How many players cheat? Statistical Discussion and Analysis

[BibleClinger]

I've been wondering for awhile how many players actually cheat. I've decided to do some cursory investigating. This is far from being rigorous or scientific, so I'd appreciate any constructive criticism.

According to VacBanned[www.vacbanned.com], as of this post, there are 179,333,552 accounts checked, and only 2,662,942 are banned. This means cheaters represent ~1.4849% of accounts checked. This is quite low.

Now this site represents Steam accounts across all games, and it doesn't include all accounts. So these numbers will not be perfectly accurate. There are many reasons why the percentage of cheaters may be larger for CSGO specifically, particularly if we take into account cheaters rebuying CSGO on new Steam accounts, for example, especially if they are more likely to rebuy CSGO than another game on which they've been caught and banned.

I've been monitoring my recent games for cheaters, and I've been noticing people caught every week. The monitoring is done by putting everyone I play with and against on a suspect list via a 3rd party demo analysis program. Most of the demos I have are from CSGO Competitive matchmaking and represent games I've actually played, although I may have missed saving a few. I also have an occasional PUG of mine from a 3rd party group. I also ended up including some pro players from pro matches and some players from games that were played by friends -- games that I had nothing to do with, but were in my list of demos that got sucked into this analysis. This was not intended for this study, but just something I had done awhile ago at the time that I'd have to go hunting to undo if I wanted to start over with the analysis. Therefore, this doesn't perfectly represent all of my games, but the vast majority, for sure, are mine.

One last disclaimer: this system I'm using just highlights if someone has been caught with a VAC ban or Game ban; it doesn't know if the ban in question is for CSGO or for another game.

So finally, the numbers: at last glance, I have 4135 players from all of the demos entered into this system, and 197 of them have been caught cheating. While this may or may not be a big enough pool to get a meaningful result, this does mean that ~4.7642% of players that I've placed into this system are cheaters. If I take out the few extra pro games, and if we take into account the fact that maybe VAC and Overwatch missed a few cheaters, we can see the percentage of cheaters would slowly climb toward 5%, although how close, I'm obviously not sure.

So with that said, let's just assume that 5% of players active at any given time are likely to be cheating in CSGO, assuming things are much worse than they already look for the reasons listed above. What are the odds, roughly, of soloQing as a clean player and finding a clean game of 9 other players with no cheaters present? If we assume that rank plays no role in where cheaters are found (not something I'm sure is a safe assumption, but for the sake of discussion, we'll roll with it without considering it too deeply), we can estimate it like this: 0.95^9 = 0.630249409724609375 = ~63.0249%. The chances of finding at least one cheater in your game would be 1 - 0.630249409724609375 = ~36.9751%.This would mean you are almost twice as likely than not to find a clean game when you soloQ.

Now this is an estimate with a load of assumptions, so don't take this last estimate too seriously. The bottom line is that ~4.7642% of players that I've put into this system have a VAC or Game ban.

Thoughts?

[Joni Poni]

Hey, thank you for your effort and thoughts. If the math you are doing is only halfway right, this is a very alarming conclusion... :-/

[tOMME]

You should add the factor rank and steam acc age to your analysis. I'm pretty sure the numbers for higher ranks and fresh accs would be much worse.

[Joni Poni]

I, personally, find accounts very suspicious that have like 2 Games, a years of service coin and like 30 hours on cs go... even more after I have seen that you can earn good money with selling accounts that have a years of service coin

[✪kAy™]

all time haking bro on ge lem le mg mge is ♥♥♥♥ bro