Eleven years have passed since Valve released CS:GO and the developers have never quite managed to fix the game’s cheating issues, which continue to affect the player base to this day.
A seasoned CS:GO player complained on Aug. 28 that they have witnessed a rising number of cheaters lately, to the point that they claim they play against at least one suspicious player once every five matches.
“I genuinely love this game and want to continue playing, but the current state is disheartening,” the player wrote, adding they hope Valves fixes this for CS2. “Yep. I have 10k hours in CS:GO alone yet I am getting put in games with 2-3 blatant cheaters on sub-100-hour accounts almost every game,” another player wrote.
What the players said about facing more cheaters lately makes sense as Valve has practically stopped banning CS:GO players, according to VAC Ban statistics collected by SteamID. The developer went from banning over 4,000 players in a ban wave made in March to banning 50 or fewer players a day during August.
This comes as no surprise as Valve stopped looking into CS:GO‘s exploits in July and is presumably focusing all of its efforts on making adjustments during the CS2 closed beta and releasing the game this summer.
While it’s unlikely that Valve does what a good part of the player base wants—implement a more invasive anti-cheating system to CS2 similar to VALORANT—the developer has come up with VAC Live, a tool capable of banning blatant cheaters while the game is live, merely seconds after the player gets reported. Not only that, but players will also be able to cancel a match if a cheater is found.
Related: CS2’s VAC Live system is already banning cheaters faster than ever
For now, however, there’s nothing CS:GO players can do other than wait for CS2‘s release and see if Valve fixes the cheating issues and improves the overall matchmaking experience in the new game.
