Counter-Strike: Global Offensive community-driven ban system has been “encouragingly successful”

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The various wings of Valve have been busy cracking down on undesirables this month, with more than a little help from their players. The Dota 2 dev team announced this week that, thanks to player reports, their MOBA has seen a 35% reduction in negative interactions since the introduction of temporary chat bans. They’ve now joined in developerly pride by the CS:GO team, who say their Overwatch experiment has been “encouragingly successful”.

Overwatch, currently in beta, gives self-nominated Counter-Strike players the power to report, review and even issue temporary bans to incessant “problem players”.

These ‘investigators’ are picked by Valve on the basis of their wins, account age, hours played, skill bracket and report count, and receive sample footage of frequently-reported players (the globally offensive ones, you might say).

Investigators have so far found evidence of disruptive behaviour in 90% of highly-reported cases, and their decisions have been unanimous in the “vast majority” of cases.

“In addition to our standard test cases, we recently added demos of pro CS:GO players (specifically NiP and Quantic) to the test pool,” say Valve. “Every single test case has been correctly dismissed as ‘Insufficient Evidence’, with no false convictions made.”

In other words: Global Offensive players have a real knack for picking out cheaters, and leap at the opportunity to take on real responsibility. Who’d have thought Counter-Strike heads would take the business of playing so seriously, eh?