Following the recent ups and downs of professional Counter-Strike has a relatively decent swing of controversies and drama ebbing and flowing weekly.
The greatest cheating scandal of all time within professional Counter-Strike is still underway as 37 coaches have been suspended for exploiting bugs to help their teams cheat for the past five years, with many teams and coaches offending multiple times over the years, allegedly without warning Valve.
With this comes the MDL match-fixing that many are allegedly attempting to dodge by shifting over to Valorant; players would bet against their team when they have the advantage and intentionally throw the match to get a nice paycheck. Illegal to the point that many who dabble in this get prison time.
On top of this, the competitive scene is similarly in shambles: the newest layer of anti-cheat was circumvented within thirty minutes and managed to not block any cheaters; only streamers using software to capture their screens of gameplay.
This meant that streamers would either need to figure out a workaround (such as using the cheats and exploits to work around the newest layer of anti-cheat) or stop streaming until Valve manages to fix this.
Yet over the past few years, the resounding truth coming from Valve is that Counter-Strike has ended up on the back burner for whatever reason; the updates are few and far between (barring new crates) and issues are sporadically fixed, if at all.
https://twitter.com/CigaretteS_Kla/status/1314451953544355841
This further encourages the extradition of young talent within Counter-Strike towards other FPS such as Valorant, while those opting to stay suffer from a bevy of new woes seemingly monthly.
The latest is stemming from Asia, and players are frustrated with a lack of any support; professional players are being VAC banned and they’re pointing to using streaming software, along with Valve’s newest anti-cheat layer, that is the culprit. Further, Asian players don’t have organizations to vouch for player integrity, so many are left twisting in the wind until Valve manages to notice the issue or they leave the scene as well.
Asia is having the same problem that NA is currently having; sparse scenes after other titles have recently launched (which has fixed itself in the past, and likely will again) and users are beginning to get frustrated with the experience. This is currently affecting professional players that are vying for an opportunity within the FunSpark qualifiers.
Valve has yet commented on the nature of the ban, but likely will when it’s noticed as they have in the past. Here’s hoping it’s soon enough that they can still compete in the qualifiers.