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Less than a few weeks after Counter Strike 2’s launch, the community are already worried that cheaters will ruin the game.
Counter Strike 2’s launch has seen a fair few issues. The bugs alone have been nearly game-breaking, with some pros claiming that the game is not e-sports ready despite the first major tournament in mere days. Despite a recent ban wave that saw skins worth thousands locked away – the CS2 community has begun to lose faith in the game, with cheaters putting up a significant road-block on the game’s chances.
The community haven’t had great things to say about hackers which have “completely killed my appetite for CS2 matchmaking,” says one Redditor, while another has said “the worst thing Valve did was implement a ranking system without adding a more invasive anti-cheat.”
CS:GO was a game filled with cheaters – if not notorious for its hackers. It’s interesting that there’s a general consensus that Counter Strike 2’s hacking issue is also rooted in the ranking system. Late on in Global Offensive’s life-cycle, the Premier mode was implemented which effectively overwrote the competitive scene’s meta. Now, it’s the main competitive queue, and this has extended over to CS2.
“It feels somehow to favour cheaters to do more blatant hacks and reach top 10 or top 50,” says another concerned player who continues that “it’s like go HvH [hacker vs hacker] in Premier if u wanna reach top.” Clearly, the sentiment is that the new ranking system not only favours hackers, but makes it more encouraged for them to hack in order to get onto the leaderboards they want.
Before, with the ‘Global Elite’ ranking system, you could load up a match and you wouldn’t see any of the rank identifiers that cheaters are looking to snag. Now, especially with Premier, the top 1000 leaderboard is visible for all to see, and you even see position and score before games begin. This gives even more incentive for hackers to cheat in order to pump their ego that little bit further.
A mix of issues are all working together to form this narrative that CS2 is going to struggle – hackers, bugs, server issues and more. It’s going to be interesting to see how the game bounces back. CS:GO itself had a similar launch, so it’s not entirely out of the question.
