Counter-Strike 2 crowds keep cheating at tournaments, but can they be stopped?

They’re back at it again: Counter-Strike 2 crowds are stirring up controversy for their cheating ways once again.

First it was Falcons fans at EWC, and now with Fisher Playground 2 2025… In the past few weeks, we’ve seen multiple high-profile instances of crowds helping players know information they shouldn’t through coordinated cheering.

Of course, it is not a new issue. Long-time fans will be familiar with this discourse, dating back at least 10 years. You may remember Olofmeister’s wallbang kill, arguably enabled by crowd confirmation back at the ELEAGUE Major in 2018. 

It’s been a thorn in the side of tournament organizers for quite a while. After all, cheating from players and coaches is one issue, but how do you tackle LAN attendees’ cheating? Here’s how organizers are attempting to address the issue.

Soundproof booths seem like a good idea…

Perhaps the oldest suggestion is to create soundproof booths on stage, something that has been tried many times. 

A properly created soundproof booth severely limits crowd noise from reaching the players, making it impossible for the crowd to tip off the location of the enemy. Right? Well, not exactly. 

It turns out that getting soundproof booths to work correctly is harder than you think. According to Adam Apicella, Senior Director of Events at Activision Blizzard Media, in an interview with HLTV in 2016: “You can still hear; there is nothing soundproof.”

And even if they did work, the drawbacks of soundproof booths are many. They severely limit the ability for players to interact with the crowd and the other team on stage, a huge aspect of the energy of a live event. The pro on-stage spectacle has only become more in-demand across esports like Call of Duty, VALORANT, and Counter-Strike.

So even if they did work, they are detracting from some of the spectacle that LAN events are best at providing.

On the bright side, most esports now use a combination of soundproof headphones and white noise to try to reduce the crowd’s distraction of players, though it is still quite possible for crowds to be heard if they are loud enough.

Turn off the player outlines for the crowd

Another option organizers have tried lately is turning off the player outlines on screen, so the audience doesn’t have the extra information to provide to players in the first place. This can also be done midgame, should cheating become an issue — while defaulting to showing the audience the full information if they are well behaved.

This solution can also be tailored to the arena while providing the full “x-ray vision” for stream viewers. The only major drawback is that it hurts the live viewer experience, but it is a worthwhile solution to have in the back pocket should a crowd get too out of hand.

Change the culture

Everyone wants a silver bullet to stop crowd cheating. But the truth is that only through intentional culture building led by influencers, orgs, and tournament directors can we mitigate this issue. CS has a long-established LAN culture; they put on some of the best tournaments out there, so changing the culture is difficult, and you really don’t want to gut the energy that makes those tournaments so special anyway. 

That said, some careful messaging encouraging people to behave could help minimize the impact of bad actors. This kind of crowd cheating really only works if a large enough group is doing it, so if you can even reduce the number of people joining in, it could go a long way toward ensuring a fair game for the players without gutting the live experience for the fans.

There will be those who tell you it’s not a problem, that players aren’t paying attention to the crowd, and that crowd noise is just a part of sports. There’s a grain of truth to that. However, when you have rounds like this at PGL Shanghai 2024, where GamerLegion reportedly even thanked the crowd for helping them, it’s hard to deny that this isn’t a competitive integrity issue. 

No one solution will solve the problem, but tournament organizers are working hard to reduce the impact of crowd behavior on game outcomes through a combination of shifting crowd culture, sound-reducing headphones, and nuclear options like turning off X-ray vision for the crowd.

---