Ah, cheaters. Don’t we just love them… Anyone who was ever played a popular multiplayer game has eventually crossed paths with a cheater. But in CS:GO, the cheater problem has become an absolute nightmare. Especially since the game became free-to-play.
Anyone who enjoys CS:GO as much as I do, knows how difficult it is to have fun when someone in your match is using wall hacks, aimbots or even mobility hacks. No matter what you do, they have the upper hand. Not only are you not going to win, you’re not going to learn anything from losing. Valve has promised to fight hackers, and for a while they did so quite effectively.
Free-to-play: bad call?
CS:GO used to have only a mildly disturbing cheater problem, and when Valve took up the challenge of exposing the cheaters and banning them, the game returned to its former glory for a while. And then they made the game free-to-play…
They wanted to increase the playerbase and at the same time introduce their new battle royale mode, but it didn’t work out so well. In fact, within 24 hours of the game becoming free, there were over 14 thousand negative Steam reviews. The amount of CS:GO cheaters increased at a ridiculous rate, and so players naturally started getting upset.
What is Valve doing to fix the CS:GO cheater issue?
So, how exactly is Valve compatting the cheater problem in CS:GO? By brute force, apparently. In 2018 they bought over 1.700 CPUs and deployed them to non-stop scan for, catch and take actions against cheater accounts. But has the AI army been effective?
The answer is complicated. Sure, we still notice cheaters in almost every casual CS:GO match and some competitive ones, but the truth is that in December of last year alone, Valve banned over 600,000 Steam accounts from the game. They’re going after the problem pretty hard, it’s just a really big problem.
It may take some time, especially with the additional complications of CS:GO being free-to-play, but I’m sure that eventually Valve will get the situation in check. And with Valorant on the horizon, I certainly hope they hurry up. Riot is poised to make their tactical FPS a true CS:GO replacement, and they are promising heavy anti-cheat measures as part of that effort.
