Cheating is a universally detested act, yet it continues to plague casual games and professional tournaments alike, with Counter-Strike players being all too familiar with it. While the CS:GO anti-cheat software did weed out countless hackers, players were mostly left unsatisfied with its performance. However, hopes for a more refined anti-cheat have resurfaced with the release of CS2, and many are eager to know if the new anti-cheat is any better than its predecessor. Let’s find out!
Does CS2 Have A Better Anti-Cheat System Than CS:GO?
Since players are still getting accustomed to CS2, there doesn’t seem to be any clear-cut consensus on whether CS2 boosts a better anti-cheat than CS:GO. However, we can form a rough opinion on the matter by looking at what we know so far regarding the new anti-cheat.
Despite not having received an official rundown of the new anti-cheat system from Valve, data-mined files have confirmed that Valve has implemented an improved anti-cheat system called VAC Live.
This leak was posted on Twitter by Aquarius, who claims that if a cheater gets detected by VAC Live during a match, the match will immediately be canceled, much like Valorant.
In fact, we’ve already seen the new anti-cheat in action in CS2’s beta phase, thanks to Aquarius. As shown in the clip below, a cheater was banned instantly after being reported. This means that Valve now takes action on cheating reports as soon as they are filed.
Valve also recently conducted a VAC Live ban wave, which saw hundreds of cheating accounts banned along with all the money they had in the form of skins. While this is undoubtedly a step in the right direction, the fact that cheaters found their way even into the beta edition of the game, which only a few people had access to, is not a promising sign.
To make matters worse for VAC Live, there have been reports of cheaters already finding ways to stay out of the anti-cheat’s line of sight. One hacker was caught in action on German YouTuber TrilluXe’s stream, who later shared the clip showing the server crashing right after he reported the cheater. The server crash prevented the anti-cheat from registering and issuing a ban to the cheater.
Moreover, numerous members of the CS community have also shared their unfortunate experiences of having their placement games ruined by blatant cheaters, with many stating that the new anti-cheat is worse than the one in CS:GO.
How Does CS2 Anti-Cheat Work?
While we know little to nothing again about the inner workings of VAC Live (thanks to Valve’s secrecy), the CS community has formulated a plausible explanation by analyzing Valve’s past history of making anti-cheats.
VAC Live is most likely powered by VACNet, an AI-based system developed for CS:GO. In simple words, it learns the in-game patterns and movements of a large number of cheating players to train a system to detect actual cheaters with high accuracy.
Many believe that Valve had been holding back on addressing CS:GO’s cheating problem because they were still feeding VACNet cheating data to improve the future VAC Live’s performance.
This explanation is also in line with Valve’s policy of avoiding intrusive anti-cheats similar to the ones used by similar games. Valorant’s Vanguard anti-cheat, for example, has been far more successful than VAC in rooting out cheaters.
Therefore, making use of an AI-powered VAC system might be Valve’s alternative to intrusive anti-cheats.
Whatever the case, we eagerly await Valve’s official unveiling of the new anti-cheat system, which (hopefully) will stop CS2 from becoming infested by cheaters.
Conclusion
While it is difficult to gauge whether the new VAC Live outperforms the old VAC anti-cheat, we are hopeful that Valve will bring the hammer down on cheaters one way or another. If you found this article informative, make sure to check out other CS guides by our team: Does CS2 Have Peeker’s Advantage? Explained. and How To Reduce Latency Using NVIDIA Reflex In CS2?