Banned MW2 Account Holders on Steam Get Left 4 Dead 2 and an Apology

If you were one of the many Modern Warfare 2 players on Steam who received an erroneous message that you were using a cheat and were suddenly banned, then you will be happy to hear that you are now entitled to a free copy of Left 4 Dead 2. The erroneously banned accounts, the result of a glitch related to Valve's Punk Buster anti-cheating software, have been made whole again and company president Gabe Newell has sent an apology letter to all of those affected.

In that apology letter, Newell told the 12,000 some-odd banned account holders that it was Valve's mistake and the he was sorry for the frustration it caused players. He went on to explain what happened on Valve's end to cause this error in the first place:

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

Newell also clarified that the error wasn't something restricted to Modern Warfare 2, and that Steam is setup in a way that allows Valve to identify and reverse erroneous bans.

In closing he told account holders affected by the bans that - if they didn't already own it - they were entitled to a free copy of Left 4 Dead 2 via Steam. Culpability aside, it was nice of Valve to admit its mistake and offer a small bit of compensation to those that suffered a ban.

Source: Ars Technica