XP Lobbies, Exploits and 1 Year Trading Ban - Valve Against XP Farming

After the introduction of the new update, "The Armory" (which we discuss further over here), which reintroduced to the game the possibility to earn skins for stars, earned by gaining XP, not only a lot of new skins appeared, but several problems that we knew from the past.

The Armory Update

XP Farming and Game Breaking Lobbies

As we know and have already mentioned, we can collect stars for XP, which we can then use for random skins from the collection, a case, a weapon pin or a sticker. In previous operations, progress was achieved by completing missions, but this time things are a little different, and we can do it simply by playing CS2 in every form. The most popular mode to farm stars naturally became the Deatchmatch, which was instantly filled with many accounts that remained AFK, bots or other users trying to bend the rules of the game.

This form of gameplay is obviously not only unhealthy for the game itself, but also for the community as a whole and even the skin market, which can be potentially disturbed by such practices.

Few words from Valve

Valve seemed less proactive recently, but this time they resolved the situation very quickly and in a hard style. Anyone who was exploiting bugged XP lobbies in Deatchmatch on official Counter-Strike 2 servers to farm XP was sentenced for a ONE YEAR TRADEBAN (Trading privileges will be restored on October 1, 2025).

The message in game

Why?

The answer is very brief. Valve exceptionally dislikes it when someone gains an advantage with use of a forbidden method (we are not talking about the VAC system here), especially when real money is at stake, due to the value of skins in real money. They take deliberate violations of the rules of the game and the market extremely seriously, as we have seen time and time again, for example through irrevocable trade bans or VAC bans.

Who got banned?

In addition to normal players, the punishment also reached recognizable creators. Characters such as Anomaly, Sparkles, Arrow, Dona and Aqua were unable to escape the ban due to their status in the community.

What will be next?

We can only speculate, but knowing Valve's harshness, the ban will remain active until the previously mentioned October 1, 2025. The CS2 developers are very strict about their policies and bans they issue, so there is little reason to conclude that those bans will be removed. The case is serious, not only because of the exploit and the wide use of it, but because of the stability of the game itself.


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