Perfect World — Perfect Time to trot out the Cheating narrative again!

Perfect World announced the Full CS2 Major Schedule for Shanghai. From Open Qualifiers to the Major itself. You may have noticed that something was missing. Europe and North America do not have Open qualifiers and the top 48 teams in Europe and Top 24 teams in America have a shot at winning the major.

This has caused a major stir because Valve’s previous vision in 2014 according to Pita was about making sure that 5 random dudes could always have a shot at winning a major.

Pita is quite credible and I value his opinion highly. He is incredibly honest. The Major was seen akin to a FA Cup I suppose where every team from every division can enter. However, this vision has clearly changed over time.

However, the cheating narratives are literally insane. You can have your qualms over the strengths and weaknesses of having a closed invite event. It depends on the intention of Valve and at the moment, I can only speculate that Valve want to make the Major, the main event like TI.

Let’s jump into the loudest narrative, the Valve can’t stop cheating Narrative.

The Valve can’t stop Cheating Narrative

This Narrative is annoyingly loud because people are still caught up in the “everyone is a cheater” narrative. It started off with this tweet by Loba.

This is just a tip of the iceberg of this false narrative. This crap has been spread far and wide. With a lot of these people, news is all about being first instead of being accurate. Whatever gets the clicks is pushed to be in the forefront.

If you wanted to take a look at what Valve release in August 2023, you might get an indication on what they were trying to address. They were trying to address franchised leagues where certain organisations had franchise spots that they bought into.

Despite the stability that this sort of franchise system brings, the major weakness is that it could lead to possible stagnation of the quality of play. This comes from two things — not having performance as the main factor and teams becoming complaecent and not managing their teams.

Some may point at the Lourve Agreement at addressing this weakness but when did they ever enforce it? They really should have enforced it against Evil Geniuses who literally flaunted their inability to manage anything?

Enforcement is a key part of any agreement and if you don’t enforce it, people are unlikely to follow it. They’ll always point out to that person that you didn’t enforce it against when you try to enforce against them. And they didn’t, EG only exited the agreement by selling their spot to Cloud 9.

That is what Valve meant by their level playing field experience is that if you close off your tournament, you can only do it by Valve’s rankings.

If you don’t do it by Valve’s rankings, you must have Open Qualifiers.

If you pay any of your teams attending your event, you must disclose it so people don’t do any indirect payments to have teams participate in their leagues.

It doesn’t say since we can’t manage the cheating issue therefore we have banned open qualifiers. As kassad tweeted, “Doesn’t Valve realise that cheaters are playing at all the events that gets them points on their rankings?”.

And that is exactly the point, it was never to resolve the cheating issue in the first place.

But we have a lack of faith in VAC…

Some people can go from saying that there is no cheating due to the kernel level anti-cheat to OMG THEY ARE USING RADAR! I’ve rarely found a middle ground in this entire cheating discussion.

No tournament that runs the Major will use VAC by itself. No tournament admin especially for the major will allow gear to be used without them being checked and scanned. I keep seeing this narrative that Tournament Admins do not check gear. They always do.

We have Faceit’s Anti-Cheat which is primarily used for every single qualifier on Faceit. We have Akros (lol) which is used for every qualifier that isn’t Faceit. We have two Kernel Level Anti-cheats that exist already. Why are we blowing hot air into needing a kernel level Anti-cheat like Vanguard when we already have two?

If you say but what about radar hack? Well, what will a kernel level anti-cheat do about it if people are already getting around it with Radar Hack?

If the anti-cheat system (both Akros and Faceit) being a failure for Open Qualifiers is true, wouldn’t all open qualifiers be done away with for the Major? If that was the case then why does the Asia RMR have an open qualifier?

Remember, the two of the biggest cheating allegations came from there which was against Mungyu (watch the series) and Troublemakers.

If that was the case then Asia should be completely closed off too, right? Oh wait, it isn’t. There are open qualifiers so clearly the cheating narrative isn’t the case. Or does cheats magically disappear when you leave North America and Europe?

All I ask is please think about what you are saying before you tweet it out. But then again, I guess it wouldn’t be twitter if that was the case. Ha!

One thing that everyone including myself can work on has been what Styko said in an interview from HLTV , “Instead of writing that tweet, you need to load up the server and work.”