[Honey]

A stronger anti cheat is absolutely useless for a game that is free. You literally just create a new free Steam account and... here you go again, no longer banned. So it gets pointless to implement or improve anti cheat systems as cheaters will use burner accounts.

Valves move to turn the game free is wrong, disappointing and questionable. They are screwing over the whole previous player base and everyone who paid money for it.

It is questionable, true.

Many people have mentioned that prior to the update Valve has released more updates on their new anticheat called VACNet, It uses deep learning to recognize hackers and uses overwatch as feedback, I personally haven't noticed any hackers since the update yet, so I think they know what they're doing as they wouldn't globally announced they upgraded their anticheat just so the hacker community can find ways around it.

Secondly about the new accounts stuff, this is where the trust factor comes into play, according to what tests people have conducted and Valve's own developers, the accounts are somehow connected together and if you get banned on one of them the other account's trust factor is automatically damaged and you're more likely to face hackers, this process continues until u can no longer create new accounts and not face other hackers every round.Since VACNet is based on deep learning the free to play update will give much more feedback to the AI and allow it to further improve itself against hackers.

I agree that the people who paid for this game didn't exactly get rewarded enough, I mean for the old players the number of hours they've enjoyed was worth for them, but for the newcomers a new skin and a loyalty badge isn't exactly worth the game's original price.