Hackers in standard CSGO games are rampant from what I understand.

Serious players pay extra to queue up in a dedicated service for high tickrate servers and anti-cheats which I believe are rootkits as well.. not sure about any of this though.

It's not a solved problem for CSGO, but surprisingly the situation now, as a F2P game, is much better than what it was before F2P. It's really quite rare to run into cheaters, most people are just smurfing.

rampant years ago. It took a long time to get where it is now. There are still cheaters here and there, but that is to be expected, and relatively rare in my experience.

It is absolutely still rampant. I could count at least 5 cheater encounters in the last 30 days (blatant cheaters, btw).

They try their best to isolate cheaters with a "trust factor" system but the reality is, unless you pay an external service with their own anti-cheat software (that's probably as bad as Valorant's) you will get a high amount of cheaters.

Given they have zero transparency on the trust factor system, I could have a lower factor than you (I definitely rage too much), so because of it I see them more often. But there's no way to know if I'm in the cheater bubble, or you're in the no-cheater bubble.

I agree that it could be more transparent. I haven't faced a single suspicious player in quite some time (and similar with my friends that I talked to about this since this came up). Sorry that your experience is worse. Player "toxicity" should not be involved in this since it might be used as a proxy.

To be clear, that's not because there are no cheaters. They've just finally implemented a behavior score and shadowbanned suspected cheaters and toxic players that way, with some help from the player- trained ML mentioned upthread.

If non cheaters do not play with cheaters, mission accomplished.

It actually doesn't look like the service is always running (although the kernel driver is). I haven't played Valorant since I started my PC, so the `vgc` service for vanguard has no status (and is in "manual" mode).

edited to be more careful with my words. thanks. Some users have reported it as always running, but I haven't seen any confirmation.

I think a Riot employee stated that cheaters would try to start cheats before the anticheat starts, so the anticheat running at all times is trying to prevent this.

CS:GO has a lot more hackers than games with more intrusive anticheats like Overwatch in my experience. Only solution is an invasive anticheat, machine learning, and trust factor systems.

I have not seen anything conclusive on CSGO having more trusted players playing with cheaters than overwatch. My anecdotal evidence for both games also goes along with this.