Counter-Strike: Global Offensive can quickly become a frustrating game if you encounter cheaters, especially in a competitive match. However, today it looks like someone revved up the Valve Anti-Cheat engine as more than 11,000 players were hit with the ban hammer in one of the largest ban waves of the year.
VAC bans are handed out fairly regularly, though normally in much smaller numbers. A giant spike like this seems to show that the engine has been updated to recognise previously undetected cheats. According to Reddit user TwitchDanmark, who has collected screenshots of statements made by cheat providers, around four big cheat sellers have been affected by the VAC update, reaching over 11,000 players according to the Steam Database.
We likely won't hear anything from Valve when it comes to this latest ban spike. After all, if they spoke out about how their anti-cheat system works, it would become easier to circumvent. Still though, this should help clean-up the CS:GO community a little bit.
It is also worth noting that due to Valve's new rules surrounding Steam Gifts and trades, it should be harder for cheaters to set up alternate accounts to switch to.
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KitGuru Says: It is always nice to see the VAC system doing its job well. Do any of you guys play CS:GO on a regular basis? Have you had many issues with cheaters?
It’s the reason I stopped playing. They were not every where, more every other game. Though regardless of if they were on the enemy team or not, they just ruined the whole experience. And for what?
In my 450 hours of game time I have only encountered a cheater once and I barely play with premade teams lmao still good though that plenty of cheaters were banned
I see cheaters at least 1 out of 10 games… and most of the time they laugh and admit they are running “walls” or something. Of all the ones I have reported, I have only received one msg saying that a player was banned with “your help” I only play casual and hate that people have to cheat.
Hacking in online gaming has gotten so bad I hardly play these days. I would just about hand over my entire system security to minimise hacking. Why accounts with certain ratios aren’t automatically flagged is beyond me. Although I do wonder if hacking is part of the business model, let them get away with it for so long so they will find their run of hacking acceptable and buy the game again rather than just banning them outright. That will equate to millions in extra sales a year for a developer, you could argue that hackers are the best customers in that respect. Can you tell I don’t trust the games industry at all?
The introduction of Prime was pretty much the end of cheaters that I saw. Plenty of smurfs still since it’s not hard to get a second number but that’s still a pretty rare occurrence and of course the newer precautions such as preventing gifting of CS:GO has surely whittled the numbers down.
This is one thing game developers never talk about, because it really is a large portion of their sales. Why would any business spend money on something (like eliminating hackers outright rather than just banning them after the fact) that would directly result in less sales (hackers repurchasing the game after getting banned.) Why is cs:go always in the top ten list of games sold on steam without any real increase in concurrent players?
Same thing but worse with rust. On major patch days they ban thousands of cheaters the first day of game play (they usually ban about 20-100 cheaters a day anyway) because people want to get ahead quickly on server restart. For rust it adds a pay to win element. Since you can build a base to store your cheating acquired gear and just pick it back up., They know they will likely be banned, but they can just jump back on their non hacking accounts or buy more hacking accounts and still benefit from the spoils of their cheating.