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Nov 05, 2023

CS:GO players say game has hit an all

Cheating and smurfing run rampant in matchmaking ahead of CS2's launch. The

Cheating and smurfing run rampant in matchmaking ahead of CS2's launch.

The last days of CS:GO have been insufferable for casual players in matchmaking, as the mode is plagued with cheaters or smurfs and Valve seems to not care anymore.

One player's June 1 Reddit post summed up how many others feel about the game right now: They only play matchmaking to keep his Global Elite ranking, but meets cheaters in nine out of every 10 matches. Other players related having a similar experience lately, on top of matchmaking being as imbalanced as ever due to the high number of smurfs.

The overall player perception is that Valve has given up on CS:GO as Counter-Strike 2‘s launch looms, and there seems to be some truth to it. Valve almost completely stopped issuing VAC bans towards the end of May, as you can see in the graphic below. Valve was VAC-banning over 4,000 players per day in March, and now is banning just 100 people a day.

This isn't all. Leakers spotted on May 31 that Valve is set to disable CS:GO‘s exploit and vulnerability reporting system on June 14, which effectively means the developer won't look into the game's problems anymore after that date.

Many players have given up on CS:GO at this point and hope that Valve does justice for all the matchmaking problems they had to go through by offering a better experience in CS2 with fewer cheaters and smurfs.

"MM [matchmaking] will make or break CS2, not that CS could ever die, but they sure as hell won't attract any new players with this shit," one player wrote on Reddit. "They also might lose some current players if they can't clean this shit up with the CS2 release," another player wrote.

Valve is set to release CS2 as a free update to CS:GO at some point in summer 2023.

Staff writer and CS:GO lead. Leonardo has been passionate about games since he was a kid and graduated in Journalism in 2018. Before Leonardo joined Dot Esports in 2019, he worked for Brazilian outlet Globo Esporte. Leonardo also worked for HLTV.org between 2020 and 2021 as a senior writer, until he returned to Dot Esports and became part of the staff team.