This CSGO player just proved how bad cheating problem really is

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is riddled with cheaters, and one player has demonstrated just how bad the problem is in brilliant fashion.

Reddit user /u/yv0Li has been playing CSGO for years and has over 3,000 matches to their name. They decided to run a scan of their match history to get some stats for their lifetime in the game, which brought up the total number of players met during this time and how many of those players have since been banned for cheating.

The results confirmed what many already suspected. Of the 23,000 unique accounts the player had either played with or against, 1,080 had VAC bans on their accounts when they were scanned and 875 had been banned for cheating after playing with the player. This works out to about 4.6% of players encountered having been caught cheating by VAC at some point and 3.8% getting banned after playing with them.

While this may not sound like all that much, it works out to about one cheater on the server in every three games played, and more than one enemy cheater in every six games played.

Others have used the Ban Checker for Steam extension on Google Chrome, with one user reporting 9% of the players they came across having cheated.

This proves that CSGO matchmaking has had a major cheating problem, but it’s less certain how bad the problem is today.

Why are there so many cheaters in CSGO?

CSGO has historically been rife with cheaters due to Valve’s passive approach to anti-cheat.

Though the Valve Anti-Cheat tool, commonly known as VAC, is a widely used anti-cheat engine, cheat creators have been able to get the better of it for years. Even if players are eventually caught, the fact that CSGO was completely free to play for years allowed banned players to simply create a new steam account and return to the game with impunity.

On top of that, Valve has been historically disinterested in anti-cheat enforcement outside the game itself. In January 2021, Riot Games and Activision Blizzard teamed up to sue cheat creators who were selling hacks for Destiny 2 and Valorant.  This shut down that cheat creator and spooked many more who were making hacks for the games.

Valve has the tools to do the same, but rarely uses its legal team for anything other than pursuing teenage esports competitors. Though Valorant and Destiny 2 have cheating problems of their own, there’s no question that Valve is doing comparatively little when it comes to policing their games.