Cheating In Counter-Strike: Global Offensive At An All-Time High

As long as there are people who want to take advantage, whether in a game or in real life, cheating will be a problem. Cheats have been part of gaming and go as far back as the early console games like Contra and Mario Bros. Cheating in single player games is considered perfectly fine since players are basically just cheating the game and of course, themselves. Cheating in multiplayer games, however, ruins the game for all the other players and is absolutely frowned upon by the gaming community.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive's developer, Valve, has been in a continuous war with cheaters since the first Half Life game gained popularity. Valve has an anti cheat system (VAC – Valve Anti Cheat) that helps detect and ban players using cheats and hacks, but cheat developers hve been very clever in circumventing the VAC system and things are getting pretty serious between the two especially with the release of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

The cheating rate has been increasing alarmingly in the past months, from over 9,000 banned players in December to almost 12,000 banned players in January, a record-breaking number for CS: GO. And these are only those that can be detected by Valve and don’t include any that escape detection by VAC and are reported through the Overwatch system.

The Overwatch is where experienced players, called investigators, can replay matches by suspected cheaters and decide whether the players involved are cheating or not. A ban is issued when the investigators collectively agree that the player did indeed cheat. The duration depends on the severity of the offense. Valve has also blocked accounts from playing competitive matches until they reach level 3 which helped temporarily reduce the incidences of cheating, until pre-levelled accounts started being sold in the black market.

Check out the detailed VAC ban statistics here.