What percentage of CS2 players are bots: A detailed research of the problem

Counter-Strike 2 seems to be one of the most popular shooting games, with millions of users every month. Even though many of them, from time to time, use third-party applications for glitching the game, it makes the game play unfair to a lot of users. Several sources indicate that every day, out of the thousands of active users of CS2, 60%~ comprise bots. So let’s take a look at why CS2 gamers need to set bots for their gameplay and what the percentage of CS2 gamers belonging to that species is along with some tips that might be helpful to get around the bots more often than not.

What drives players to use bots in CS2?

The usual offline bots in CS2 developed by Valve AI are quite different from the hacking software and scripts used by cheaters to automate the game process and increase chances of winning for a player in most of the matches.

Using these kinds of programs narrows their primary goal to a few objectives, such as earning case wins to obtain rare skins that can be resold at a high price.

Concerning the holder of the farmed cases software, a subscription to such software costs about 15 dollars which is recouped with one account for three to four weeks depending on the worth of skins obtained. And even then, the job is done concurrently on dozens of accounts.

How many bots among CS2 players are there?

Many Reddit users have been mentioning excessive numbers of bots on CS2 servers which they claim is one of the greatest issues that has to be dealt with in DM mode. Users have said that trying to play on DM with bots is almost futile as getting shot by the bots is the norm for the first few seconds of joining the server.

Players have expressed their displeasure of this scenario and blame Valve for doing nothing but even the estimates given from different sources on the percentage of bots that are on the servers are quite different. Case farming software owners and Steam’s trading platform analysis show distinctively contrasting statistics. We will review both of these estimates in detail next, but to summarize all the data, we may say that these numbers are approximately 20% of the minimum estimates of online figures which is in line with the average figures of the active bearings of the players in the gaming community.

According to the graph that presents average daily statistics for CS2 players, the period between UTC 15 and UTC 21 is a rush hour for online players and during this time, the number of players peaks above eight hundred thousand players. The span where hours where players are less than five hundred thousand is between UTC 00 and UTC 8 hours.

With regard to the metric that was recently discussed concerning the possible number of bots flooding the gaming experience, one can also deduce the trends regarding the proportion of bots with regard to the amount of players who are present. It should be appreciated that in relation to the fact that farmers are always active in background, the number of bots never changes much hence, the additions in the total number of people comes at the expense of live players.

An interview with one of the case farming software owners reveals some interesting facts about the CS2 average population of which almost sixty percent consists of bots. Further the number of such players is not decreasing even with Valve doing active measures to make it difficult for bot owners to do their business. Still, as such case seller denotes, bots are not completely eliminated by the developers as they keep the trading system operating smoothly which is beneficial to developers.

A statement made by a case farming software owner states that his site had around 15,000 users registered, most of them using up to 10 accounts simultaneously, and the largest bot network consisted of 50,000 elements.

The amount that could be projected from sales data where on the trading platform Steam some 14 million cases were sold in October of 2024. Given that around 4 sales transactions occur from one account in an average scenario, there would be around 3.5 million sellers at maximum which is close to 13% from the total of CS2 fans for a month. Still, regular players are also capable of selling cases on the site, and the farm owners are able to sell on other websites despite the risk associated with doing so, which is why these figures are very rough.

How to not play against bots on CS2?

Because the software for farming cases is constantly being improved, it is not possible to completely avoid bots on CS2 servers but their activities can be reduced through simple guidelines:

• The least amount of bots in CS2 is encountered during peak online. Because farms run in the background, the number of bots tends to stay about the same, so increases are due to real players.

• Play on Valve’s official servers in Premier mode where the level of protection against thes of software is the highest. Good reputation also has FACEIT servers.

• Stay away from Deathmatch servers where the number of bots is the highest.

Conclusion

Even though Valve has put measures in place to curb third-party software users on their servers, their prevalence still remains fairly high. Despite this measurement being normally tough, estimates vary quite a lot from one source to the other. To avoid getting matched against bots in CS2, one should pick trustworthy servers.

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