CS2 Tracker’s new “Slurs Tracking” feature for Valve’s Counter-Strike 2 went live earlier this week, and its implementation has resulted in an unfortunately predictable outcome: an increase in the amount of “racist and abusive” language already prevalent in the game, as Counter-Strike 2 players are now competing to climb the slur-related leaderboards in a bid to snag first place.
When Kotaku reported on CS2 Tracker’s Slurs Tracking feature two days ago, the majority of the “top” 25 players in the “n-word,” “r-word” and “f-slur” categories had fewer than 100 individual instances of slur use to their names. Many of the users featured in the slur categories had slur-counters ranging between 10 and 100.
As of this writing, the minimum number of “n-word” uses in CS2 Tracker’s “n-word” category is sitting at 976. According to Counter-Strike 2 content creator Thour, the increase in slur usage and the introduction of CS2 Tracker’s Slur Tracker are not a coincidence: “People are becoming increasingly racist and abusive in CS2 just to climb a leaderboard that tracks the number of abusive messages they post in chat.”
https://x.com/ThourCS2/status/2095567944642363573
It’s unfortunately quite easy to corroborate Thour’s theory, as browsing through the publicly available chat logs of the top-ranking slur users on CS2 Tracker reveals that players are openly bragging about climbing the leaderboards. For instance, the third-ranking user in the “n-word” category states in their chat logs that they “gotta get on the slur leaderboard number 1.”
Sadly, this was to be expected, but the real question is: What exactly is Valve doing to combat this? By the looks of things, not much.
Counter-Strike 2 players have complained about the game’s extremely lax language-filtering options since the game first released. In fact, to call it “lax” is kind of underselling it, as the only real language detection tools in the game appear to target third-party weapon skin marketplaces, such as CS2Float.
Likewise, the number of players using wall-hacking and auto-aim cheats in Counter-Strike 2 lobbies has been getting out of control as of late. As a result, players have been vocally criticizing Valve for its lack of intervention in preventing and banning cheaters, yet the problem continues to persist.
Kotaku has reached out to Valve for comment to see if they have any plans to moderate or address the uptick in racist and homophobic language in Counter-Strike 2, but did not receive a reply before publishing.
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