Twitch Ban for CS:GO Pro Caught “Cheating” While Watching Demos

CS:GO is a competitive first-person-shooter with an extraordinarily high difficulty ceiling. As a result, players need to have excellent skills to become successful and take on the competition without being slaughtered. Like many other eSport titles, CS:GO is watched by a large community on Twitch and can attract huge sums of money for streamers via sponsorships or donations. Recently, the British CS:GO professional player, Jake “Boaster” Howlett who represents the CAZ eSports team, received a 24-hour ban on Twitch after employing a command which allowed him to view enemies through walls while watching in-client gameplay recordings. The command in question, “r_drawothermodels 2” displays players as wireframes. Oddly enough, the code was only used to view content and didn’t provide an unfair advantage while playing a competitive match.

According to the latest information reported by PCGamesN, the temporary ban has now been served and Howlett’s account is accessible once again. As someone who doesn’t play CS:GO to a high level, this is an interesting development and I’m wondering if his behaviour broke an ethical code? If this is the case, surely other professional players and eSport fans won’t forget this in a hurry and will have lost some respect for Howlett. Whether or not lengthier bans will be imposed for players adopting the same method remains to be seen but it’s clear that Twitch is taking a proactive approach against measures which could be conscrewed as cheating. To be fair, I don’t think the ban was warranted and claiming Howlett cheated seems a little far-fetched. He didn’t rely on a cheat mid-game to defeat his opinion and might have used the command to analyse player movements.