Case farms: The dark side of Counter-Strike

Bot farms, commonly known as case farms have been a massive problem in Counter-Strike for a long time. Ever hopped into an official deathmatch server only to find it full of empty accounts with random names, moving weirdly and the next moment you're automatically kicked? These a bot farms operating inside of a Valve deathmatch server.

Popular Counter-Strike content creator Gabe Follower took to X, showing footage of a CS2 bot farm setup in China and attached to the post was an image showing multiple accounts hammered with a VAC ban, tying the current ban wave with similar bot farms.

These bot farms run multiple instances of CS2 using sandboxes and inject them with scripts written to automatically create lobbies and queue to join the same deathmatch server. Once the bots are in, they kick all the legit players (if any) and automatically move around, shooting each other to farm points through movement scripts.

The automated process ends with farming match-end drops and once a batch of accounts receive these drops, the panel automatically shuts down and restarts with a new batch of accounts, starting the process all over again. One might naturally question the profitability of these farms and to answer that, Gabe Follower has mentioned an example where one farm was able to generate more than $600K USD in a month.

Fortunately for the community, Valve seems to have put these farming panels in their crosshair, handing down mass VAC bans across multiple bot accounts setup for farms. At the end of April 2024, CS Stats recorded a steep and sudden rise in the number of VAC detections and renown white hat hacker killa linked it to these bot farms.

Additionally, these farms also operate as rank boosting services for monetary benefits. Similar to the case farms, bot accounts flood a competitive server leaving one slot for the account that is set to be boosted and through auto-reconnect scripts, the panel gives the target account a flawless win, massively boosting elo.