I completely get Cooper’s point, and I agree with him. But with CS we also need to be honest about what the game has become over the last few years. Counter-Strike is a cheater game now. It’s a farming game. It’s an HvH game. It’s a cheat-testing game. It’s a boosting game. It’s a matchfixing game. There are people who genuinely have more fun loading into CS to test cheats against other cheaters than legit players have trying to climb Premier. At this point, playing Valve MM without at least some kind of radar/wall information almost feels like loading into a round without buying a rifle. That’s how normalised cheating has become. So, at least for me, the surprising thing in 2026 is no longer that someone wakes up and decides to cheat in Counter-Strike. The surprising thing is that someone wakes up and decides to play it legitimately. Because if you’re a normal player, what exactly is the incentive? If you’re not a streamer, content creator, pro, or someone making money from the game, why would you willingly queue Premier and spend your time and mental energy dealing with this? Most legitimate players either leave the game or move to FACEIT. Valve matchmaking has become something many people only touch because they need to show how bad it is. Even when Valve adds a genuinely fun new mode the same problem follows it. And then there’s the wider ecosystem around the game: farming, boosting, matchfixing and people trying to make money through every gap that has been left open for years. So yes, cheating being an industry is insane. But in Counter-Strike, the bigger failure is that cheating has been allowed to become part of the culture around the game itself. The people who love CS should not be the ones feeling like there is no place left for them in Counter-Strike.

⚠️ℹ️ People are celebrating the new VACnet Labeling Portal and I’m struggling to see what exactly we’re supposed to celebrate. VACNet has been in development for almost a decade. For years, official CS servers have effectively been the environment where Valve deploys, evaluates and iterates on its behavioral anti-cheat, with legit players dealing with the consequences when those iterations go wrong. False positives, broken heuristics, rollbacks, months of terrible detection and an official matchmaking environment that has repeatedly paid the price while VACnet “learns”. And now, after all these years, Valve needs the community again. Not only do players continue providing the gameplay data VACnet learns from, “selected” players are now being asked to sit outside the game and manually label suspicious gameplay to help train future models. Once again, Valve isn’t giving the community more, they’re asking the community to give Valve more. Maps? Community. Skins? Community. Years of VACNet training data? The players. Now manual anti-cheat labeling too. For a multibillion-dollar company running one of the biggest competitive FPS games in the world, watching this get celebrated as some revolutionary anti-cheat development is honestly bizarre. And after almost a decade, we’re still here teaching VACNet what a cheater looks like.