Valve gives away Left 4 Dead 2 to banned players

Steam ran into a pretty big problem over the past two weeks. The service had been erroneously banning gamers after they were thought to be cheating in Modern Warfare 2. Steam banned around 12,000 Steam accounts from accessing MW2 much to the surprise of everyone. This meant either there were a ridiculous amount of cheaters on Steam, or something had gone terribly wrong.

It turns out Steam was at fault for the mass banning. Most if not all of the users who had their accounts banned were innocent. Valve has recognized this error and is trying to make good by giving each banned user two copies of Left 4 Dead 2 in addition to restoring their accounts. An explanation for the technical error that cause the confusion was given by Valve’s president Gabe Newell in an e-mail to those who were mistakenly banned.

“The problem was that Steam would fail a signature check between the disk version of a DLL and a latent memory version. This was caused by a combination of conditions occurring while Steam was updating the disk image of a game.”

I’m sure a lot of people, myself included, has no idea what that statement means. What matters is that Valve acknowledged its mistake and is doing what it can to make things right. Not only did Valve give away a free copy of Left 4 Dead 2 to the victims, but also gave them a copy to gift to a friend. If only Apple had responded to users this quickly instead of blaming its customers.

Read [IGN] Also Read [Kotaku]