VAC is now displayed as VACNET, and the chat may show the name of the banned player

During the night of May 7 to 8, another update was released for Counter-Strike 2, and besides the music kits and Cache fixes, players noticed one more change - in the English localization, the VAC anti-cheat is now displayed as VACNET. This was pointed out by dataminer Maxim “Gabe Follower” Poletaev, who also reported that the system’s functionality had been expanded.

“The Counter-Strike 2 developers renamed VAC to VACNET in the English localization. In addition, the chat will now display which player was banned for suspicious behavior.”

So far, Valve has not released a separate public explanation specifically regarding these changes, so the main sources of information remain community observations and reports from dataminers. Nevertheless, the very fact that VAC has been renamed to VACNET looks telling against the backdrop of recurring rumors in recent months about the continued development of CS2’s anti-cheat and the expansion of its capabilities.

A new CS2 patch has been released: Valve added NIGHTMODE II music kits and made another round of fixes to Cache

As a reminder, in the same May patch Valve added the new NIGHTMODE II music kits to the game, made another round of fixes to Cache, and also resolved a number of bugs related to model rendering, post-processing, and game modes.