BattlEye? You better bet your ass they regularly take info from you, illegally automatically dumping your memory if you're a marked cheat developer. What about mining BitCoins with ESEA? Never had something like that with VAC. What about the recording taps and info selling that ESEA did? 0 history like that with VAC.

Due to Valve's scale, they want to provide a general anticheat solution that will ban cheaters with certainty without invading a user's privacy. You want a game? You're going to Steam. They provide a barebones anticheat solution for any games that want it; and any games that don't can add their own anticheat if they so choose.

Valve believes closely to this idea of "third party carries the burden of desires that cannot be enforced on the public", so you have third party anticheats like BattlEye or clients like ESEA that take that burden at cost of not being open to all users.

Now, bottom line, can the anticheat be improved? Yes, but in vain. Something like an integrity check for the memory region of glow would work, sure, but it's easy to bypass. Now, that's not to say it wouldn't ban cheaters, but it wouldn't ban the ones that matter. Cheats like the P2Cs who have the highest distribution and most publicity are already doing overkill for VAC, protecting hooks from before that update, giving no access to memory, loading the driver before the operating system loads, etc. These people will virtually never be banned if done right, unless VAC catches some small mistake they're doing - then they push an update and ban those cheaters.

VAC is doing everything it can, and I absolutely support the anticheat because it's doing everything RIGHT.