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.
Banned from twitch because I was watching my demo with r_drawothermodels on… Just a streamer trying to make it. Peak viewership and RIP…
— FNATIC Boaster (@OfficialBoaster) September 24, 2016
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.
If all he did was watch a demo ( recording of a past game) with r_drawothermodels on that is fine. There’s lots of reasons to do it – self improvement, checking if other players were watching you through walls and thus cheating themselves. There is no reason to ban him apart from non-educated users believing he was doing this in a live game.
I’m guessing he did not announce it or display properly this was not a live game and got reported for “hacking” by someone who just did not know or trolls reporting him for the LOL’s.
Personally he should not of been banned and watching back demo’s like this with himself talking about how he reacted to things/ where he thought players were hiding / game sense and the evidence given to him and seeing if he was correct would be interesting and not something he should of been banned for. It was only 24 hours however and its all done and dusted now its pretty much a non issue, just a lesson to educate his watchers in the future that’s its a demo and not a live game.
it was just a 24 hr twitch ban… lol. who cares? if he got VAC banned, different story