VacNet 3.0 rolled out for initial testing

With the latest Counter-Strike 2 update, Valve takes a stance towards popular scripting features (Snap-Tap, etc) in several gaming peripherals. The community rejoice as VacNet 3.0 finally ships out, still in an initial test phase however.

Valve's latest addition to their list of blog-posts: "Side-stepping Skill" gives an in-depth look into their approach towards hardware features such as Razor's Snap-Tap which has been gaining traction of late. As opposed to games like Dota, VALORANT, etc. where magic is built into the game, Counter-Strike requires players to create those magical moments, thus needing massive mechanical fluency.

"Recently, some hardware features have blurred the line between manual input and automation, so we've decided to draw a clear line on what is or isn't acceptable in Counter-Strike.", says Valve in their blog post.

Valve points out that scripting or automation at a hardware level significantly lowers the skill ceiling of the game and as a result will employ a simple algorithm to detect these scripts and remove their users from official game servers. In order to prevent false positives, multi-command binds such as the jump-throw or null-binds will be parsed. While the community suspect this to be a permanent change, Valve have made no mentions to it's nature.

In Valve's release notes, a single sentence outweighed all the hefty paragraphs that led up to it. Towards the end, the notes read - "Initial testing of VacNet 3.0 has begun on a limited set of matches". With the ever increasing cheating issue in CS2, an anti-cheat update was one of the most anticipated things in the community. VacNet was first mentioned by Valve at the GDC 2018 while referring to machine learning. With over five years of data at it's disposal, VacNet might finally be out of it's learning phase.

Here are Valve's release notes for the update:

INPUT

• Certain types of movement/shooting input automation such as hardware-assisted counter strafing will now be detected on Valve official servers, resulting in a kick from the match

• Input binds that include more than one of the following commands will now be ignored by default. Support can be re-enabled using the cheat-protected convar "cl_allow_multi_input_binds 1"

• sprint, reload, attack, attack2, turnleft, turnright, turnup, turndown, forward, back, left, right, moveup, movedown, klook, use, jump, duck, strafe, zoom, yaw, pitch, forwardback, rightleft

• The jump-throw confirmation grunt sound can now be heard by other players nearby

VacNet

• Initial testing of VacNet 3.0 has begun on a limited set of matches. If you believe your match was incorrectly cancelled, email us the match details at [email protected]