Toxicity within the Counter-Strike 2 community has reached a staggering new high.
Veteran journalist Richard Lewis recently looked back on the past year’s events, presenting his 2025 Gonzo Awards. During the ceremony, he named the “Most Annoying Community” of the year.
Once again, the dishonorable mention went to the fans of Counter-Strike 2:
To get a sense of what the CS2 discourse has become, imagine a high-pitched shriek emanating from a primitive hive mind whose only human trait is pure audacity… The modern CS player lives in a delusion where the new version must not only function identically to the previous CS:GO—a game that these same people criticized for the majority of its existence but now treat as perfection—but also demands daily content updates; otherwise, they claim the ‘developers have abandoned it.’
According to Lewis, the Counter-Strike 2 player base is plagued by a high concentration of entitled individuals whose behavior is frequently irrational:
[…] the average CS2 player seems to derive more pleasure from whining about the game than actually playing it. As for the experience itself? Well, good luck with that, given the community consists of people determined to turn every gaming interaction into a total nightmare. Matches are routinely abandoned after just two rounds because they are ‘unwinnable’ due to ‘clueless teammates.’ Any stroke of luck is met with cheating accusations, often followed by the accuser toggling on the very cheats they claim to despise. Despite tactical communication being vital, roughly 50% of the lobby remains silent, and another 40% can’t afford a microphone. Of the remaining 10%, about nine percent are ‘great thinkers’ with a profound grasp of geopolitics, eager to explain why you should [*censored*] because of some 13th-century conflict.
This marks a consecutive win for the Counter-Strike 2 community, which also received the anti-award in 2024. In 2023, the title was held by fans of another Valve flagship project—Dota 2.
Source: iXBT.games