Valve has released new Regional Major Rankings rules today, April 15, that allow VAC banned players to return to Valve sponsored events five years after their ban. The Valve Anti-Cheat ban will still be in place on the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive players account, but the players themselves can compete. The ban will remain in place until the five year mark or, if the player received their ban after their first participation in a Valve-sponsored event, they will be unbanned.
According to Valve, the bans had previously been indefinite due to how young the game was at the time. Now, however, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is over eight years old.
“These guidelines had not seen an update since the game was new and all CS:GO VAC bans were relatively recent. But VAC bans can now be more than 8 years old. So we’ve decided to update them,” the announcement stated.
Other tournament specific bans or bans for other offenses, like match fixing or cheating at LANs, are unchanged. Valve has released this ruling just a few weeks before the main event of the first RMR event of the season, Flashpoint 3. This ruling also comes as Counter-Strike will have its first major LAN since 2019 in Stockholm, Germany this fall.
The VAC banned players impacted by this
Officially… Unbanned… Thank you @CSGO ❣️🙏
— Liquid Jamppi 🇫🇮 (@Jamppi_) April 15, 2021
Many of the players that this ban would impact have already moved on to other games. Elias “Jamppi” Olkkonen, Patryk “Patitek” Fabrowski and Saif “Sayf” Jibraeel are all now unbanned from Valve sponsored events. However, they now compete in VALORANT. Their previously indefinite bans are a big part of why those players had made the switch. The new rule also puts a timer on the Brazilian player Vinicius “v$m” Moreira’s ban from 2018.
— Vinicius Moreira (@vsmzin) April 15, 2021
This also gives a buffer to newer players who may have shared cheater accounts in their youth for competition, like Jamppi. Valve is known as notoriously slow when coming down with rulings or changes to its format and policies. This new ruling, in typical Valve fashion, was dropped unexpectedly and without warning in under 200 words.
