Too often in CS:GO's competitive game mode, we encounter players who plan to ruin the experience for everyone else just to get a kick out of their reaction. This means that unless you deal with that player, you are most likely to lose your match. Unfortunately, every game with a huge community has its bad apples. Here's how they are dealt with in CS:GO.

The Overwatch system

Once you reach 150 competitive games won and if you are (reportedly) at least Gold Nova 3, you are eligible to enter Overwatch. This doesn't happen instantly, as it seems that Valve manually selects players for this task based on their behaviour. So, if you were reported a lot or received a lot of matchmaking cooldown bans, it is unlikely you will get access to Overwatch.

What is Overwatch? Overwatch is a feature in which players selected by Valve decide whether or not a reported player deserves a ban. Once a player has been reported enough times, his case gets added to the Overwatch queue, and those eligible can download an encrypted demo (with no real names: the one to be judged is named "The Suspect") featuring a few rounds of his match.

After watching, the players have to decide whether or not "The Suspect" is guilty or not of one of the following: "Aim Assistance", "Vision Assistance", "Other External Assistance", "Griefing". If the majority of players who watched the demo claimed The Suspect is guilty, then Valve will issue an Overwatch ban, which means that The Suspect is:

a) Banned permanently in the case of hacking.

b) Banned for 30 days in the case of griefing.

People who participate in Overwatch and help improve the CS:GO community are rewarded with an experience boost at the end of public matches.

So what are these "deadly sins" of Overwatch, and how do you combat them?

If you are in any public CS:GO match, upon pressing "Tab" to bring up the scoreboard, you can right-click a player's name and press "Report". This brings up a small in-game window with 6 checkboxes, describing the possible offenses. The offenses are:

Abusive text chat/Abusive voice chat

This option is meant for reporting people who are either spamming with their mics when they should be quiet, or people who are rude to anyone else. It's interesting that Valve has added these two options to the report panel, as it seems that these matters are not being investigated: Overwatch demos do not contain voice chat/ text chat information due to their encrypted nature, so they cannot decide on abusive chat. It is unclear whether or not Valve actually does something about these offenses: some users are saying they are dummy buttons, and others saying they got kicked out of certain servers for being "marked as abusive chat users".

That being said, the best thing you can do to someone who is a toxic player or who just refuses to shut up at the right time is to press "Tab" to bring up the scoreboard, right-click their name and click "Block Communication". This will completely block their messages showing up on your end, and they don't even know it either, so unless you miss on some important info in a clutch situation (doubtful with such a player), it's a win-win situation.

Griefing

If you don't know what griefing is, it is doing something that hurts your team/makes the game harder for your team on purpose. Examples of this are throwing flashbangs at your own team or throwing a smoke grenade which blocks the field of vision of a teammate. This offense is considered a "Minor Disruptance" only and is punished with 30 days of Overwatch ban. 30 days is a long period, so the correct course of action when dealing with a griefer is:

1. Report the griefer. While abusive chat seems to not be investigated, griefing definitely is, and it's quite easy to spot a griefer on Overwatch.

2. Kick the griefer. This should be fairly easy, as a griefer's aim is to make people on his team angry, which means people are more prone to kick him.

Aim/Wall/Other hacking

Hacking is the practice of using an external program which helps you with the game, without you needing any skill. It is a widespread problem throughout the FPS genre, and is usually resorted to only by really bad players, or those who want to rank up fast without improving their skills. As their name suggests, there are several types of hacking, with the most popular being:

a) Aim hacking, which refers to a program which automatically places your crosshair on enemies, giving you an obvious edge over the other players.

b) Wall hacking, which refers to using a program that allows you to see enemy players through walls.

Both types of hacking are usually easy to spot and are detected by VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat technology, which is featured on most multiplayer Steam games nowadays). However, there are a lot of hacks available on the Internet, and with new hacks releasing every day, it is up to Overwatch to identify and ban these players.

If you believe a cheater is on your team, report him! If you do not, and you win the game, once he is banned, you will lose the ELO points you won that match. This could even mean deranking in certain cases.

The conclusion

If Overwatch sounds cool to you right now, but if you don't have access to it, don't obsess over it! You'll probably get access to it when you least expect it, making it an even bigger surprise.

If you ever think about cheating/griefing/ruining the experience of others for the sake of you having fun, don't. Not only will you make a lot of enemies and ruin your image, but you will most likely be swiftly banned from the game and have your inventory permanently locked, which means you won't be able to trade/sell items anymore.

If you encounter someone ruining your game, report him and try not to flame him. Remember, these people enjoy watching others become enraged, so by flaming them you're only letting them win.

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