Match fixing in esports

Cheating in sports and in esports are two very different things. When in traditional sports ⛷️ you can expect that dope will make you more accurate, add some strength 💪 and stamina, overall it’s still an athlete, who controls the results, cheating in esports 🎮 can utilize such smart software as “aimbot” for Counter Strike, which is doing a big part of the job for you. That’s why esports fans and athletes hate cheating more than any other sports representatives.

And the recent scandal involving a member of OpTic Gaming caught cheating in CS:GO, reminded the industry about the cheating problem, one of the sides of which is match fixing. There hasn’t been a year without a big scandal in esports, which would involve match fixing. CS:GO, StarCraft, Overwatch, Dota 2 — professional players of these and other esports games can be attracted by the idea of getting some easy money. So how the industry is dealing with that ⚔️?

Match fixing, as a way of cheating, is not tolerated in today’s esports. Reputation is everything in the gaming industry, and every cheating case is strongly affecting the industry, as no one is interested in watching games with a predetermined final. Thus, Valve is known to set lifetime bans for players caught on match fixing; Blizzard’s precise regulations ban all participants of Overwatch league to place any bets, and special organizations like Esports Integrity exist to protect the integrity of esports competitions.

However at the top levels of esports, it’s quite difficult to determine a deliberate loss, and esports today is facing the same problem traditional sports faced decades ago and still struggling with. On the one hand, a big prize money and a chance to get invited to bigger competitions are lowering the risk of cheating — it’s just simply not worth the catch. And on the other hand where is money, there are always hunters for an easy bite. After all, considering that esports is a relatively young industry, it’s still difficult to say how the cheating problems will affect the whole system, and how the community will cope with such an issue.

And what’s your attitude towards cheating in esports and match fixing in particular? Share with us on our FB page: facebook.com/esglobalsummit.

🤖 Follow Esgs to stay connected, and meet esports as it is: from professional gamers to agents, from event managers to streamers, from organization owners to coaches.