And in February, Olkkonen seemingly gave up on CS:GO entirely and signed on with Team Liquid as a pro-level Valorant player (though the 'CSGO' name still appears in his Twitter handle). He sued Valve in Finland in 2019 over that ban's impact on his professional esports career, including its role in preventing him from signing a contract with pro team OG.Ī Finnish court ruled in favor of Valve in that case last November. Olkkonen has claimed that the banned account in question had been lent to a friend of his at the time of the alleged cheating. Some CS:GO watchers suspect the rule change might be targeted to affect players like Elias “Jamppi” Olkkonen, who received a VAC ban back in 2015, when he was 14 years old.

It's a surprisingly stark and specific carve-out for a policy that was previously inviolable. When it comes to CS:GO esports, though, Valve apparently now thinks suitably old evidence of cheating should be considered as some sort of youthful indiscretion that shouldn't be held against current players. One verified cheating infraction was enough to ruin your in-game credibility across Steam forever, with no exceptions even considered by Valve's enforcement team. Cheater bygones?įor years now, Valve's zero-tolerance approach to VAC enforcement has suggested how seriously it takes evidence of cheating in the hundreds of games that use the system. 'The only change is how they influence your eligibility to play in Valve-sponsored events,' the blog post notes. That's a pretty big change for a system whose defining feature is consequences that are supposed to be 'permanent' and 'non-negotiable.' And those other VAC consequences-including loss of access to all VAC-protected multiplayer servers, achievements, tradable vanity items, etc.-will still remain in place. The CS:GO team notes in the post that its event guidelines were initially written around the game's 2012 release, when 'all CS:GO VAC bans were relatively recent.' Now, though, the team has decided to update those guidelines to reflect the fact that 'VAC bans can now be more than eight years old.' As such, VAC bans older than five years, as well as VAC bans that pre-date a player's first participation in a Valve-sponsored event, will no longer be taken into account when assessing RMR event eligibility. A post to the Counter-Strike: GO blog yesterday notes that some VAC-banned players will now be able to participate in events surrounding the game's next Regional Major Rankings (RMR) season. Further Reading YouTubers escape fines for promoting their own CS:GO gambling siteNow, apparently, there is one sizable exception to this rule, at least when it comes to esports.

Vac ban remover