What’s a couple more cheaters in the game of Counter-Strike at this point?
Following a bizarre Trusted Launch program that was immediately circumnavigated by cheaters (within thirty minutes) resulted in only streamers and fair-play users being hounded by the layer of protection while cheaters were blessed with additional trust, shifting the upper level of competitive play in Valve‘s official matchmaking service (that is tremendously unpopular considering the current theory of population) to include more than a few hundred cheaters ruining matches for almost everyone.
Now, a Counter-Strike developer has just stated that players should be expecting even more cheating in the upcoming days, specifically with spinbotters, as they work on some ‘experiments with VACnet and Overwatch’ in apparent attempts to, again, stymie cheating in one of the worlds most popular games.
Overwatch, the in-game system that allows veteran players to watch demos of suspected cheaters to confirm (or deny) that cheats are occurring has had a rough go of the past month or so; people blatantly cheating within Overwatch cases aren’t getting banned, resulting in Overwatchers not receiving as much XP for undergoing the painstaking process of watching demos for cheats.
The silver lining here would be that Valve, contrary to what they’ve publically stated, understand that more cheaters seem to be getting through than ever before and are actively working to solve this in what appears to be a new layer of security.
As is tradition for Valve, the less stated about the backend changes attempting to block cheats the better; it gives the bad actors less time and understanding to thwart the newest foray.
In spite of all of this, it’s admittedly a frustrating problem within Counter-Strike, and the medium stretches from Valve’s matchmaking servers all the way to professional matches.
If you’re hard-pressed to dodge them yourself, it’s very much worth it to consider a Broken Fang pass, which allows you to queue with other Broken Fang pass holders in a new format that includes map bans and options far beyond what Valve has traditionally offered.
The fact that players need to have purchased the newest pass, as well, has seemed to (however temporarily) offered pass players a bit of a respite from frustrating matches where enemies simply cannot be outplayed; at the moment, it’s relatively free of cheaters from empirical evidence alone. A statement that frankly cannot be backed by public-facing statistics.
Here’s hoping that whatever Valve is cooking up for Counter-Strike‘s anti-cheat is successful.
