Valve recently made a big call with Counter-Strike 2, and drew a line in the sand when it comes to a feature called SnapTap. Mostly associated with Razer keyboards, though identical features can be found on other hardware, SnapTap basically enables players to counter-strafe more easily in the game: So Valve has banned it (alongside other automation tools), with the ESL quickly doing the same on August 29.
You'd expect the pros to be all over this, and most of them are, but yesterday the team HEROIC messed up. Shortly after victory over NIP in an ESL Pro League Season 20 match, the ESL announced mid-broadcast that SnapTap had been detected on a player's hardware. HEROIC's win was struck off, with the map awarded to NIP, and NIP went on to win the match overall 2-1.
The culprit was HEROIC player René "TeSeS" Madsen, who subsequently said that he had switched off the feature when Valve announced the ban. "Fucking embarrassing and amateur from me," said Madsen on social media. "I turned it off ages ago when it was banned from Valve. I didn’t notice it during the game or anything and obviously didn’t do it on purpose. I let the boys down and I’m devastated about it, sry."
The CS2 crowd generally seem sympathetic towards this (though naturally the subreddit has a few conspiracy theories), mainly because everyone likes dunking on Razer's annoying software and there does seem to be an issue where switching between PCs and hardware can re-enable the feature without players being aware. Either way both Madsen and HEROIC have copped to it, taken the punishment, and that seems to be the end of the matter.
This was probably inevitable, given how ubiquitous SnapTap had become in the competitive scene, even if it does seem in Madsen's own words slightly "amateur" that professionals aren't double- and triple-checking their settings before competitive games. Nevertheless it's the first time that a Counter-Strike pro team has been caught and punished for using SnapTap, and a warning to every other team that this is now a liability that will lose you games regardless of the result.
SnapTap is becoming a problem across various competitive games: Valve may have banned it from CS2, but it remains fine to use in other games. If you're wondering why it's such a big deal, and how exactly it works, here's a full technical explainer of how it relates to competitive Counter-Strike.
