Oddities
Valve's Anti-Cheat (VAC) doesn't ban cheaters in real-time. Instead it issues VAC ban waves on irregular intervals — sometimes weeks apart. The strategy: make it hard for cheat developers to know when their software was detected, since affected users may have used it for months.
Oddities
Bots in CS aim with input lag because they used to be too good
CS:GO bots had no input lag at launch — and the resulting reaction time made them statistically unbeatable in difficulty Hard. Valve added a deliberate aim-tracking delay to make them human-feeling. The behaviour persists in CS2.
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Oddities
CS:GO's "1.6 sound" mod is one of the most-installed cosmetic mods
Throughout CS:GO's lifespan, replacing weapon sounds with the original 1.6 sounds was a frequently-shared mod — a nostalgia object. The CS2 sub-tick audio system made these mods harder to drop in, but the modding community is still iterating.
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Oddities
Some CS pros' Steam profiles are protected from public match-history scraping
A handful of high-profile pros (s1mple, ZywOo) have privacy settings that prevent third-party tools from recording their match history. This started after a 2019 incident when a stalker used CSGOSTATS data to track a pro's real-life schedule. Most pros now hide their friends list and recent matches.
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Oddities
CS2 has true positional audio — louder above, quieter below
CS:GO had stereo with rough left/right cues. CS2's sub-tick audio system upgraded to HRTF positional audio with vertical localization. You can hear that an enemy is "above" or "below" you on Nuke's vertical site within ~10 ms accuracy.
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