Valve has taken action against bot farmers in Counter-Strike 2 and has banned nearly a million accounts in a single day.
What was Valve’s approach? In Counter-Strike 2, thousands of accounts were banned. Players first noticed a significant increase in VAC & Game Bans on the csstats website on March 26.
While on most days only 400-600 accounts are banned, nearly 18,000 were banned on Thursday. The website also shows that on no other day in the past month were there more than 4,000 bans – however, only accounts that play Competitive or Premier are shown.
When the community became aware of the bans, a user shared a screenshot of the csstats website on Reddit. A few hours later, an employee from Valve responded to the post, explaining that they had banned farming bots. The developer stated:
“Yesterday, we banned 960,000 accounts of farming bots. This was the result of extensive investigations supported by user reports.”
The developer also pointed out that you can report bots via email. Please write “Farming Bot Report” in the subject line and send your report to:
Currently, it seems that this was the largest ban wave in a single day in the history of Counter-Strike 2. Recently, a ban wave from 2017 was considered the record holder, which banned around 40,000 accounts in one day (via DotEsports)
What is bot farming? In Counter-Strike 2, there are users who use bots to farm cases, for example. To do this, multiple accounts per person are used, which “play” automatically to earn weekly rewards. The “farmers” hope to achieve financial profit through the various drops from the bots.
Bot farming is considered one of the biggest problems in Counter-Strike 2 by many players. The 960,000 banned accounts demonstrate how large the number of bots used is. Depending on the server region, players report that they often play against bots – especially in Deathmatch.
Other games are also plagued by bot farms. For example, a company reportedly operated around 20,000 computers simultaneously with 50 employees and farmed gold in World of Warcraft. The bot farm controlled 160,000 characters simultaneously in WoW and was then stopped by the police.
