Things like lag and trolls can certainly take away from an online gaming experience, but there’s one thing that tops them both in terms of ruining a game: cheaters. Dealing with these cheaters is generally left to whichever company controls the platform you’re playing on, such as Xbox Live or Steam, but now Valve has decided to take a slightly different approach by allowing the game developers themselves to ban players for cheating.
Fresh off removing paid mods from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Valve is back in the news again. Steam, its digital distribution service for PC games, will now let developers block users from their individual games. While the platform has previously banned players for cheating in multiplayer games, this new system lets developers remove users from games based on their own anti-cheating methods. “Playing games should be fun. In order to ensure the best possible online multiplayer experience, Valve allows developers to implement their own systems that detect and permanently ban any disruptive players, such as those using cheats,” the company said on its website. “Game developers inform Valve when a disruptive player has been detected in their game, and Valve applies the game ban to the account. The game developer is solely responsible for the decision to apply a game ban. Valve only enforces the game ban as instructed by the game developer. For more information about a game ban in a specific game, please contact the developer of that game.”
