Valve cancels Counter-Strike: Global Offensive November Major, dealing with coach cheats

As the COVID19 pandemic and quarantines around the world continue, another event has been cancelled.

Much like Valve did with Dota 2, with The International 10 cancelled this year and pushed back to much later in 2021 they're now doing the same with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. In a blog post on the official CS:GO website, Valve explained they're "not going to ask players and fans to risk their health in order to attend a Major while the pandemic still poses a threat to travelers".

They will not be scheduling any Majors until Regional Major Ranking (RMR) LAN events are "safe to hold around the world", so they will be continuing with online RMR events to keep track of the teams.

Additionally, it was recently announced by ESL that CS:GO had a bug where an e-sports team coach could spectate from anywhere on the map. A pretty big flaw, an obvious cheat and multiple professional coaches took advantage of it. As a result, multiple coaches were handed bans. More were found to have abused the bug, some just admitted to it and so the Esports Integrity Commission opened their own inquiry into it.

Valve themselves have said that any teams that have been disqualified for exploiting this bug during an RMR event will have their RMR points reset. However, they're waiting for a "complete picture" of how widespread this issue is and how the event organisers and the EIC deal with the punishments before taking their own action. It's clear they're thinking about adding new limitations to coaching too.

You can play CS:GO free on Linux with Steam.