Valve is cracking down on cheaters (at least on CS:GO) with the help of AI.

In a reddit post Valve confirms that they are starting work on in and progress has been promising so far. This came about when users asks on a subreddit on Counter Strike: Global Offensive why spinbots aren’t automatically detected “or at least kicked”.

Digital Trends explains that “A spinbot is a type of hack that spins a character so fast that it gives a 360 degree field of view. Because the player looks like they’re glitching, it also makes them a difficult target to hit. Couple this with aiming software and cheaters can essentially hit any player from any angle.”

Understandably, it’s highly frustrating for both players and spectators alike. Valve_Anti-cheat wrote an explanation to why it’s difficult to deal with them. “Any hard-coded detection of spin-botting leads to an arms race with cheat developers – if they can find the edges of the heuristic you’re using to detect the cheat, the problem comes back. Instead, you’d want to take a machine-learning approach, training (and continuously retraining) a classifier that can detect the differences between cheaters and normal/highly-skilled players.”

And this is exactly what Valve is working on.

“The good news is that we’ve started this work. An early version of the system has already been deployed and is submitting cases to Overwatch. [nosey writer: not the game, mind you] Since the results have been promising, we’re going to continue this work and expand the system over time.”

Although, the process takes some serious hardware specs, not to mention a system that can handle monitoring over a million matches and from every player’s perspective. That takes some processing power and they’re looking at a datacentre that can handle powering thousands of CPU cores.

So while Valve is working on that, it will continue to be frustrating for players and spectators until they have a stable working solution.