CS:GO is not worth playing anymore… Kind of a big statement, right? Well, bare with me, and I will explain what I mean.
Counter Strike: Global Offensive, a.k.a. CS:GO, has been around since 2012 and has been a staple for FPS games’ fans. Players have always enjoyed how fun the game was, how realistic it felt, and how you could enjoy both casual and competitive matches.
I have never been the best CS:GO player, but I did enjoy coming home from school or work and playing a few matches with friends or random players. But that started to change a couple of years back. Slowly and steadily, my passion for the game started to vanish, and today I’d like to share with you the reasons why that is. All of the things that soured this game for me are universally bad for all players, which is why I feel that CS:GO is not worth playing anymore.
The cheater problem
I have mentioned this problem before and if you’ve played the game recently, then you already know it as well: Counter Strike: Global Offensive has some serious cheater problems, and has never been able to solve them. From wall hacks to aimbots and spinbots, you name it: you will have to face something like that constantly while playing.
Back in the day, reporting the cheaters used to be enough… and then the game became free to play. From the moment the game became free back in 2018, the cheating problem spread like wildfire, in both casual and competitive matches.
Valve even bought over 1.700 CPUs with the specific mission of doing non-stop scans, in order to catch cheaters and take action. It didn’t work out as nicely in practice as it did in theory. Still, kudos for trying.
In 2020, they tried another approach: the Trusted Launch system. The Trusted Launch’s mission is to block all external processes from being able to interact with the game, and lowering the trust factor of any player that disables that system. But it turned out to be a bust as well. The new system banned innocent players if they used so much as Spotify to listen to music, or even Discord to talk to friends.
I tried playing a couple weeks ago and I ran into cheaters in 3 out of 4 competitive matches. I actually came across a team with two cheaters in one of my games.
My noobish perspective aside, even pro players have given up playing the game. Case number one is Michael Grzesiek, a.k.a. Shroud. He didn’t have my patience and quit the game a long time ago, and at the top of his reasons for not playing CS:GO anymore is the issue of cheating.
Match queues take forever
Starting when the game became free to play, matchmaking for competitive matches started taking a seriously long time. CS:GO has never had issues maintaining a healthy enough playerbase, so this was a mystery to me until recently. I put the pieces back together, thanks to some pro players: as the number of smurfs and cheaters is incredibly high and they play on lower ranks, the match queues for my current rank are looooong.
Smurfs
How to even start… For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term, smurfing is all about creating a secondary account in games in order to play at the lower levels, against unskilled opponents. Why do people do this in the first place? Well, some players claim that it is their way to test out new strategies without harming their rank on their main account. Others use smurfs in order to rank them up fast and sell them to other players. However, the most annoying use for a smurf acount is to easily win matches against inexperienced players.
I can understand the first reason, the others not so much. I haven’t clocked in that many hours in CS:GO, but when I play the game, I like to do so against players of similar skill and not walk into a complete massacre. Which leads us to the next problem: toxicity.
Toxicity
The game is very toxic and for way too many reasons. We have people who blatantly cheat and then brag about how “superior” they are to other players, and we also have people with oversized egos… And there’s people like me: I don’t consider myself to be toxic, and I never have anything to say about other players’ moms, yet when I am facing a cheater, an obvious smurf, or a professional trash-talker, it really gets on my nerves.
I don’t act upon the rage, but when the match is over, I turn my computer off and am annoyed for the rest of the day. Which is the main reason why I no longer play CS:GO, nor do I intend to return to it, unless some miracle happens.
Conclusion
Counter Strike: Global Offensive used to be a game that I really enjoyed, and the game part of it can still be fun, provided there are no cheaters or smurfs in my match. But as getting a match like that seems to be harder than winning the lottery, I have decided to stop playing the game altogether, so as to save myself from rolling my eyes to the back of my head each time a match starts.
I am of course willing to give the game another try if I hear the above problems are being dealt with effectively, but until then, it’s sayonara.
