Valve is apparently upping its crackdown on cheating in CS2, as the company has issued 12 times more VAC bans today than the average. The community, starved for any information on an updated anti-cheat, is now hopeful that Valve’s latest and greatest ban wave is slowly coming to fruition.
Several big Reddit threads have cropped up today, April 27, regarding the uptick in issued VAC bans, which are sitting at 12 times the average at the time of writing. Though not many in raw numbers (around 130 people were VAC banned today), that’s a lot, considering only around 10 or fewer get the hammer each day. This pales in comparison to the February VAC ban wave when Valve gave the boot to over 20,000 players, though the CS2 community is hopeful this uptick means something far greater is coming.
One April 27 Reddit thread already heralded the VAC ban wave, saying it is “just starting.” A player replying to the thread claimed to have received numerous messages from Leetify in the past few days alerting them that players they came across were being issued VAC bans. “Fingers crossed that Premier becomes playable again,” they wrote. Another pointed out how the raw numbers don’t seem that high because ConVars doesn’t track all CS2 accounts, implying the actual number of banned players is likely far higher.
Another thread from the same day saw fans expressing their hope that CS2 will be cleaned of cheaters soon. “Cool, maybe it’s time to revisit the game in a month or so then,” one user said.
Theories on what could have caused this uptick in VAC bans are rampant in both threads, with numerous users claiming that a free cheat has been detected. This has happened in the past, and the number of banned cheaters will depend on how widespread the software is.
Be it all as it may, it’s good to see that Valve is tackling the issue of cheaters. I have also been receiving Leetify messages informing me of my adversaries getting the Gaben treatment, which certainly makes me want to return to the game.