Perhaps we weren’t supposed to notice, or Valve really is relatively indifferent about the status of Counter-Strike as controversies pile up and begin falling onto the regular community with seemingly reckless abandon.
In the tail-end of June, Valve released a new anti-cheat layer for Counter-Strike that was intended to block third-party applications from interfering with the executable itself; the announcement was celebrated wide and far as CS:GO players have been suffering at the hands of script-kiddies within competitive match-making for years, and the problem was becoming exponentially worse.
Many analysts and stars of the first-person shooter began calling out CS:GO publically for offering the worst experience possible for veterans and beginners alike; experiencing at least two cheaters per day was the norm, with more being expected.
So while Valorant players were fussing over their anti-cheat being invasive, the CS:GO community was interestingly begging Valve to get as intrusive as possible and make the game playable again.
Enter the new anti-cheat, which was noticeably circumvented within thirty minutes of its beta release on the Steam platform, allowing those who wanted to cheat could easily continue doing so, while those who maintained competitive integrity now had new hoops to jump through to play the title.
Those new hoops are displayed in the form of an untrusted launch in order for Open Broadcaster Software (OBS, a commonly used streaming application to show your screen) to function.
For two months thus far OBS has been blocked by Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Valve seems to either be indifferent to the plight of streamers, or incapable of fixing the issue that was introduced.
To be clear, OBS is the primary application that was blocked by the anti-cheat, which has frustrated the community; Valve could have named it the ‘anti-streaming patch’ to be a bit more clear regarding expectations. Perhaps more frustrating, however, is that there have been no noticeable attempts from Valve to try to right the ship.
There have been little regarding statements of whether Valve even understands that the most recent anti-cheat attempt has frustrated the community while accomplishing impressively little, or that cheaters continue to roam free in the game unobstructed, as they have had for years.
Some make note of this with a cynical outlook, stating that Valve has done very little for Counter-Strike aside from printing money using community assets such as maps and skins, and thus the silence is to be expected; others are holding out hope that Valve is working hard on the situation, but has yet to break the silence regarding upcoming fixes.
