What's a 'proper' anticheat? Do you mean one of the kernel-level rootkit ones? No thanks. Thankfully there is more backlash recently against client-side anticheat, which is a fundamentally flawed idea anyway, eg https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2020-05-21-doom-eternal-r...

I think they don't care because they offer a subscription mode that is 99% cheater free in my experience. I got promoted to prime mode after playing the game so much (I don't pay for it). Cheaters are not willing to burn the prime fee ban after ban so stay on the free servers.

I've been playing CS:GO for 5 years, totalling close to 3,000 hours. I can tell you cheaters are still a huge problem, especially at high rank.

Also, the matchmaking system is utterly broken. It's insane that half of my games are plagued with at least one low-level steam account with a player that's totalling 400 hours and dropping 35 kills in a game. Also, being LE and queuing up against MGE that instantly headshot you while jump shooting feels sad.

Considering CS:GO has 500,000 to 800,000 concurrent players at any time, I find it difficult for the system to create such unbalanced and flawed games.

If you're interested, Valve uses deep learning model called VACnet to "watch" every player on their servers[0][1]. If any dodgy gameplay is detected, it gets submitted into a moderation queue called Overwatch[2], which is basically delegates the decisions to ban cheaters community. It's really cool how they've gamified this.

[0]https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/vacnet-csgo/ [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnRgW54EWwA [2]https://blog.counter-strike.net/index.php/overwatch/

It goes beyond that. Overwatch is now mainly use to train the machine learning algorithm and confirm cases. The whole VACnet thing is automated and cheaters are now either automatically banned or put in a separate queue so they play against each other until the system (or a human) confirms they are indeed cheating.

Same goes for griefers and ragers, they're assigned a low "Trust Factor" so that they play together, leaving other more serious players play together.

> Considering CS:GO has 500,000 to 800,000 concurrent players at any time, I find it difficult for the system to create such unbalanced and flawed games.

Do you know of any other game at that magnitude that doesn't have cheaters? I'll wait.

I'm not just talking about cheaters. I'm talking about the system not being able to find 10 players of a similar rank to begin a game.

> Also, being LE and queuing up against MGE

Could you supply a glossary? I'm trying to follow this discussion.

Oh sorry. CS:GO is divided in 18 ranks, from Silver 1 to Global Elite. The rank distribution follows a bell curve, and comes a point where it's really hard to go from one rank to the next. LE is Legendary Eagle, the 15th rank. MGE is Master Gardian Elite, the 13th rank.

Matchmaking is supposed to be done in a way where you should not meet people that are way lower or way higher than your rank. But since it's a team game, it takes into account the average level of the team. I won't go into too much detail but it's definitely not uncommon to meet teams that are a complete mix of random ranks and for some reason a guy that's supposed to be much weaker than the rest top frags everyone.

It's a really complex system, as a few months ago Valve introduced the Trust Factor, an index which, through machine learning, supposedly puts cheaters in an alternate queue. It takes into account multiple elements, such as your account age, how much you've spent, how much you play, with how many people, how many people report you, etc, etc. Sometimes it works wonderfully. I get to play with people that are nice, have great game sense and communication, and I'm having a blast. Then I get queued with ragers, team killers, it's super annoying.

Just last night I played two games. The first one was really good, then we got absolutely obliterated by a guy who had the most perfect angles, timings, speed, you name it. I checked his steam account and saw he was level 4 (you can level your steam account through using the service) and had 450 hours in the game.

Now I'm not saying that I'm the best there is. But I've clocked close to 3,000 hours, and I've played on the three major platforms (Valve MM, Faceit and ESEA) for years. I have a 11 years steam account with 250 games on it, and in 5 years I must have had maybe 3 penalties caused by my internet crashing. So I'm confident my Trust Factor is good. Then again I get queued with and against cheaters constantly. It's just super annoying, especially considering the fact that a game typically lasts 45 minutes to an hour, and with a 3 years old at home, I can crank one, maybe two games a day at most.

Thanks! It was the acronyms that lost me but the rest is super interesting. I'm an occasional gamer but of a very different kind (single-player games only. play for the world building and the art direction mainly. only finish about half the games I start) and competitive gaming is just another world to me.

They are CSGO ranks. Use Google to find the full list.

Prime is not 99% cheater free at all. I'd say you'll find a cheater in one out of three matches at least. And one cheater is enough to ruin a match, which lasts around and hour. It's an appalling experience.

That is honestly my experience. I hardly ever find players in my games that are appearing to cheat. Maybe it's location dependent?