Valve removes almost one million bots from Counter-Strike 2
14 April 2026
Lately, it looks like the good news just keeps coming for the Counter-Strike community. Recently, for example, the hugely popular first-person shooter was confirmed as the international esports title that pays out the most prize money overall on an annual basis (by quite a stretch, actually) and now, developer Valve has announced a more big news. Via one of their developers, the company recently revealed that they had removed almost one million bots from the game. By doing so, the company finally addressed a problem that had been flagged by the community for a long time.
Player reports
According to Ido Magal, the Valve employee and Counter-Strike 2 developer who announced the news, the exact number of banned bot accounts rounds up to 960.000. This is objectively speaking a huge number and many of the bots were identified with the help of player reports. These are reports of suspicious gameplay and other report-worthy in-game occurrences submitted by the players who witnessed them.
“Yesterday we banned 960.000 farming bot accounts”, Magal wrote on X, “This was the result of a bunch of investigation that benefited from user reports. Thank you. To send us reports of bots, email csgoteamfeedback@valvesoftware.com, subject “Farming bot Report”. Cheers.”
Farming bots
We assume that most of our readers are familiar with bots or at least have a basic understanding of what they are, but allow us to briefly explain for those who do not. The word “bot” is short for “robot” and in gaming and international esports, it usually refers to a piece of software that powers an NPC (non-playable character), usually with the goal of making that character behave like a human-controlled player.
A farming bot is a specific type of bot that is programmed to continuously repeat repetitive and/or tedious tasks in a game. In Counter-Strike 2, for example, farming bots can be employed to farm cases and items (by playing matches and triggering the weekly care package) or to earn XP automatically in order to level up. CS2 farming bots have also been used a lot to farm stars in special events, such as the Armory Pass update.
Integrity and in-game sales
The removal of nearly one million farming bots from Counter-Strike 2 is big news, because integrity is crucial for how the community works and operates. Not just in terms of fair play, but also, for example, when it comes to players who invest time and money in the game to upgrade their accounts and acquire new skins with the goal of selling their account in the future.
In the first place though, the mass banning move will considerably improve overall gameplay. Counter-Strike 2 regularly records more than a million concurrent players on Steam, so 960.000 banned farming bots is still a relatively low number, but unacceptable, nonetheless. For competitive players especially, the biggest improvements as a result of the removal of so many farming bots will be cleaner queues and fewer fake accounts occupying Valve’s ecosystem. It now remains to be seen if (and if so, how fast) the bots will return to the game.