CS2 Tracker’s new “Slurs Monitoring” characteristic for Valve’s Counter-Strike 2 went dwell earlier this week, and its implementation has resulted in an sadly predictable consequence: a rise within the quantity of “racist and abusive” language already prevalent within the sport, as Counter-Strike 2 gamers at the moment are competing to climb the slur-related leaderboards in a bid to snag first place.
When Kotaku reported on CS2 Tracker’s Slurs Monitoring characteristic two days in the past, the vast majority of the “high” 25 gamers within the “n-word,” “r-word” and “f-slur” classes had fewer than 100 particular person cases of slur use to their names. Lots of the customers featured within the slur classes had slur-counters ranging between 10 and 100.
As of this writing, the minimal variety of “n-word” makes use of in CS2 Tracker’s “n-word” class is sitting at 976. In response to Counter-Strike 2 content material creator Thour, the rise in slur utilization and the introduction of CS2 Tracker’s Slur Tracker are usually not a coincidence: “Persons are changing into more and more racist and abusive in CS2 simply to climb a leaderboard that tracks the variety of abusive messages they publish in chat.”
https://x.com/ThourCS2/standing/2095567944642363573
It’s sadly fairly simple to corroborate Thour’s concept, as shopping by way of the publicly accessible chat logs of the top-ranking slur customers on CS2 Tracker reveals that gamers are brazenly bragging about climbing the leaderboards. As an illustration, the third-ranking consumer within the “n-word” class states of their chat logs that they “gotta get on the slur leaderboard number one.”
Sadly, this was to be anticipated, however the actual query is: What precisely is Valve doing to fight this? By the seems to be of issues, not a lot.
Counter-Strike 2 gamers have complained in regards to the sport’s extraordinarily lax language-filtering choices because the sport first launched. In truth, to name it “lax” is form of underselling it, as the one actual language detection instruments within the sport seem to focus on third-party weapon pores and skin marketplaces, akin to CS2Float.
Likewise, the variety of gamers utilizing wall-hacking and auto-aim cheats in Counter-Strike 2 lobbies has been getting uncontrolled as of late. Consequently, gamers have been vocally criticizing Valve for its lack of intervention in stopping and banning cheaters, but the issue continues to persist.
Kotaku has reached out to Valve for remark to see if they’ve any plans to average or tackle the uptick in racist and homophobic language in Counter-Strike 2, however didn’t obtain a reply earlier than publishing.
