Valve has quietly rolled out a major update that the community has been asking for since the game’s release. The legendary “Overwatch” has effectively returned to Counter-Strike 2, only now it goes by a more technical name—VACnet.
How the new Overwatch works (and why it doesn’t ban players)
If you’re lucky enough to be part of the first wave of testers, a new icon will appear in the CS2 main menu that leads to a private website. For everyone else, this link will open a standard placeholder page.
The key thing to understand is that your verdicts no longer result in cheaters being banned immediately.
The new portal wasn’t created for instant punishments, but to train artificial intelligence. By reviewing demos, you’re literally teaching the VACnet neural network to distinguish cheaters from honest gamers. The system shows reviewers short clips with sound and X-ray (the ability to see through walls) enabled.
After watching, you must determine whether the suspect is using:
- Aimbot;
- Wallhack;
- Auto-bunnyhop;
- Automated actions.
The answers are standard: “Guilty,” “Not Guilty,” or “Insufficient Evidence.”
One extremely important detail: Valve has strictly prohibited leaking audit logs online. The developers don’t want to give cheat creators any clues about what exactly the new anti-cheat system is looking for. So we’ll most likely never see any more entertaining YouTube videos analyzing these demos.
Who can get an invite to VACnet?
Right now, it’s practically impossible to get onto the portal.
There are only two ways to get an invite: wait for a direct invite from Valve, or receive an invitation from an existing member (though only those who have made many correct verdicts have this ability).
The exact selection criteria are kept secret, but newcomers are barred from joining. This makes sense: a player with a hundred hours of experience can easily confuse a default shot, the sound of footsteps, or a well-executed play with cheating. Most likely, gaining access will require a perfect Trust Factor, an account with no VAC bans in other games, and a solid rating in Premier mode (approximately 15,000 points).
Key Questions About VACnet
The initiative looks promising, but several legitimate concerns have already emerged within the community:
- Where are the rewards? Players receive neither experience points, nor unique badges, nor loot for painstakingly watching demos. Will players have enough enthusiasm to regularly do this work “just for the sake of it”?
- The threat of sabotage. What will prevent cheat developers from artificially inflating their bots’ ratings, infiltrating the system, and mass-exonerating violators to break VACnet’s algorithms?
- When will the servers be clean? Since this involves long-term AI training, don’t expect the servers to be cleaned up overnight. We won’t see the results of this work right away.
Nevertheless, things are finally moving forward. Valve has clearly taken the problem of cheaters seriously, and the reporting portal is a huge step toward comfortable matchmaking in CS2.
