Are We Seeing a New Wave of Cheaters in CS2? How Can We Fight Back?

[Venom.]

Lately, I’ve been noticing a disturbing trend—cheaters seem to be popping up more often in CS2 matches, and it’s seriously ruining the experience for legit players. I wanted to start a conversation about this issue, see if others are noticing the same, and brainstorm ways we can fight back as a community.

Key Points:

New Cheating Tactics: Have you noticed any new or more sophisticated cheating methods in CS2 compared to the original CS: GO? Wallhacks, aim hacks, or something else?

VAC and Anti-Cheat: How effective do you think the current anti-cheat measures are? Are you confident that VAC can keep up with these cheaters, or do you think it needs an upgrade?

Reporting System: Do you feel that the current reporting system is effective? Have you had any success with reporting cheaters, or do you feel like reports just go into a void?

Protecting Yourself: What steps are you taking to avoid cheaters in your games? Do you stick to playing with trusted friends, or are you using any third-party tools to detect potential cheaters?

Community Impact:
The presence of cheaters not only ruins individual games but can also damage the overall CS2 community by driving away honest players. We need to stay vigilant and report suspicious activity, but we also need to push for better anti-cheat measures.

Let’s Discuss:

Share your experiences—have you encountered more cheaters recently? How are you dealing with them?
What do you think Valve should do to improve the situation?
Any tips on how to spot cheaters and avoid getting frustrated by them?
Let’s keep this discussion constructive and focused on how we can make CS2 a better place for everyone.

If you agree that something needs to be done, give this post a thumbs up! Let’s make our voices heard!

[Kio]

you cry, i enjoy

[aR` pooned]

it does suck

[TheLevelCap]

Originally posted by Venom.:

New Cheating Tactics: Have you noticed any new or more sophisticated cheating methods in CS2 compared to the original CS: GO? Wallhacks, aim hacks, or something else?

No, it's the usual BS

Originally posted by Venom.:

VAC and Anti-Cheat: How effective do you think the current anti-cheat measures are? Are you confident that VAC can keep up with these cheaters, or do you think it needs an upgrade?

It's effective since it gets them, but it lacks efficiency since it takes months for the baan to occur and cheaters can immediately return to our matches with new accounts, thanks to Valve's poor ban policy, it becomes useless.

Originally posted by Venom.:

Reporting System: Do you feel that the current reporting system is effective? Have you had any success with reporting cheaters, or do you feel like reports just go into a void?

Yeah I get the blue notification from time to time.

Originally posted by Venom.:

Protecting Yourself: What steps are you taking to avoid cheaters in your games? Do you stick to playing with trusted friends, or are you using any third-party tools to detect potential cheaters?

I add people that look legit and we try to close a public server only with friends to avoid random players that could be cheating (when playing casual).

--
I'd be fine with keeping current VAC since many people don't like an intrusive anticheat. I'd suggest adding a optional verification system (at least for premiere), so people that are willing to prove they don't want to cheat play only with those with the same mindset and even if someone tries to cheat there, once they're caught, their ID would be banned for good. I'd be fine with companies banning people instead of only accounts.

Edit: and no a pay wall doesn't work in CS since people cheat with expensive inventories, some even pay monthly subs to cheat developers to use their software. Add a verification system and isolate those players from the rest and they should feel an improvement. Cheaters and the ones carried by them will be mad of course but who cares (and yes, prime players love getting carried by a cheater that's why I've been mostly playing non prime, at least there they open a vote kick).

[Hello. 🏳️‍🌈]

The reporting system in CS2 is broken and useless. Valve doesn't hire enough people to be on the cutting edge of what is detectable with their anticheat. People are not banned fast enough for it to make any bit of difference whatsoever and the majority of cheats are not detected.

Another important point to mention is: accounts are cheap. People can just buy hundreds of steam accounts for very little, and just use cheats that take weeks or months to detect, when the account gets VACd they just switch to another account. Essentially people can have enough bought accounts paired with low quality detectable cheats to last them a lifetime...where they continue to cheat for years upon years without any reasonable stop.

Given how easy and affordable it is to have a life time supply of accounts and cheats.... And how long it takes to even get banned, people just continuously cheat without anything meaningful ever happening to change this reality.

The report system is more of a punishment for people that are good at the game or not good enough. You get put in low trust for either playing the game too well or too poorly (of course other things factor into getting a lower trust such as being toxic) people will also just report you for anything...It doesn't really matter.

Green trust is full of people trying harder to hide their cheats while every other trust factor such as yellow and red are just full blatant.

Queue times are exponentially longer because of dwindling player count. Valve places queue times based on your trust more so than your actual level of individual skill. The worse your trust the longer the queue times, however, that is not the only reason.

The report system is what dictates your trust factor mostly and it is a lazy way to minimize how many blatant cheaters you encounter, but a skilled player can, more often than not, tell who is hiding it in green trust lobbies. It is a sorry excuse for a lack of a effective anticheat and is only here because valve does not care about the community enough to implement enough talented employees to correctly deal with the issue.

CS2 player count is inflated.

CS2 anticheat basically doesn't exist.

CS2 gameplay mechanics broken and worse than CSGO.

Some pros have spoke out against the issues with CS2 regarding the broken mechanics and bugs as well as the poor anticheat.

Many people from the CS community (long term and experienced/skilled players) have made their points made about the game, and only fractions of it get listened to over the course of an incredible length of time of nothing being done.

The slow process in development of these fixes are inexcusable and only exist because valve simply does not care about hiring the talent required to fix the issues.

When a company as big as valve chooses to not listen nor care about their community that made them into a success in the first place, there is simply nothing you can do but watch the thing you loved die.

[macsabli]

Lol

[FEXEY]

Cheaters are back.
Blatantly cheating in premier again.
Its a joke.

[Tomico.]

What's the point of current bans/cooldowns if by the time you see such messages on clowns' accounts they're already back cheating under different account.

Pointless to ban them and let them ruin games again and again.

What Valve's anti-cheat needs is to prevent them to come back. Hardware ban just like Vanguard does, on motherboard's TPM.
https://x.com/AntiCheatPD/status/1796609553104015767

[apr4jc]

bro cheaters barely get banned. barely. some do get banned, but 99 percent still remains. and then there are indeed new waves of cheaters

[Oyun Arşivim]

More chatgpt

[apr4jc]

a cheater on my match is running around with random gun and only checking corners where we are. hilariously sad.

[apr4jc]

anyone claiming they havent seen a single cheater on this game should be blocked by everyone else.