One mouse setting is getting players wrongfully banned in CS2

Looks like cheaters are the only ones dodging the ban hammer these days.

Banner of CS2 featuring a Terrorist character next to 'Counter-Strike 2'.
Image via Valve

CS2 players who have switched to a ridiculously high DPI in matches are being hit with a VAC ban over the course of this month despite not using any actual cheats.

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This is because Valve’s anti-cheat is seemingly interpreting people switching to high DPI and moving their mouse ridiculously fast as some sort of spin-botting, a software many cheaters used throughout CS:GO‘s history.

One player got banned for doing this and successfully replicated the bug in a fresh Steam account. The player set their mouse to high DPI and hit a teammate in Casual mode, triggering an automatic VAC ban. Lots of players have been dealt a wrongful ban, according to Reddit and posts on Steam’s forum.

This comes after Valve falsely VAC banned lots of players over an anti-lag feature on AMD graphic cards, which also affected the Premier rating of their friends. Players also got VAC banned for playing CS2 on Windows 7, for whatever reason.

Should Valve not review its CS2 anti-cheat, this could become a bigger problem as I’ve personally seen a lot of players change their DPI to a ridiculously high number in warm-ups or in between rounds. Players have been doing it since CS:GO and never got punished for it.

It’s frustrating for the player base that CS2‘s anti-cheat continues to hand out false positives while it allows cheats to run rampant in CS2 Premier, which was supposed to retain the player base and not make them switch to third-party matchmaking services like FACEIT.

While this is a disaster, Valve will probably revert these VAC bans triggered by high DPI in the near future. The developer reverted bans handed to players who ran CS2 on Windows 7 and is already unbanning those who were banned because of AMD graphic cards’ settings.

Author
Image of Leonardo Biazzi
Leonardo Biazzi
Staff writer and CS:GO lead. Leonardo has been passionate about games since he was a kid and graduated in Journalism in 2018. Before Leonardo joined Dot Esports in 2019, he worked for Brazilian outlet Globo Esporte. Leonardo also worked for HLTV.org between 2020 and 2021 as a senior writer, until he returned to Dot Esports and became part of the staff team.