CSGO matchmaking is still rife with cheaters. Valve has put a ton of work into VAC, but if people want to cheat, it is still very possible. It prevents matchmaking from being taken seriously as a competitive ladder. Even when I’m just playing casually with friends, it’s stressful when I basically have a 1 in 10 chance of the opponent cheating, and I need to sus out whether they’re actually good or just cheating.

I pay for ESEA, an external service, which installs a kernel mode anticheat. ESEA also got sued for running a bitcoin miner on users computer several years ago. But it’s the only way to get any semblance of real, high level, competitive play.

This is the context for Riots anticheat. They need to provide a solid AC from the start to pull over players and provide a competitive matchmaking system that isn’t a total joke like Valve MM. It sucks, but I know who I’d trust more between Riot and ESEA. I just run my games in a separate partition and bitlocker my primary OS install.