A number of high-profile Counter-Strike streamers, including Arrow, have been banned from CS for one year over an XP farming exploit.
Anyone who has put a few hundred hours into Counter-Strike will know that waiting for updates can be a bit of a pain. That has carried over into CS2 where Valve has slowed down a bit following a raft of updates initially.
However, at the start of October, the CS2 devs dropped a massive update in the form of The Armory. Working similar to an operation – but without any of the wingman missions – you earn stars from games that can be turned into weapon skins, operator looks, and everything else.
Grinding this is supposed to be hard. Yet, exploits to farm XP and stars have been found in the Deathmatch mode. Players reported they’d been able to get around 40 stars per match on average, allowing them to quickly level up their armory passes.
A number of high-profile CS streamers including Arrow, Aquaismissing, Epidemic, and others have since been banned for at least a year after using it.
Pricempire initially also stated that Anomaly had also been punished for using the exploit. However, that has since changed and the Swedish content creator has gone unpunished.
Prior to the ban wave, the Swede claimed that “chances for a ban are very, very low.” He even went as far as saying it would be “less than single digit percent” chance.
Obviously, that hasn’t been the case given 15 creators have been punished for using the exploit.
Even though Valve is clamping down on people who have used the exploit, they haven’t yet patched it.
As a result, a bigger ban wave may hit players before long too. That’ll tie up anyone hoping to hold onto their skins for a while. So, expect a knock-on effect to the CS2 skin economy.