Now that the highly anticipated Counter-Strike 2 has officially launched, other than praising Valve for all the positives, players are rightfully highlighting its blaring issues, too. Unfortunately, one of its prominent flaws happens to be cheating, and former CS:GO pro Robin “flusha” Rönnquist claims he has already fallen victim.
In a tweet dated Sept. 27, flusha shared he ran into cheaters as opponents in his first CS2 game, and it was not one, but three of them. “First game, 5 stack vs 5 stack, they have 3 cheaters.. not a good look,” he tweeted, reminding us of how much grip cheaters have on free-to-play shooter games even today.
Throughout CS2’s beta testing period, players reported having run into suspicious encounters, so they weren’t really expecting the CS:GO successor to be free of cheaters. But running into multiple such offenders in the first game itself doesn’t leave an assuring impression.
In fact, just a few days ago, players accused the Premier mode of being full of cheaters and that CS2 would be dead before its launch.
That said, the latest CS2 update didn’t just mark the game’s global launch, but it also brought some essential patch fixes, including one that satisfactorily penalizes players who team up with cheaters. So it does seem like Valve’s trying.
Replying to flusha’s tweet, one player highlighted the fact that Valve skipped on a much-needed ban wave on launch. “Not even a ban wave on release… so many cheaters on my Leetify still playing lol,” they said.
Another player revealed they’d be fine with Valve requesting kernel access like Riot does for VALORANT. “Sure, it’s ‘invasive,’ but Valve is a trustworthy company, and it would reduce the number of cheaters by like 90% at least,” they said.
With Prime Status, players can reduce their possibility of running into cheaters in their CS2 games. But that is based on the assumption that cheaters aren’t willing to pay that kind of money to sabotage others’ games.
For now, it seems like cheaters are willing to do anything to destroy the game’s integrity, so it may be time for Valve to lash back harder than before.
