The chink in the armor for the counter strike franchise ever since its first title has been cheating. Be it competitive matchmaking or in pro leagues, like the one odd instance when Optic India’s player Nikhil “Forsaken” Kumawat was caught cheating at a LAN in ZOWIE eXTREMSLAND 2018 Main Event in Shanghai – such instances have deeply ruined the experience for players in CS2.

This article aims to shed light on just that, now on how to cheat but a counteractive measure initiated by CS2, which they call “overwatch” and how effective it is.

What is Overwatch in CS2?

No, it is not a CS2 and Overwatch 2 game collab but a system to keep cheaters in check within CS2. Most recently, in April a significant update was pushed out, post which data miners found lines of code that seemed to have introduced Overwatch and some other enhancements to the VACNet anti-cheat system. What does this mean? Well, the patch notes indicate that Overwatch – a feature where community veterans review gameplay to decide if a player is cheating or not – will only be granted to trusted partners of members who have been evaluated. Though the specifics of this “evaluation” remain unclear, one thing is for certain.

CS2 Overwatch and the surge of bans

Over a week passed and no one had gotten access to overwatch, but very soon a large wave of VAC bans occurred and overwatch’s global block was shown to all of those who got banned – meaning this feature was being executed by Valve internally before launching to the community. This is an awkward situation because earlier, a player had to be reported by someone else to get added to the overwatch pool – where the gameplay if found suspicious could have itself declared as a cheating instance which would later slam the hammer on the cheaters, but now the evidence seems to suggest that the bans were being pushed out in real-time. 

Gabe Follower’s investigation even revealed that the bans were pushed out to accounts that had very blatant cheats like aim-botting, bunnyhop abuse, firing rate abusers, and some other scripts. Certain types of “hidden” cheaters were not banned as wall hacks and radar hacks don’t really have blatant giveaways. 

But is Overwatch in CS2 “really” effective?

Do not worry, it doesn’t seem to be a pseudo entity because the initial waves of bans seem to be only the test phase, once the developers confirmed there were no false positives, the next ban wave was even more aggressive. Even though only premier mode players were banned, anecdotal evidence suggests that accounts that were banned had cheating instances that were in games even before the overwatch update, meaning they could either be or not be directly linked to the update. 

Here is how to access Overwatch in CS2

As of the time being, Overwatch in CS2 isn’t available to all users and the requirements for someone to be in the program seem to be in the nascent stage. However, if history dictates the future the requirements should look somewhat like this:

• Minimum of 300 hours played in Counter-Strike
• At least 150 wins in competitive mode
• Rank no lower than Gold Nova I
• Minimal violations
• No VAC bans

While the CS2 devs gather data to train what possibly could be a machine learning model with all kinds of gameplay, as soon as the model has enough data to gauge cheating instances from one-off lucky shots – it is game over for all the hackers.

In the meantime, keep grinding, refine your gameplay, and follow this space here at Talkesport to improve your rank in CS2!