No More Cheating Coaches in CS:GO? Valve Has a Solution
In the latest update for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Valve introduced a new feature - coaches' positions will be recorded in the round's backup files to prevent future cheating on their part.
The Counter-Strike: Global Offensive update released by Valve on May 27, brought a long-awaited fix that should make it impossible for coaches of professional eSports teams to cheat in future competitions. In the changelog we see an item, which says that from now on coaches will have their positions recorded in the round's backup files.
If you don't know what this is about, I hurry to explain. On August 26, 2020, Wisla Krakow coach Mariusz "Loord" Cybulski revealed the existence of a bug in CS:GO, which enabled trainers to appear at any point on the map as an observer. It quickly became apparent that the glitch was being exploited in e-sports tournaments to view the position of opponents and report back to teammates.
As a result of this discovery, ESL (Electronic Sports League) and DreamHack organizations did not hesitate to take the appropriate action, banning the guilty players and depriving their teams of the rewards they unethically won. Initially, only Nicolai "HUNDEN" Petersen of Team Heroic, Ricardo "dead" Sinigaglia of MiBR, and Aleksandr "MechanoGun" Bogatirjew of Hard Legion Esports were punished. Later on, however, it was revealed that there was much more cheating going on and more coaches had to be banned.
Valve quickly fixed the bug. The solution, which it introduced to the CS:GO recent patch, is simply to prevent similar issues from occurring in the future. The aforementioned bug fix means that you'll now be able to view a post-match replay of the game from the perspective of the team's coach. Watching such footage should help to quickly determine whether he did anything suspicious during the game.
It is worth noting that the investigation by ESIC (Esports Integrity Commission) is still ongoing and may result in further bans. Meanwhile, the aforementioned update for CS:GO has introduced a number of changes to Ancient, Grind, Mocha, and Cache maps. You can read more about these changes here.
