The Armory update was one of the biggest patches in CS2‘s brief one-year history. However, it invited a plethora of money-hungry players who wished to exploit its XP system and farm stars as fast as possible, ruining casual matchmaking. Now, Valve has decided to ban them all.
Whether you are a streamer or a regular player, you won’t be spared Valve’s keen ban hammer targeting everyone who participated in exploiting deathmatch and casual matches for the sake of farming Armory Pass XP. According to Pricempire on X, several popular CS2 content creators, including ArrowCS, Aquaismissing, Duwap, and others, have been issued one-year trade bans for their participation in Armory Pass XP farming in the game’s casual modes, while the CS2 subreddit is seeing numerous other players who met the same fate. It’s interesting to note that Anomaly, one of the biggest CS2 creators who made a video showing how to pull off the Dust 2 XP exploit, hasn’t been banned as of this article.
The Armory Pass is a system introduced by Valve in its most-recent cosmetics-oriented Armory update. It allows players to collect stars through gameplay and redeem them for cosmetic rewards, including charms, stickers, sprays, cases, and weapon skins. Players quickly discovered ways of farming the Armory Pass XP by completely ruining the Casual mode in CS2, as most players would just throw grenades at each other on certain spots to make the rounds last as short as possible and earn as much Armory Pass XP as they could. Valve paid close attention to what was happening, and decided to roll out lengthy trade bans to any who participated, though it’s highly likely that exploits will continue as time goes on.
The situation also opens up the question of whether or not big-name streamers are exempt from Valve’s policies, as many redditors pointed to Anomaly, being the biggest name in the CS2 skins and trading world, remaining free of a ban despite his direct involvement in the whole ordeal.
