How to Play CS:GO While VAC Banned — Is It Possible?
Cheating is definitely a bad thing. Cheaters ruin all the fun for fair players for a dubious advantage. However, each of us has made mistakes in this life. Sometimes a player who downloaded a wallhack or auto-aim after another "successful" match may return to the game and notice that the matchmaking is unavailable and the inventory full of rare skins is blocked. These are sure signs that you got a VAC ban.
VAC or Valve Anti-cheat is a protection mechanism in CS:GO that works on all official servers as well as on custom servers that have VAC protection. How do you play CS:GO while VAC-banned, can it be removed, and can you play with it in Counter-Strike at all? Read on to find out the answers to all these questions.
How to play CS:GO when VAC-banned
Let's deal with the question of whether it is possible to play CS:GO having a Valve Anti-Cheat ban. The answer is yes, but with some complications — you won’t be able to play on the official CS:GO servers and servers with VAC protection. However, there are unofficial servers where the protection is disabled, and you can play on them.
Needless to say, playing on these servers is usually total chaos, and most of the players are cheaters who are VAC-banned too, and therefore playing a game normally will be problematic. But this is what you get when choosing a slippery way of cheating.
If you want to know how to play with a Valve Anti-Cheat ban in CS:GO when you're only interested in official matchmaking, then there is only one solution. As the VAC ban concerns only already existing accounts, you can create a new one if you don’t care about preserving your collection and achievements. For this, you will only need a new email address, and, as CS:GO is a free game, you can dive right into it.
Is it possible to remove a VAC ban?
Valve is constantly improving its protection against cheat software and claims that the probability of false positives is zero or something close to that. History knows cases where players got VAC bans by mistake due to problems on the servers themselves. The players were soon unbanned, and these are the only known cases of removing restrictions. In all other situations, a VAC ban is issued automatically and permanently for the account associated with the cheater. Steam support does not even consider complaints about removing it.
FAQ
As reported by representatives of Valve in the FAQ for Counter-Strike 2, VAC bans will move on to the second part of the franchise. This means that banned players can not get access to the beta of CS 2. In addition, Valve reported that access to VAC-protected servers for banned accounts would also be prohibited. So far, it is unknown how things will turn out on the servers without VAC protection because the game has not yet been released. So far, we can only assume that everything will be just like in CS:GO.
As Valve claims, the only reason for a VAC ban will be if you're using cheats. In practice, however, any third-party software that interferes with the CS:GO files can result in a VAC ban. Moreover, even inactive cheats that are just installed on your computer might be detected by the Valve Anti-Cheat system and lead to permanent account restrictions.
