Ninjas in Pyjamas’ Counter-Strike pro Kristian “k0nfig” Wienecke said on Oct. 12 that Premier is plagued with cheaters and it’s taking away from his desire to play the new game mode designed for CS2, sharing a sentiment that many people in the community can agree with.
Though I’ve certainly not played CS2 as much as k0nfig, I’ve come across two highly suspicious players in two out of the 10 Premier games I’ve played. They fit the same description that k0nfig provided: new accounts with low hours of CS:GO/CS2 played, but they always knew where my team was heading and nailed all the timings with perfection.
They weren’t blatant spinbotters, but I could tell they were most likely using wallhacks as their aim and movement wasn’t nearly as good as their godlike game sense.
Premier is the mode everybody who played CS:GO over the past 11 years wanted. It’s a competitive mode with a pick-and-ban phase in which your rating is visible and you know exactly how much Elo you’ll win or lose depending on the result. It’s like playing FACEIT, for example, but the difference is that FACEIT is historically much better than Valve at keeping cheaters away from the servers.
CS2 was off to a great start but players have been facing more cheaters in Premier matches since the game’s global release and are already considering a move to third-party platforms such as FACEIT. Recently, Josiah “JoJo” Jimenez—one of the highest-rated Premier players in the world—said if Valve doesn’t start giving back Elo when cheaters get banned, the Premier grind “might be dead.”
Though VAC Live, a new anti-cheating tool designed for CS2, is currently working, it isn’t good enough to detect all types of cheats while the match is still ongoing. It also seems like Valve is battling cheaters in the same vein it did in CS:GO, which is banning hackers in waves after a popular cheating software gets detected.
Should Valve not go for a more intrusive anti-cheat that is more capable of keeping cheaters away from Premier and other official modes, I could see people stop playing on the official servers and once again move to third-party platforms, killing all the purpose of Premier.
