Awesome! So when will Stardock get VAC for their games?

Obivously all of those players are cheaters. They should shut up and pay another 60 bucks to Steam.

Really though, there's no evidence that they are not.

Reading up on this, it sounds like the most plausible explanation, assuming not everyone banned is cheating, is that MW2 allows for hackers to set their own lobbies up that uses IW's old system to inject modified files into other players' game folders.

So people could have unwittingly downloaded hacks, due to some idiot running a server and their own ignorance of what was going on.

Certainly if that's the case, then Valve should ban the guys with the hacked lobbies and not the people who just happened to be connected to it.

While it's Valve's right to ban people for no reason if people agreed to the fine print, the whole 'guilty without any facts or appeal' is kind of insane.  It's like if your city mailed you a fine without saying anything more than you 'committed a violation' and have already taken the money out of your bank account to pay it.

Just FYI: Those who use private hacks [they pay for it], won't get caught sadly. It's worked like this in all of the CoD games so far.

Which is why I'm skeptical about the mass complaints/Steam groups. Hacking sites have their communities too, so there's no guarantee that everyone in that Steam group is completely random. More likely it's just a bunch of people from the same hacking site/community got banned, and made the group to protest their non-existant innocence.

If Valve's anti-cheat was this flakey, there would've been many more cases since its inception.

Already made it. Called "Demigod".

Well, I dunno, I haven't read up on it, so I'll trust whatever you say.  I was just kind of conjecturing based on the scenario as it was presented in the link.  I don't really care about whether they can or can't ban people legally.  The part that would rankle me is the total lack of information (again, trusting what that link says) because it doesn't give people any kind of representation.

For everyone who is calling Steam/Valve the anti-christ over this; it looks like Valve has identified VAC as triggering a false positive.

Know what those evil bastards at Valve did?

They un-banned everyone, and gave them 2 free copies of L4D2 for their problems:

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1380803

These corps always pull that shit. They have no interest in making it right until it blows up and becomes bad press.

HMm, my mw2 was banned too!! Can i has 2 copies of l4d2??

btw, this goes to show that those people banned weren't hackers or cheaters.