Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has a vast player base that keeps on expanding. 2020 saw the player count peak at 1 million, but not all of them prefer to play the game entirely on Valve’s terms.
Third-party platform Faceit, has become the primary home of professional players. With 15 million registered users, Faceit has become a significant part of Counter-Strike and more players are moving to third-party providers by the day.
128-tick servers are the main reason behind this switch, but Faceit has many other features that make it the top choice of serious CSGO players.
Players believe that Valve’s anti-cheat does a poor job of keeping the hackers at bay, a problem that has grown since CSGO became free to play on Steam. The developer has introduced various anti-cheat updates to punish hackers or prevent them from playing the game, but cheaters have been able to bypass all of these patches, including the most recent “trusted mode” update.
Conversely, Faceit has banned more than 120,000 cheaters in CSGO thanks to its stringent anti-cheat. The third-party provider’s approach is not based on bulk banning, but preventing the hackers from entering a match. It has multiple detection vectors that can quickly detect any suspicious driver operations.
Accounts with multiple bans get harsh punishment on Faceit. For example, if an account has various reports from different users, Faceit justice will conduct a manual inspection to make sure that the reports were valid. These reports often result in a permanent ban from Faceit.
Valve makes no effort to combat toxic behavior and abuse, whereas Faceit has a whole system dedicated to deal with bullies. Faceit AI “Minerva” makes the gaming experience smoother by detecting toxic messages in chat and sending out warnings. During the initial days of its release, there was a 20.13% decrease in toxic messages on Faceit.
Apart from a robust anti-cheat, Faceit is generally considered as a better platform for those who want to pursue gaming as a career. Premium features such as leagues and ladders allow players to compete with tier-1 players who are actively participating in Faceit events. Many renowned players in the current professional CSGO scene were discovered from the Faceit Pro League. For example, Mathieu “ZywOo” Herbaut dominated FPL before he was picked up by Vitality.
128 tick servers bring more players to Faceit, but it is the developers’ attentiveness towards the community that is building a large player count on the platform.
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