The game has some serious issues regarding cheating and fair play. Anti-cheat is still very poor in 2025, as cheaters are flocking the higher end premier matches with _blatant_ cheats without any repercussions. Somehow people with thousands of hours and thousands of matches of legit play get matched against new accounts or obviously older but bought accounts with very few hours played on the game that then boost other accounts by cheating without even trying to hide it.

Removal of dangerzone and other gamemodes to focus on the competitive side has made the game empty and miserable due to the above mentioned failure of the very basic aspects and core functionalities of the ranked game regarding fair play.
Another thing is the clear lack of decent servers, the "improved" tick system has not provided the same experience the 128-tick used to and the game still suffers from "rubberbanding" above 40 ping. Casual servers are often incredibly laggy and obviously have been a target of cost cutting.

What disappoints me the most is that Valve has no clear strategy to improve the game in long term and is seemingly only using it to pump cash. No communication on Valve side on anything and totally sidelining the pro scene and the cs communities.
The incompetence around the whole game and managing the community is just astounding and the whole development and publishing team is being run like a middle school student project.
The amount of potential wasted here makes me regret some of the hours I've spent on this game and I cannot recommend it to be picked up by new players at it's current state nor in any future the CS2 developer or management team has publicly visioned for it, since they have not visioned anything.

The game has some serious issues regarding cheating and fair play. Anti-cheat is still very poor in 2025, as cheaters are flocking the higher end premier matches with _blatant_ cheats without any repercussions. Somehow people with thousands of hours and thousands of matches of legit play get matched against new accounts or obviously older but bought accounts with very few hours played on the game that then boost other accounts by cheating without even trying to hide it. Removal of dangerzone and other gamemodes to focus on the competitive side has made the game empty and miserable due to the above mentioned failure of the very basic aspects and core functionalities of the ranked game regarding fair play. Another thing is the clear lack of decent servers, the "improved" tick system has not provided the same experience the 128-tick used to and the game still suffers from "rubberbanding" above 40 ping. Casual servers are often incredibly laggy and obviously have been a target of cost cutting. What disappoints me the most is that Valve has no clear strategy to improve the game in long term and is seemingly only using it to pump cash. No communication on Valve side on anything and totally sidelining the pro scene and the cs communities. The incompetence around the whole game and managing the community is just astounding and the whole development and publishing team is being run like a middle school student project. The amount of potential wasted here makes me regret some of the hours I've spent on this game and I cannot recommend it to be picked up by new players at it's current state nor in any future the CS2 developer or management team has publicly visioned for it, since they have not visioned anything.