KennyS says CS2 is better on FACEIT, raising questions about Valve’s servers

He felt CS2 is more accurate on FACEIT servers than Valve's.

KennyS looks down at his monitor as he plays CS:GO.
Photo by Michal Konkol via BLAST

CS:GO legend kennyS played CS2 on FACEIT’s servers today and claimed that the game runs much better in comparison to the matches he’s had on Valve’s official servers thus far.

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Since Valve granted CS2 access to thousands of new players on Aug. 31, the community has been complaining the game feels laggy at times, that shots don’t connect the way they should especially when spraying, and that even the almighty Terrorist rifle AK-47 feels broken at the moment.

FACEIT launched servers for CS2 on Sept. 7 for players that are level nine or 10 and have over 1,000 matches played on the platform, and kennyS offered his initial thoughts. The DreamHack Open Cluj-Napoca Major winner said he could flick his AWP flicks, pistols felt “accurate,” and so did spraying with rifles.

KennyS has been quite vocal in the past few days about how he feels that CS2 is worse than CS:GO at the moment, so it’s interesting to hear him saying that the game runs better on FACEIT servers. We should, though, take his feedback with a grain of salt as he also admitted this could be just a placebo.

Valve is trying to improve the matchmaking experience for CS2 and retain the playerbase in the official servers with the new Premier mode, which added global, regional, and friend leaderboards on top of a new rating system. This poses a threat to a third-party platform like FACEIT, but not if the Valve servers aren’t as good as FACEIT’s.

We only know a little about what Valve is doing with the CS2 servers. The developer refused to implement 128-tick rate during CS:GO, which is a big upgrade to 64-tick rate, and one of the reasons a lot of players abandoned CS:GO‘s official matchmaking for FACEIT over the years.

Valve said the subtick system created for CS2 would be enough to accurately register every movement, jump, or shot, but players remain adamant that without a 128-tick rate, CS2 won’t run smoothly on the official servers.

After kennyS described his experience, a lot of fans think that FACEIT is running its CS2 servers on 128-tick rate servers, but that remains unclear for now as FACEIT declined to comment to HLTV.

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Image of Leonardo Biazzi
Leonardo Biazzi
Staff writer and CS:GO lead. Leonardo has been passionate about games since he was a kid and graduated in Journalism in 2018. Before Leonardo joined Dot Esports in 2019, he worked for Brazilian outlet Globo Esporte. Leonardo also worked for HLTV.org between 2020 and 2021 as a senior writer, until he returned to Dot Esports and became part of the staff team.