Report botting is a serious problem in online competitive games, especially in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Although Valve claimed it had solved the problem of en masse reporting two years ago, it seems some users were able to bypass the fix – but not anymore.
As reported by our sister site PCGamesN, John McDonald tweeted “RIP report botting” earlier today, suggesting the problem had been solved once again. After being questioned if the solution would hold true for years to come, the Valve developer says it’s “impossible to say ‘This will be fixed forever'” since it’s “an ever-escalating battle” but the team is working on keeping report botters at bay for good.
Report botters were a big problem years ago when many players found they were banned via CS:GO’s self-regulating Overwatch system as a result of being mass reported. The problem escalated so much so that in 2018, McDonald tackled the problem himself, telling players on the Global Offensive subreddit that the bots no longer work.
“To clarify a bit there was a time where report bots did work,” the developer says in his 2018 post. “They were causing a significant decrease in conviction rates for OW [Overwatch], so I did the work to prevent them from working any more. This work does not indicate failure to the report bot. I don’t believe there is a feasible workaround for report bots to suddenly work, and last I checked (about a month ago), I didn’t see any instances of cases in OW coming in from anything that looked like a report bot or report bot network.”
RIP report botting.
— John McDonald (@basisspace) August 19, 2020
The renewed problems with report botting were highlighted by YouTuber ‘Sparkles’ earlier this week after he interviewed a cheater known only as ‘Kessi’. According to Kessi, cheaters had worked out a way to whitelist in-game names in CS:GO in order to circumvent Overwatch bans. Kessi claims this method can also be used for report botting to hit legitimate players with bans.
Well, no longer it seems.