CS2 players claim Premier is already full of cheaters, will be ‘dead’ before launch

CS2 players are feeling like they’ve faced more cheaters than ever before over the past few weeks and are concerned this will be the standard CS2 experience.

Cheating was arguably CS:GO’s worst problem throughout its 11-year life span as Valve couldn’t keep cheaters out of the official servers no matter how many ban waves were issued, and players were hoping that the developer would come up with a better anti-cheat system for CS2. But that hope is already going down the drain as players are seeing more cheaters in Premier, CS2’s cool new competitive mode.

The spike in suspicious players or blatant cheaters couldn’t come at a worse time as it seems we’re getting close to the CS2 release and players are worried CS2 will be a “dead game” before launch.

“For me, there has been a huge uptick in the past couple of weeks, my experience went from largely flawless, well losing games to players way way better than me, to excruciating,” one CS2 player wrote on Reddit. “True, feels like in every game at 8k elo, hopefully VAC Live turns out a success,” another player agreed.

The VAC Live feature mentioned above is a powerful anti-cheat tool that Valve developed for CS2, capable of banning blatant cheaters mere seconds after they get reported and also canceling matches that were ruined by a cheater. The issue is that VAC Live has seemingly been disabled for weeks now in the CS2 beta as even blatant cheaters are not getting banned.

Although it remains unclear why VAC Live isn’t working, some players think Valve is letting the players cheat to collect enough data to sort of train VAC Live and start banning cheaters in waves like the devs did in CS:GO.

For a lot of players, the way that Valve deals with cheaters will make or break CS2. The developer has done an amazing job with Premier mode, but that will be worthless if players feel like they’re facing cheaters all the time.

If Valve doesn’t come up with a better anti-cheat for CS2, players will likely install third-party matchmaking apps like FACEIT as they did throughout CS:GO’s history and avoid playing the official matchmaking as much as possible.