In December 2018, Valve released their very own Battle Royale mode called Danger Zone for CS: GO. At the same time, they also made the game free-to-play and that didn’t sit too well with many members of the community. Sure, it is great to get in new players, but fans voiced their concerns about a potential increase of hackers. Now, it seems that fans were correct as the CS: GO bans have reached an all-time high.
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I have to admit, I didn’t think there would be such a massive increase of cheaters ruining matches, especially since there are safeguards in place, such as the Prime Status. However, just looking at the stats from SteamDB, it is clear that there has been a massive influx of hackers that have received VAC bans. Valve swung its mighty banhammer in December 2018 and the CS: GO bans for the month was a whopping 622,000 according to SteamDB.
To put this number into perspective, CS: GO bans per month have never been over 200,000 and in November 2018, there were 100,000 VAC bans. That’s a giant leap in bans and the increase happened just as CS: GO went free-to-play, so that’s really no coincidence.
It is, however, great to see that so many CS: GO bans are happening and it will be very interesting to see if this continues in January 2019. Hopefully, Valve will put even more measures in place to safeguard players from cheaters this year. Let’s face it, Valve opened the floodgates and now they have to clean up the game again.
What do you think about the recent, massive increase of CS: GO bans and have you had any troubles with cheaters since the game went free-to-play? Let us know in the comment section below.
