Biggest CS2 Ban Wave in History Removes Thousands of Cheaters

At the end of April, Counter-Strike 2 had a huge ban wave, affecting thousands of cheaters. After it, there was another, even bigger ban wave at the beginning of May. Since then, the amount of people getting banned hasn’t reached a new peak yet but is staying well above the normal daily amount before the first wave. These two ban waves came in just a little after CS2 had received a huge update which included “Added Overwatch system to enable match demo review by trusted partners” in its patch notes.

While there haven’t been any publicly revealed cases of people getting access to the Overwatch system, that might have been what caused these ban waves. According to famous Valve dataminer Gabe Follower, these bans are all server-sided and not client-sided, meaning that it’s not the anti-cheat software itself causing them. The amount of bans itself is unknown, as a lot of them are not publicly visible on the banned player’s profile.

Valve hasn’t commented on it at all, and other than the datamined info, nothing is known about it. A theory is that Valve could have enabled the long-rumoured AI that detects how someone plays and figures out whether or not they’re cheating based on a huge dataset gathered from the old Overwatch system used in Global Offensive.