If you play Steam games, you know all about VAC and other preventative software that stops hackers and cheaters in the most popular games and can cause a potential ban wave. (You read all those EULAs and TOS-agreements, didn’t you?)

Just this last week, Valve pushed out a new ban wave based on their detection of hackers that swung the banhammer on almost 100,000 Steam users. The bans were targeted at a significant amount of Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive players, the latter of which is known to be a haven for cheaters at all levels of the game.

For those that aren’t in the know about gaming cybersecurity, gaming companies tend to do bans in “waves” to make them harder to evade. If bans were trickling in based on instantaneous detection, it would be a lot easier for cheaters to warn others and develop new anti-detection methods on the fly. Bans coming in huge waves means that tons of players will get hit all at the same time with no warning, forcing them to scramble and buy new software (or in some cases, hardware) and staggering their hacking development in such a way that makes it easier to anticipate.

The ban wave hits specific games as well as being VAC-wide bans. No one has access to Valve’s internal specifics, but it’s likely that specific-game bans like CS:GO are detected based on specific cheating software to that game (such as aimbots) and VAC-wide bans detect programs that can be used across multiple games.

The community at large is cheering for Valve’s security measures, with the majority of players getting sick of the competitive mentality of certain Valve games. For CS:GO, cheating is so rampant that the prevailing attitude is “if you’re not cheating with the rest of them, you’re bound to lose.” For Dota 2, it is pretty much the only MOBA where cheating is a factor at all; certain server-side data transfer makes League of Legends and Heroes of the Storm near impossible to cheat on without getting instantly caught and banned.

The anti-cheating software has been at the forefront since a recent Splatoon 2 debacle in which a player hacked the leaderboards demanding Nintendo to step in and do something about the rampant cheating on the Switch. Nintendo hit him with a ban and gave no further comment. Valve likely took notice of this and rolled out the ban wave based on the previous detection to capitalize on the good press it would generate. Gamers respect a company that does something about its community problems rather than letting them fester and get worse.

This is also true of modern game development, which has intensely long development cycles and expensive games. Valve, who rarely releases games at all, would do well to focus on keeping the games that they do have out alive and well; if people migrated out of CS:GO, they would likely stay with other companies instead of sticking with Valve (unless they started releasing games faster than a snail’s pace).

Hackers and cheaters are theorized to be so common amongst Valve games because they are popular in Eastern Europe, where PC hacking and scamming in gaming communities is a lot more common. Dota 2 and CS:GO, which were two key games that were targeted in the ban wave, are significantly more popular in that region than they are in a lot of others.

CS:GO has been the source of a lot of this discussion since its release, with pro players being caught cheating fairly often. Cheat software developers have different “levels” of software that they put out for purchase, with “common” cheats ranging from 20 to 100 USD, with professional players willing to shell out 4 or 5 figures for undetectable cheats.

SteamDB.info has graphs that can show us the number of banned users on any given day. The 18th of July spiked to over 28,000 users banned, with the day after ramping up even harder to over 61,000. This is one of the biggest ban waves in gaming history—not just on Steam or PC gaming as a whole.

For perspective, if this ban wave hit exclusively CS:GO players, that would be about one-third of the daily user base. That’s a lot of gamers and a lot of potential customers.

Valve’s stance is clear: there is a zero-tolerance policy for cheaters, and they want to maintain the long-term health of their communities. The bucks that these players would otherwise burn on skin crates and their involvement in the communities and hubs for the game are not worth the negative competitive environment it creates for players.

If you want to laugh at the misfortune of some cheaters caught in the crossfire of Valve’s newest ban wave, check out the subreddit r/VAC_Porn. They show off the account details of plenty of banned users, with some lamenting the loss of expensive CS:GO skins and others laughing at the terrible rankings of those who use aimbots and wallhacks.