Mark your calenders, as today is one of the few days where matchmaking inside of Valve‘s Counter-Strike: Global Offensive should be far less cancerous than it typically is; at least for a short while.
A monumental VAC ban wave just hit yesterday for Counter-Strike that had a slew of players unceremoniously removed from the game during the ban, regardless of the size of their inventory; an aspect that has prevented some cheaters from being Overwatch banned in the past.
Cheaters with $17,000 worth of inventory now can’t reach that inventory, and it feels so fantastic to watch; a number of high-level FaceIt accounts were also struck from the ban of Counter-Strike; users can open a new profile, of course, and begin their antics again in earnest.
It should take a decent chunk of time until they once again reach a high level of trust, regardless of whether they’re using the largely ineffective trusted mode launch or not.
The timer officially began yesterday, but the wave has continued today as Valve methodically strikes accounts that have opted to use scripts and various unscrupulous means to gain an unfair advantage.
The ban wave yesterday resulted in a total of 9,646 VAC bans, as reported by ConVars; thus far today, that ban wave has continued to roll to a lesser extent with 2,300 bans offered thus far at the beginning of the workday for Valve.
The current statistics for VAC ban speed offers a modicum of relief for some: 59.96% of VAC bans strike within one day of receiving a game ban; not that this doesn’t mean that within moments of a bad actor turning on a cheat receives the ban, but more so that once the account has been flagged it takes less than a day for the vast majority.
Also worth noting is that these statistics only reflect the number of accounts that were successfully caught by the VAC system; an automated system that runs checking for scripts and hooks; users that use cheats that have not yet been discovered will obviously not have been removed by the process.
This does promise, however, that you’re going to encounter far fewer cheaters within the next few weeks that you would have otherwise; while some cheaters will eagerly redownload hacks to dive back into spoiling the competitive gameplay for everyone, the cheats that have been used in the past shouldn’t function, and others that have lost expensive inventories will likely be frustrated by the ban in its entirety.
Now the only thing that you’ll need to worry about (for the time being) is toxicity.