
innocent: "Many teams in Europe are cheating, and I'm pretty sure it's connected to matchfixing"
KOLESIE, one of the two Polish teams that attended Fragadelphia 19, ended up winning the tournament against M80, one of the home teams.
At the start of the tournament, Jeffrey "Mnmzzz" Moore interviewed KOLESIE's IGL Paweł "innocent" Mocek, to find out why they choose to fly all the way to Canada to play at FRAG, and discuss the ongoing rampant cheating that goes on in online CS tournaments.
The complete interview can be found below on YouTube, with key snippets underneath. The questions and answers were slightly edited for clarity and length.
What made you decide to come to Fragadelphia 19? You're one of two Polish teams here, one of four international squads here. And, of course, it's quite expensive to travel to Canada for a LAN, especially as an orgless team.
When we decided to leave Rebels, we also thought that the organization wouldn't send us to any tournament. And, we just found out that Fragadelphia could probably give something almost impossible to reach online, unless you're super good all the time and you don't lose to random teams, obviously, some cheaters, let's say, which is a common problem right now.
So, it's pretty tough to rank up playing on the lower stages of international tournaments. We thought this is a chance to actually speedrun the ranking climbing, and we found help from the agency StormMedia and sponsors CSGOSkins and PirateSwap, and they just gave us money to come here, which we greatly appreciate, of course.
That's basically it. We didn't even think of winning prize money or something. Like, VRS is the only thing that comes to our mind.
You mentioned how hard it is for a team of your level in Europe to climb the VRS rankings, and you also mentioned the fact of cheaters in your scene. sdy from ENCE has been very vocal about that and so were his teammates. Do you think there's a rampant cheating issue in the European online scene right now?
I think it is a really big issue and I don't like to just throw accusations that someone is cheating and stuff. But, those clips that the ENCE guys were posting were pretty blatant. You can't explain that stuff. So, I'm not the first one to jump to conclusions instantly, because online CS is kind of random.
People often don't care about this round or this game because there is always another match or so. So, they just do random stuff, push smokes, etc. Sometimes it looks maybe fishy, but it's just random. But yeah, those guys that ENCE played a couple of times, I guess it was pretty obvious that they were using cheats.
I think there's much more to it, and there are many teams that are doing it. I'm pretty sure it's kind of connected to rather than matchfixing than cheating to be a better team. Because you can bet that you will take one map of a really good ranked team, and you just cheat your way into this map, and then you lose 2-1.
There are tons of problems and I'm not sure what the solution is. Right now, we don't have any.
Do you think tournament organizers perhaps need to put more value into something like the eyetest from experienced players like you? You've been around since CS 1.6. Clearly, the anti-cheat isn't working, and the admins are missing some steps. What's the potential solution here?
Honestly, the only solution right now that tournament organizers are trying to implement is good camera angles and all the other stuff. But, I'm not sure how this works right now because previously, you could just cheat from the coach. Right now it's pretty tough because they can't be on the server.
But, there's this new update from ESEA that implemented the coaching bug again. It's a really good change because teams deserve to have a coach. But, at the same time, you have webcams for the players, and the coaches could still cheat from their perspective. This is both good and bad, because you could get a coach, but also a potential cheater again.
I'm not sure if there is any solution to really solve this. Obviously, you can try. The webcam angles and all the other stuff are really good, but I guess the anti-cheat would be the best answer to it, and we know how fast Valve works with that stuff [chuckles]. I really don't know.
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