We get to start off our day with a bit of tongue-in-cheek humor coming directly from a Counter-Strike developer, taking note that there is currently a slew of cheaters that are currently running rampant across the standard matchmaking experience, playing spoiler to roughly twenty-million players trying to enjoy a few competitive matches of CS:GO.
Patches that released two days ago were noted as breaking a few settings and mechanics within the game, although notably nothing that actually would interrupt the standard game-playing experience.
Texture streaming couldn’t be disabled, configs weren’t operating, and it was generally a bit of a rough patch for many players. The CS:GO developers were made aware of the issue, and had this to posit towards people that are still experiencing crashes.
(Any time we reship all of the code for the game, it causes lots of churn in badly written cheats that leverage well known places in our less-frequently rev'd DLLs).
— John McDonald (@basisspace) October 17, 2020
Some are still noting that some settings have still been reverted back to defaults, and Valve is continuing to investigate the causes as they dive deeper into the past patch to figure out what setting has players experiencing unideal circumstances.
The silver-lining here would be that Valve is, at the very least, tracking how many cheaters are currently swarming around the Counter-Strike casual scene to the point that they are throwing out a couple of jabs towards the bad actors seemingly intent on bringing the game down into the gutter.
Whether or not this results in direct action forthcoming isn’t necessarily as promising as many would like; the patch currently in discussion is not an update to the anti-cheat nor the adding of another layer that seeks to protect actual players from bad actors.
That being said, FPS has been reportedly dropped for many players and the weapon auto-pickup has been shifted back on, which forces players to switch weapons when they run over one that fits an empty slot during matches.
Shifts in code can result in cheat-makers struggling to figure out where the shifts occurred, which can result in a beautiful (albeit brief) respite for players as cheaters pressure their developers to catch up and allow them to play; taken another way, this morning, if not the entire day, seems to promise good matches if you’re so inclined.
This does appear to be a form of capitulation or at least acceptance, that Valve has been struggling with the sheer number of cheaters within Counter-Strike, accepting that the ongoing battle will be a struggle for the PC juggernaut that oft appears to be unwinnable.
On the back of a myriad of controversies that has a third-party organization (ESIC) stepping in to attempt to mitigate and parse the sheer quantity of data, resulting in 37 coaches being banned for cheating while some organizations take steps to protect them from the punishments.