Did you queue up with a hacker or found out a member of your team was cheating? Then it’s totally understandable to worry about being banned forever from playing CS:GO (CS2), as Valve and Steam can be quite severe when it comes to cheating.
Therefore, on this page, we are going to answer this question, so you can find out if you will end up getting banned or not.
You Won’t Get Banned for Playing or Queueing Up with a Hacker
If you were asking “can you get banned for queuing with a hacker CS:GO”, or if you can get banned for simply being in the same match as a hacker, now you can relax because neither Valve nor Steam will ban you. Be it a game ban or a VAC ban, there’s nothing to worry about, you can play as usual.
There have been some rumors about Valve banning players for playing with hackers, but they have been proven false. Even if the cheater is your teammate and you have him added as a Steam friend, it won’t lead to getting your account banned. That’s a myth.
The only way to get banned is by cheating yourself, for example altering the critical CS:GO files, using cheats like wall hack, amongst other common tactics to give yourself an unfair advantage in the game, and none of them include simply queuing up or playing with a hacker.
However, although you won’t get banned, playing or queueing up with a hacker will lead to other consequences, which we will explore in the next section.
The Consequences of Queueing Up with a Hacker in CS:GO
If a hacker joins your lobby and queues up with you, and he gets detected and banned, you will lose Premier points and potentially your Premier rank. This is the main problem of playing with a hacker, it can do some serious damage to your Premier rank and ELO, especially if you have been playing with a hacker frequently.
We are solely talking about Premier. However, if you end up playing with a hacker in Casual on conventional MM servers, or another game mode, including Competitive, the evidence suggests it won’t impact you negatively.
As long as you don’t engage in hacking or cheating yourself, you won’t get banned.
However, if you want to reduce the chances of playing or queueing up with a hacker to the bare minimum, you should invest in buying the Prime membership. It’s just a one time payment of $14.99 USD, and this way you will only play with other Prime users, hence making it very unlikely you’ll end up in the same match with a hacker.
Conclusion
Now you know it: you won’t get banned for playing with a hacker in CS:GO. However, if you still worry about it, just invest $14.99 and buy the Prime membership, so you can reduce the chances of encountering a hacker to the bare minimum.