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Valve Apologizes For Mistakenly Banning 12,000 Modern Warfare 2 Players
Uh-oh. It sounds like in their eagerness to ban cheaters and make Modern Warfare 2 a safer, fairer place for players, Valve mistakenly issued "about 12,000 erroneous bans over two weeks."
ShackNews reports on Valve owning up to the issue and apologizing. Valve president Gabe Newell explained what went wrong in an e-mail sent to players who were 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. This wasn't a game-specific mistake. Steam allows us to manage and reverse these erroneous bans (about 12,000 erroneous bans over two weeks).... This was our mistake, and I apologize for any frustration or angst it may have caused you."
As part of the apology, each of the 12,000 banned Steam users will receive a free digital copy of Left 4 Dead 2 to gift to a friend plus a copy for themselves if they don't already own it. It's a pretty serious screw-up, but giving away somewhere between 12,000 and 24,000 free copies of their latest game? That's a pretty nice way to say you're sorry, at least.
But giving players of an Activision game access to your game as an apology? This is akin to accidentally striking a friend's girlfriend, apologizing, then discreetly giving her your telephone number.
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