Sam_HoustondMenaceI've sat next to Remedy while watching him play, sponsored his team and even gave him a hug at GXL. The other person at the LAN that has been verified a cheater was making a complete fool of himself every breath and honestly that's the attitude that can only verify suspicion. When his invite team I paid for died due to roster mixups, he was the first person I met that offered to pay me back as much as he could because he felt sorry. I refuse to believe he is at fault, nobody as considerate as Remedy could be actually cheating after all this time.
#FreeRemedy!!
One of the nicest players I've ever met in TF2, a guy who mentored and sponsored my team for multiple seasons, turned out to have blatant walls, radar, and probably aimbot too. I fully believe he was a nice person. I have no desire to play with him in TF2 ever again and will report him if I ever see him on an alt, but I strongly believe he still is a good/nice person who did a really really shitty thing in a videogame. People hack for reasons other than just being an asshole, and I don't think being a nice person is evidence someone is a legit player. I don't know anything about remedy and I'm not commenting directly on his VAC, I just don't think the "he's nice so he's not hacking" line is solid.
You can actually have CheatEngine open and as long as you don't attach it to TF2 it won't do shit. A program has to fuck with memory in some way. So usually this means using any of the WinAPI functions that actually mess with memory (Read/WriteProcessMemory, OpenProcess etc) or use any inline assembly to do the same. Having the program open shouldn't do anything what so ever.
To clarify that is the case for CheatEngine, not necessarily any other cheat program. Consider CheatEngine's OpenProcess method to be the same as injecting a DLL. Both can lead to bans when in a VAC server. VAC detects certain hooks, functions that edit memory, common programs (like CheatEngine) etc. but I'm almost entirely sure that it doesn't just ban for having a program with a name in their list open.