timekeeper wrote: ↑02 Jul 2025, 20:53
This has been my exact suspicion with CS2. I have 6k hours on the game and I've been on the top 1000 premier leaderboard multiple times, global in CSGO etc. I started out not knowing or caring what EOMM was until after the launch of CS2 when I started to notice how bizarre the game is. One of the things that threw me for a loop was how I kept seeing objectively bad players on my team frag out like crazy. Sometimes I see players in 25k+ premier lobbies who look like they would've been between GN2 and DMG back in CSGO, but in CS2 they're able to hit these super high, high ranks, I'm talking top 1%-2% worldwide ranks while looking very rudimentary in terms of actual gameplay. My first assumption was that they're cheating, but after 2 years of the game being out and having logged over 1200 matches in premier alone, I genuinely think something else is afoot. Sometimes there's no evidence whatsoever that they're cheating, yet the gameplay doesn't match the results. Also, sometimes I'm the one destroying players much better than me. I would regularly get matched against popular CS streamers who are worlds above me in terms of skill, yet sometimes I would destroy them, and sometimes they would destroy me, there's no consistency at all. Maybe this all boils down to bad netcode, though. In halo 3 there was always one player who got immediate hitreg while others had normal ping-based hitreg, maybe something similar occurs in CS2 with the new subtick system. However, if look at valve as a company and see how much they care about 'data' and the fact that they hire experimental psychologists, it starts to make sense to consider why they would add engagement mechanisms to the game.
Imagine that you have a competitive 5v5 shooter like CSGO and you want to make a successor game. But other 5v5 shooters exist which already have massive popularity and are more 'new player' friendly. CS is notorious for having a playerbase of old heads and tryhards with 10+ years and thousands of hours on the game. Are you really going to release CS2 and allow that existing playerbase to decimate new players and make them quit for valorant or other games? Of course not, you're going to give them some kind of advantage, at least sometimes. It's part of the dopamine rollercoaster they've implemented. On the one hand, bad players get to think they're good for a certain number of matches so that they keep playing, and on the other hand good players get destroyed by people worse than them which hurts their pride and makes them keep playing.
Furthermore I've noticed this isn't limited to matchmaking per se, I've seen people getting weird damage values for wallbangs, seeing someone on their screen but not on the match demo (this happened for me yesterday and I got accused of cheating), teammates saying they shot 4 bullets but from my spectator view they didn't even shoot one. The severity of which seem to fluctuate from round to round, maybe even during rounds, and vary from the plausible to the outright comical. Yesterday I was watching JoJo and he awped someone in the torso, blood splattered out of him but the guy didn't die (and damage prediction was disabled) and other weird stuff like this. Which makes me think the game is actually tweaking the values (like interp ratio) dynamically throughout the duration of the match. I learned this type of rigging is often called DDA or dynamic difficult adjustment. This would also explain why valve removed many of the networking related console commands, specifically cl_interp and interp_ratio. A decision which almost everyone hated. Well I think it's because they don't want us to see these values anymore.
Now the real kicker is how cheaters and bots play into this whole scheme. Cheaters, particularly closet cheaters, simultaneously provide a convenient way to enforce certain player experiences while also providing a convenient smokescreen or scapegoat for the whole thing. If everybody thinks the game is full of cheaters, then nobody will suspect the engagement mechanisms themselves. All the blame goes on cheaters.
Anyway, these ideas shouldn't be taken in isolation but rather within the context of valve's other shady activities such as inflating or straight up lying about the player counts, backhandedly promoting underaged gambling using their ingame economy or at least being willfully ignorant of it, constantly dancing around the law etc. Hell, the CS2 devs don't even talk to the community, it's completely silent and we're just left out to dry. The way valve runs their games is less like a game company and more like some kind of secretive government agency, and I don't think it's just to deprive cheat devs of information. The valorant devs regularly talk to the community about their efforts in countering cheaters. Why doesn't valve? If you sit on that question for a while it seems increasingly likely that it's because
cheaters serve the company's primary interests, cheaters enhance the effectiveness of these engagement mechanisms and ultimately make the game more sticky and addictive.
I've been calling Valve out for this for years, way back in CSGO. In CSGO it wasn't as rife for everyone, but you would get a load of people, always experienced players based on their hours played, where suddenly the muscle memory they had had ingrained for years would stop working. Shot nots registering or seemingly going around enemies, recoil seeming more intense along with screen shake, not being able to react to enemies who are killing you with 4 shots even though they were only on your screen for 100ms, or instantly head shotting you while moving while anyone spectating you says you just looked at him for ages, etc. Then getting mechanically normal games for a brief period before going back to playing like you've never played the game before.
Personally when I started playing CSGO I could perform better and way more consistently than I can now, and shooting was incredibly consistent compared to what it is now. Now it seems completely bias to hitting or missing no matter how well you perform. Even against the completely obvious new player who you somehow come across at 20k+ mmr. Watch the demo and they are running around shooting, taking ages to respond to you, no crosshair placement, don't counter strafe, and can't aim, yet their bullets all seem to find that instant first shot headshot given to them by lucky spread, even at long range with multiple spam pistol dinks in a row, smg dinks in a row, deagle spam, and run and gun rifle headshots. I have to tap central to the head at about 20 meters up to 10 times to get a bullet that doesn't go around the enemies head from spread. Then for brief periods here and there my first shot will always land on the head.
Something I've discovered recently is that the spread appears completely bias. In one match the game can feel beautiful and you can tap heads at all ranges with great statistical chance of hitting. It's like now you get a small chance to miss rather than a small chance to hit. Valve recently made your view align to how CSGO was while shooting, and in general, shooting now feels great, at least from a visual stand point. But they said in the patch notes the bullet trajectories remain the same as they always have been in CS2.
It's the trajectories of bullets (spread) that I find extremely fishy. When you get a good game you can visually see you are getting a lot more central distribution from your bullets, then in a bad game you can see the distribution seems to be favouring more the extremities of your inaccuracy circle making your bullets go more around the enemy and few to the centre.
Before they did the visual update to shooting to look like CSGOs, people complained a lot about too much camera shake even though there wasn't any more camera shake. Your view has always kicked towards the direction of your bullet spread. I believe the reason people complained about more camera shake (and it wasn't consistent by any means because in matches you felt you were getting good "organic" shooting mechanics and were able to consistently spray that perception of extra camera shake didn't really exist or was extremely muted) is because when the spread appears to be being bias toward the extremities of inaccuracy you're getting larger jumps between greater distances for shots which creates a greater distance that your view and view model need to travel for each shots on average. When the game appears to be giving you proper organic spread, e.g. in a good game, and you get more shots with central distribution, that's on average less distance to travel for each shot because you have the central distribution shots at least halfling the distance between each shot. This gives the impression of less screen shake.
I suspect the game server is sending a spread modifier to the client to adjust the spread as it likes which would most likely be applied under the lag compensation layer, not in client game mechanics code because that would expose it completely. This way you can't prove anything and have to trust that the server is sending a truthful value, and if it's not, assume its just lag comp doing it's thing. The server could stream a small ambiguous value every tick along with a bit to say whether or not it should be used on the next shot, and that value could be applied on the next shot. So this could be done pretty much invisibly on every single tick. A pre-emptive modifier with a switch to say whether or not it is to be used for the next shot.
I also highly suspect real time latency adjustments creating higher opponent peekers advantage and predicting movement ahead to give you less peekers advantage. Players cannot physically gain extra peekers advantage from having higher latency or see you faster than their latency allows them to. You should still see the actions he made in order and over the same timeline up to where he starts shooting, you just unknowingly see them around half his and your ping later. Someone with 200ms ping might come out late on your screen, but that gets balanced out because their shots are also delayed to the server. How often I peek a high ping player but magically get instantly headshot the moment my crosshair centrally meets the edge of cover makes no physical sense. He should not be able to see me yet on his screen, I have to be accelerated on the server for him to see me at this point. With his ping of say 200, and ticktiming around 45ms, he should be 145ms behind, so how can he possibly shoot me in the head when he would only just be seeing half of my head if he was playing in the same instance as on my computer, not even lan that is 0ms but still has ticktiming.
Then I have noticed, when you are holding the correct angle and all you need to do is click, with distance from cover and right eye advantage, if someone peeks there they come out so quickly its impossible to respond to. But if they peek from another angle far enough away from the one you're holding, they peek like a human being, not a benny hill character. They take a lot longer to respond. All this takes is a large bubble around players on the server side and when a view angle intersects that bubble, delay their movement info by whatever milliseconds your algorithm wants to push.
There is so much evidence for manipulation in this game.
Valve also have patents for this kind of stuff just like Activision and EA. When there are so many symptoms that don't make mechanical sense and actually align to what these kind of mechanics suggest, mechanics are bipolar and seem to statistically change in waves and not from encounter to encounter, haven't been called out as bugs by the company or fixed for years, the company basically becomes so introvert that they have zero communication with their players, wont even acknowledge such accusations or even clarify by saying something like" no we don't do anything like that", and have a history of utilizing unethical methods to make money, then their game NEEDS to be questioned on its integrity.
Look at COD. Activision passes most of these criteria. While they do communicate some, they mostly stay quiet when it comes to accusations of the game being rigged. They did acknowledge it once with a huge response, but they didn't even have to lie about anything. The community always talks about this in the wrong context, in the context of SBMM and EOMM. SBMM and EOMM is just the matchmaking that occurs before the game is actually played, so of course these accusations cant exist in the context of those two systems. Activision didn't correct the contextual error of the community, they leveraged it and responded in that incorrect community created context and never in a game wide context or in any context of gameplay. So technically they couldn't lie.
) in that so many young Kids believe and where at same time Developers advertising and promoting there Online Games always as best of the best "real pure skill based" just after Release and out of Beta... 
