Talking About Cheaters In CS2 Has Become Insufferably Stupid

Even when Valve update their anticheat and add new measures to improve game quality the community would rather complain than enjoy the improvements.

Valve finally got round to updating their anti-cheat after the Copenhagen Major and the results initially seem to have made a profound dent in the number of cheaters in the game as well as the type of cheating they can engage in. The social media timeline has been filled with examples of cheating lobbies being obliterated and the upper tiers of the CS2 Premier Rankings have been purged to the point where even the likes of Alex “Mauisnake” Ellenberg are placing. In addition to whatever update to their anti-cheat they’ve made they are also, for the first time, introducing measures that will cancel games if anything seems out-of-place, a significant change in policy from Valve who have always been steadfast in the belief that false-positives are a more grievous sin than letting cheaters go free.

You’d have thought this would have been met with a lot more praise from the community and attention from content creators. After all cheating seems to be all anyone has ever talked about in the world of CS2 for months. But no, what has happened instead is that people have quietly shuffled along mumbling “well, the cheaters will be back” and while there’s theoretically temporary respite find other things to complain about. More so than any previous version of Counter-Strike it is the constant complaining that typifies and unifies the community. In fact you can now make a pretty compelling argument that the CS2 community across Reddit and HLTV are now more entitled than the perennially ungrateful Dota 2 playerbase.

An example of the new measures implemented to prevent cheaters affecting player rankings

The discourse around the development of CS2 has been frankly insufferable even by that standard. While I agree that Valve made a rod for their own back by launching what is effectively a beta without that qualifier and taking away server support for the previous iteration of the game, some of the claims made by the wider community have bordered on the delusional. For example, it was only a few months ago that the sentiment was Valve had “abandoned” developing the game before they dropped a significant content patch for the game. Point out the stupidity of that and you’re met with semantic arguments over what constitutes large. The objective reality is the speed with which Valve has updated CS2 has been more rapid than any other previous iteration of Counter-Strike before it. At launch it was bare bones and felt broken in some key areas but I can attest still better than any other version of CS at launch. Seven months after its official release the game feels like it has the potential to be the best version of Counter-Strike ever released and one with future-proof coding that opens up new possibilities for the game’s development.

The other boringly stupid narrative is the “Valve don’t care” mantra. You can easily point at many examples to suggest Counter-Strike hasn’t been the top priority at Valve despite being their most popular game. The one thing that’s a lot harder to point to is evidence that they don’t care about the products they release. Hotfixes for identifiable and replicable bugs have been taken care of in a matter of days if not sooner. Valve staff members have waded into the sewer of Reddit to interact with users to gather information to improve performance. At the most recent major Valve staff invited everyone from players, tournament operators and broadcast talent to book meetings for the purposes of giving feedback and ideas for the development of the game. To suggest that they’re doing this while simultaneously only caring about adding more gold to Gaben’s dragon hoard is asinine.

And of course during those meetings the cheating issue was brought up on multiple occasions. It had become the most discussed topic around the game with valid complaints being blended with hysteria. For example while it was clear enough anecdotally that once you ascended past a certain rank in Premier you were exposed to cheaters in a much higher volume that somehow seemed to bleed into the professional scene making some absurd statements. A dogshit bedroom organisation used the existence of cheaters as an excuse to drop their team. A company that was running major qualifiers declared “cheating in CS2 is utterly and completely out of control” after their anticheat caught 30 cheaters from the 7,500 that participated in their qualifiers. A pro player who lost a close final to a team with less reputation than theirs publicly declared that there were “so many teams doing it 100% obvious” and asked “does anyone even give a fuck about it?” A player with a 0.92 HLTV rating was banned from a league after “demo analysis” from the coach of the team they had beaten was used as material evidence in his public condemnation. A captain from one of Europe’s top teams called for more demo review bans comparing it to VAR in football suggesting those with “knowledge and experience” (like him) should be the ones doing the banning. The wider CS community cheered them on because, you see, they know that they’re being cheated against all the time too. Don’t worry though, I’m sure nothing poisonous could ever come from these kind of actions being normalised.

Any attempt to try and have a sober discussion about cheating and anti-cheat measures in CS2 just brings out a carnival of ignorance and bad faith. You’re supposed to say that there are cheaters in every game .You’re supposed to say the game is “literally unplayable.” You’re supposed to say that Valve aren’t doing anything. If you deviate even slightly from the wisdom of the insufferable crowd you are a “shill” that is excusing the inexcusable actions of a multi-billion dollar corporation. You are yapping, you are glazing, you are doing tricks on it, blud might also be waffling and every other regurgitated, calorie-free phrase the braindead utter on loop.

I’ve been repeatedly misquoted on the issue of cheating in Counter-Strike. The most common instance of this (it’s daily at the moment) is that I said no cheaters exist in the game. Who would ever make such a claim? What I have said that there’s no definitive piece of data we can point to that suggests there are more cheaters in CS2 than there were in CS:GO. Prior to CS2’s launch people were in fact saying that CS:GO had a cheating problem with an influx of cheaters, all now conveniently forgotten about. The other thing I’ve said is that for the average player if someone is dominating you in a game the statistical probability is that they’re just a much better player than you rather than a cheater. As Hannibal Buress said “why are you booing me? I’m right.”

It’s typically at this point whoever is trying to argue against that will say “ah well you don’t play the game so what do you really know?” I don’t need to play the game now to know the fundamental truth about those who play competitive games, that they are mostly irrefutable proof of the Dunning-Kruger Effect and at the same time emotionally unstable basketcases. It would be impossible for me to even come up with a ballpark figure of how many times a teammate of mine has, after being the recipient of an outplay by an opponent has vocally declared “they’re cheating” and then immediately spent the rest of the game crying about how it’s essential we report them. The reality of online games is that the emotional cripples that play them disrupt an almost infinitely larger amount of games than cheaters ever could but that take is too real for most to metabolise. Here’s another truth about online gaming. If a developer created a game that harnessed the power of machine learning to ensure you always had a challenging experience but would ultimately always win, that it could convince the player that they were beating other players instead of artificial intelligence destined to fail, it would be the most popular game ever created.

When people want to ignore even what they know to be true to their own experience it kind of gives the game away. They pull numbers out of thin air and then repeat them until they are convinced of their veracity. In a reply to the news that 26,000 cheaters had been banned overnight due to the recent VAC changes I saw a reply that claimed 20% of active accounts were bots and 20% were cheaters. This is not a uniquely stupid opinion. You will see numbers of this nature kicked around in the cheating discussion repeatedly. It simply holds absolutely no weight whatsoever when you consider that studies even using flimsy metrics such as Google Searches have placed the number of cheaters inside CS:GO at 2.47% of the playerbase.

Thankfully there were some statistics released by Leetify that confirm the bulk of what I have said in the past, namely that until you are playing in the very upper echelons of Premier encountering cheaters is a statistical outlier.

What’s interesting about that is despite 20k or above being just 0.2% of the playerbase almost everyone with an active Reddit account claims to play there.

Reddit is of course where most of the bad faith discourse takes place. Take a look at this account for example, dedicated to posting months old out-of-context clips of me talking about cheating in a bid to rile up all the very real 20kers and discredit my opinion. The funny part about that last clip is it is from a months old video talking about how dangerous it is to blindly accept professional players as the arbiters of who is and isn’t cheating as I outlined above not that you’d know it from the replies. People don’t even listen to what you say. If your argument doesn’t amount to “FUCK VALVE I’D BE A PRO BY NOW IF IT WASN’T FOR ALL THESE CHEATERS” they don’t listen to what you have to say.

Here’s another bitter pill to swallow for the VACcels. If you compare the CS2 cheating landscape to other online games you can see that presenting it as uniquely bad is ridiculous. Escape From Tarkov, an extraction shooter where losing costs you your in-game equipment meaning that losses can easily snowball, banned 44,000 cheaters across a period of a few months. If that doesn’t sound like a lot consider that monthly players for the game hover between 2.5 and 2.2 million and then you can see how that would be significantly disruptive. PUBG, one of the most popular games in the world, bans around 100,000 players per week and given the format of the game those are numbers that really cast doubt on the prospect of a legitimate single-player experience. Rainbow 6 banned 100,000 players in 2023 with their community claiming it wasn’t enough and cheating still being out of contol. Call of Duty Warzone players have complained endlessly about the number of cheats despite the game employing some pretty advanced measures to detect and penalise cheaters. There’s an ongoing conspiracy theory there too that pro-players and streamers are placed on “white lists” that enable them to cheat based on anti-spam reporting measures. Oh and a Riot Games anticheat developer claimed that in some regions League of Legends has 1 in 5 games containing some form of scripter or bot account. Make sure you install our spyware kiddies, it’s the only way you’ll gain MMR.

Which brings us to Valorant. Riot’s biggest marketing trick is convincing bitter CS2 players that it is “cheater free.” Even a cursory Google search will show you what complete bullshit this is. Like CS2 you can pay for public cheats, which are readily available on most cheat forums. Like CS:GO it has a hilariously embarrassing incident where a cheater got caught disguising an executable of a cheat to that of supposedly another benign program. We know that Riot will issue manual bans when their Vanguard anticheat fails to detect the use of hacks and yet they consistently market the software as flawless, hilarious given recent incidents where it totally didn’t brick people’s PCs when rolled out in League of Legends.

Crucially though, despite Riot having explicitly promised that a replay feature would come to the game in 2022 they still haven’t implemented one. Compare that experience to being able to instantly download and watch back an entire match from the viewpoint of a suspected cheater and it’s clear why so many seem utterly convinced that there aren’t any cheaters in Valorant.

This isn’t to say a Kernel level anticheat wouldn’t reduce the number of cheaters in CS2 but rather that framing one as a total solution to the problem is simply disingenuous. We’ve had them in versions of Counter-Strike for years, including relatively archaic programs like ESL Wire, and those environments have still contained a significant number of cheaters. Even recently FACEIT had to ban the number one ranked player in North America for cheating which took over 900 matches to implement. Esports journalist Izento has done multiple deep dives into the ways which Vanguard can be bypassed and has even interviewed the people that come up with the ways to do it all of which should tell you that the battle to stop cheats is the same cat and mouse arms race it has always been.

None of this will matter though. The Counter-Strike community has had a pretty radical shift in perspective. The one time view of “fuck cheaters” is now very firmly “fuck Valve” irrespective of how much they fix or improve the game. The front page of Reddit didn’t contain much in the way of praise for the update, the consensus of course being “I am entitled to play in a cheat free environment and this won’t even last.” The 48 hours of being unable to say “Valve don’t care about cheating” was simply replaced with new complaints, notably the state of deathmatch servers and some professional players not having their Major attendance badges added to their profiles. It was these new things that proved beyond all doubt that Valve actually have abandoned their game and only care about money. But tomorrow or soon after we’ll be back to the endless droning about cheaters and how they’re everywhere regardless of any data that shows otherwise. It’s never a great sign when a community seems to enjoy complaining about the game more than actually playing it but that’s where we’ve arrived at. Until we can have sensible, adult conversations about problems plaguing the game you can’t blame the developer for ignoring the noise.