There exists a distinct category even more problematic than cheaters in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Account boosters have emerged as a scourge, tarnishing the competitive experience for everyone playing CSGO.
A Valve employee has now responded with a formal way to submit your
boosting complaints. This way, players can directly report malicious actors to the developers, which may result in swift punishments.
Valve isn’t the most active developer in the FPS realm. It’s part of the reason CSGO has the most long-standing bugs, but the developer has shared a way to directly report at least one of the many prevailing issues. Taking to Reddit,
DanB_Valve
has shared what to do when you come across a boosting lobby.
How to report account boosters in CSGO
Here’s what you should do if you’re queued against account boosters in CSGO.
In the email, attach a screenshot of the scoreboard
Add links to the profile of suspected players, and link to your own profile as well.
This is a more direct method compared to the in-game generic complaint option. With this method, players may report all boosters involved directly to the developer.
What is a boosting lobby in CSGO?
A boosting lobby often has one player who top frags and carries the low-rankers to a higher ELO.
In more severe cases, players hire account boosters in exchange for money, who create bot accounts and queue at the same time on less-crowded maps. So one player who paid for the service is queued against five bots, who’d either disconnect or remain AFK so the player may win games and rank up. In this case, the four random players benefit from winning, which ruins the competitive experience.
The latter case is more common than one may think and is the main cause behind Valve’s strict punishment for account boosters. So if you do manage to get your report to Valve, the odds of suspected boosters getting fair punishment are solid.
Fariha Bhatti
About Fariha Bhatti
Fariha Bhatti is a long-time gaming writer who loves competitive FPS games and slots with particularly fun themes. She got her start playing classic games developed by SNK, from legendary fighting game series The King of Fighters to challenging platform franchise Metal Slug. She now spends most of her time playing Valorant and Counter-Strike 2 while working her way through new slot releases to find her next favorite. Fariha has been published at PCGamesN, TalkEsport and ONE Esports.