Valve Apologizes, Gives Left 4 Dead 2 To 12,000 Wrongly Banned Steam Gamers

Valve must have been pumped when it heard Thor: The Video Game is in development, because it began swinging its ban hammer like the God of Thunder, booting more than 12,000 "cheaters" from its Modern Warfare 2  servers and banning them from playing the game on Steam over the past two weeks. Just one problem: the banned players weren't actually cheating. Now Valve is apologizing and correcting its mistake.

Valve's anti-cheat software went HAL, president Gabe Newell said in a statement, and is responsible for accidentally kicking law abiding MW2 gamers from Steam servers.

"This was our mistake, and I apologize for any frustration or angst it may have caused you," Newell stated. "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)."

Thousands of those booted gamers took to Valve's forum, creating an epic thread that demanded something be done to correct the problem. Their cries did not fall on deaf ears, and those impacted are getting a generous gift for their troubles.

"We have reversed the ban, restoring your access to the game," Newell said. "In addition, we have given you a free copy of Left 4 Dead 2 to give as a gift on Steam, plus a free copy for yourself if you didn't already own the game."

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