In Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, the absolute lowest strata of the community is occupied by cheaters. No matter the game, we all know the pain of going up against an obvious cheater: that person who makes the lives of other players a misery, and griefs them just for kicks. This isn't like being at the whim of some hacker who shows off by messing with the game—you're at the mercy of the weasels who bought or subscribed to their script to "win."
It is that shared hatred of cheaters that Valve taps into with Overwatch, its new crowdsourced anti-cheating tool. Overwatch, which lets experienced players like myself ban other players, works so well because we know what it's like to be on the receiving end of a wall-hacking charlatan. We know that a competitive match of CS:GO is on average a 45-minute commitment, and we know that abandoning it will result in punishment from teammates and game alike. We know that if we can keep CS:GO free of cheaters, the game—and the community—will be all the better for it.
The Overwatch
As the competitive first-person-shooter (it had over nine million unique players last month) CS:GO naturally attracts cheaters. Valve's solution is a simple one: let the players police themselves. The Overwatch gives "qualified" players—those that that have fulfilled certain criteria, such as a minimum rank and a minimum number of games—to take on the ultimate counter-terrorist role and strike the ban-hammer down on those that see through walls, or auto-aim their way to a string of unbelievable headshots. Putting the power to rid the game of cheaters in the hands of those who, by and large, are competitive-minded and thus inclined to hate those that break the rules, has proven to be a smart decision, even if it didn't always seem like it.
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