CS:GO is dead, CS2 is real... but so are cheaters, and they're still there. Yep, it's a problem that Valve seemingly can't tackle. The community is desperate for Valve to improve on their system or to overhaul it completely. Becuase one thing is for sure, it can't stay like it is now.
Counter-Strike and cheaters are almost synonymous with each other. Everyone who has played Counter-Strike on official servers for more than a handful of hours will know, that cheaters, unfortunately, are a common occurrence in the world of Counter-Strike.
Over the past few years, Valve has made multiple promises to improve their “Valve Anti Cheat” (or VAC in short) to combat this problem, yet the numbers of players getting banned is stagnating, whilst player numbers are at their peak. Multiple pro players have addressed this issue and are demanding a better Anti Cheat from Valve.
CS2: Pro Players Demand Better Anti Cheat
With CS2, the hope of a game with fewer cheaters than in CS:GO was celarly on people's minds. But it disappeared almost instantly, and the first cheaters were banned in the opening days of the limited test. Valve are seemingly very far behind on this issue.
We can see how bad the problem has become from stats shared by the website SteamID, which tracks Steam profiles and sorts them for game and VAC-bans.
The numbers of VAC bans in the last months and years have decreased. In a time when cheating in Counter-Strike is still a big concern, that's not a good sign. VACnet, the project that was meant to end cheating in Counter-Strike, isn't working as it should be.
It uses artificial intelligence to decide whether a player is legit or not, and Valve have poured major effort and money into VACnet, but it is still far away from what we need/
Valve implemented VAClive into CS2, an anti cheat that is supposed to end games when a player is alleged of cheating by the system. This works for a tiny amount of games with obvious cheaters involved. But the problem remains.
And it's not just the cheaters who benefit, but also those who associate with them. Former-pro turned streamer “NatoSaphiX” recently published a video exposing a number of players sitting at the top of the Premier Leaderboard who playing with cheaters in their team far too often for it to be coincidence.
FaZe-Rifler Robin “ropz” Kool tweeted this about the cheating situation in CS2 Premier at the moment:
Cheating is a big problem in Premier games currently.
— ropz (@ropz) October 2, 2023
I would be so down for an invasive AC for any kind of Ranked matches. Volvo pls I can give you my car, my house, access to my bank details, pls just do it @CounterStrike
There are multiple games out there with an intrusive anti cheat, and ropz wants to have that for CS2 as well. Let's take a look at the said-to-be "CS:GO-Killer" Valorant. When playing Riot's first-person shooter, you'll encounter cheaters a lot less frequently than in CS. The difference? Riots Vanguard Anti Cheat uses a "kernel mode driver", meaning it has access to a ton of things your PC is doing at the time of you playing Valorant.
Vanguard has the privilege to access data that VAC can't. Yes, giving Riot the power to basically access every file on your computer is a little disconcerting, but the amount of cheaters in Valorant speaks for itself.
A lot of CS2 players are asking Valve to create a kernel-mode anti cheat driver as well. Yet this seems pretty unlikely. Valve has put a lot of effort and money into VAC. And the same thing that happened with sub-tick servers will happen here. There is a better alternative, but Valve will stick to their own vision.
Nothing against Valve for trying their own thing, but the community is tired of it. And they are willing to give Valve the access to their PC's, if they finally can get anti cheat done.