It is no doubt that Counter-Strike 2 has been embroiled in turmoil in the past few months, particularly in the official matchmaking department. To prove this point, a CS2 player shared a video meant to showcase the current state of the game’s Premier mode—characterized by Macarena singing and spinbotters.
The video from an April 19 thread, titled “This is the state of 20,000+ Premier lobbies,” the video shows a blatant cheater bunnyhopping around Inferno, shooting a USP-S as if it were an automatic rifle, and cheerfully singing the popular song Macarena. Cheating has been a rampant issue in official CS2 matches, and the game’s subreddit is overflowing with demos and claims that Premier is nigh unplayable, especially at 20,000 Elo or above.
Users replying to the thread are generally upset and angry with both Valve and the cheaters, though there are some who see such blatant and obnoxious hackers as somewhat beneficial. “Cheaters are the most braindead people humanity can muster,” one player wrote. Another believes that cheaters such as the one in the video are “doing [the players] a solid,” and that “there’s no way Valve won’t react to this.” The latter claim would go hand-in-hand with some players’ hope that Valve is actively collecting data by allowing spinbotters and other cheaters to flourish, thus strengthening their machine-learning VAC Live anti-cheat solution.
Aside from cheaters using third-party software to enhance their performance, there have also been reports of massive bot usage in the game’s casual game modes. Deathmatch and Arms Race appear to be the most affected, and some on the CS2 and CSGO subreddits claim to have been kicked by bots invading casual servers.
Steam Charts points to a healthy CS2 player count, with nearly 1.6 million players clocking in during peak hours. How many of these are bots? There’s no telling, but it seems Counter-Strike 2 is doing fine, even with all the trouble. Valve has kept silent on all these claims, and drew some backlash from the community with recent small-scale updates, but that was bound to happen around the time of the big company trip to Hawaii.
