I stopped playing because I felt I could not trust other players, I was getting too paranoid. There were not that many blatant cheaters, but with closet cheaters, it's now very difficult to know if your opponent is better than you or cheating in subtle ways. It's a grey zone.
I guess it's the combination of a frustration of losing matches and the constant suspicion. I was constantly trying to probe things and watching replays, it ruined the game because I was always focusing on cheating.
Ultimately, I think most CS players don't really care about subtle/closet cheaters, so as long as they don't feel it, it's fine, the game keeps its high player count, so it's a good facade and valve is happy with that.
CS is a game I can really enjoy, until I couldn't anymore.
In one specific area, I think this was actually the point, and that was Minecraft servers.
Minecraft minigame servers were very competitive, and very shady, using every dark pay-to-win, gacha psychology trick in the book and even some new ones (in particular, pay-to-unban). They also had very public, competitive popularity rankings among themselves, which players actually used to pick a server.
So I'm pretty sure they also actually paid account stealers to go to competing servers and cheat. The account stealers didn't have any better ways to monetize their huge lists of stolen account credentials.
What makes me think this is the huge number of accounts who would cheat in obvious ways and immediately get banned for it. There didn't seem to be much effort to avoid bans, but when you can join minigame after minigame, and all of them have one guy who ruins it by cheating and immediately gets banned, I think that's economics at play, not just psychology.
I'm closing in on 3000 hours on cs2, and I often get accused of cheating, but I never have. You're definitely right about people being upset and thinking that someone is hacking. I'm pretty good at spotting "togglers" (people who turn their hacks on and off) but there are certainly times where it's really hard to tell, people can be very sneaky about hiding it. Then sometimes someone will call them out and they'll stop pretending.
It's been quite a while since I've seen anyone spinbotting though.
Same problem here. I doubt I'll ever touch an online competitive game ever again . Back in the 90s and even early 2000s cheating was different as people would be extremely blatant and it would sometimes even be funny watching people fly around in Halo. These days there is actually profit to be made through cheating by winning tournaments and streaming. Thus they now hide it as best as possible and even pay large sums of money for individualized cheat software. The game is now to cheat as best as possible without getting caught.
There is no way to guarantee all participants are legitimate so I am not interested. It feels like a complete waste of time putting in the effort.
I guess it's the combination of a frustration of losing matches and the constant suspicion. I was constantly trying to probe things and watching replays, it ruined the game because I was always focusing on cheating.
Ultimately, I think most CS players don't really care about subtle/closet cheaters, so as long as they don't feel it, it's fine, the game keeps its high player count, so it's a good facade and valve is happy with that.
CS is a game I can really enjoy, until I couldn't anymore.