Hello everyone! Thanks for joining us for another article in the Counter Strike: Global Offensive section. Today we are going to discuss and analyze a niche of the Electronic Sports market that isn’t given much attention: The Boosting Services.
One of the reasons it’s not much talked about is because it goes against the Terms of Services (that huge wall of text you have to accept when installing CS GO’s client), so it technically illegal to offer and contract these kinds of services – meaning that the companies and sites behind them can’t launch very big marketing campaigns, otherwise they’d be targeted by Valve and risk being shut down.
This means that this niche market has to kinda lay underground for its work. Valve won’t go out of its way to shut these services down if they just mind their own business without being too greedy or disrupting the community too much.
How do these programs work?
The way CS GO Boosting works is pretty simple and straightforward: you pay a site (or a group of players) usually through PayPal or G2A Credit, and they will log into your account and play ranked matches until they have reached the rank you paid for.
The boosters are usually very high skilled players – they have to be way above the skill level in the bracket they are boosting in order to be able to guarantee a near perfect winrate (they aim for at least 90% of wins) to make sure they can rank up the users account in the least amount of time (and matches) possible.
The buyer also has the option to play in a duo with the pro (playing with his own account while he plays on a smurf acc). This service is much more expensive than simply letting the booster play on your account, as he has to adjust to your playing time and also be able to carry you during the matches (“carry” means playing so well that you’re basically doing all the hard work for the team).
Most sites that offer boosts also outright sell ranked accounts, so the users have the option to buy a CS GO account with the badge and rank they desire. The higher up the ladder, the more expensive it is, obviously.
Pros of the product
In this section, we’ll go over some of the pros regarding this kind of boosting services. In the next section we’ll go over the cons as well, so be sure to read everything before making a decision to hire the boosters.
If you are confident you belong in a higher skill bracket, you can pay someone else to do the climb for you. This means you won’t need to spend your time playing against silver and gold ranked players all day to finally be able to play with players of similar skill to yours. A lot of players find themselves in this situation because of CS GO’s Matchmaking Ranking (MMR) decay – if you don’t play ranked games in a while, your ladder badge starts dropping, until you’re eventually in Silver I if you quit for long enough. The decay starts acting after around 1 month of inactivity in ranked matchmaking.
After a losing streak, a player can find themselves in a very tilted state of mind, playing much worse than their true abilities and making bad decisions – and end up dropping a few ranks in the ladder. Boosting can help these players improve back to their previous rank, and once they recover their mental state and have one or two good games to gain confidence back, they’re able to maintain the badge and keep progressing on their own.
Bragging rights. I know this may sound lame (or even pointless) to some people, but the majority of users who pay for the ladder climbs are players who want to show off their supposedly high skill / high MMR, to other real life friends or just display it on their Steam profile. For this kind of player, this service means they don’t have to put in the time and effort necessary to achieve the highest tiers – it’ll only cost them some money (more or less depending on how long they can maintain themselves up there, and if they desire to keep paying to go back up if they eventually fall down).
The sites guarantee that the professionals doing the job aren’t using any kind of cheats, so your account VAC status is completely safe for the duration of the task. No third party software is involved in the service.
Aside from regular ladder improvement, you can also hire skilled players to raise your FACEIT or ESEA placements. This usually costs more, as the level of games is much higher than Valve’s regular matchmaking.
You can still play on your account while the job is in progress (of course not simultaneously, only when no one else is ON at the time) – but you can only play casual matches (and other modes such as deathmatch, arms race, quest missions, etc).
Cons
Now, let’s discuss a little bit about the cons – the system is not perfect and certainly not suited for everyone. Do some of your own research as well, before doing anything.
If you pay someone to climb to a bracket you don’t belong, once you get your account back (and hop right into ranked matchmaking), you’ll lose most of your games, usually being the worst player. This can be a very frustrating experience for a gamer, being constantly outmatched and outskilled during their matches.
As we mentioned briefly in the introduction, CS:GO boosting is against Steam’s ToS – even though being punished for hiring this kind of service is extremely rare, you must be aware that there is an odd chance that it might happen (and your acc will get suspended for some time or permanently banned).
You must trust the site you’re hiring fully, because they will have access to your entire account, including other games and full inventory. The biggest platforms and companies are mostly trustworthy, but you can never be 100% sure nothing is going to happen to your stuff while someone else has access to it.
If your friends (or a community you take part in) finds out that your ranking isn’t legitimate, you will lose your bragging rights and along with it any respect, they had for you previously. Some may see what you’re doing as cheating and pretending to be something you are not (being dishonest about your ranking).
Conclusion
As the article points out a couple times (and it doesn’t hurt to warn once more!), do your own research across the many sites that offer this service and weigh the pros and cons before making any decisions.
If you do decide to go for it and hire someone to play on your account (or play with you while carrying the team), try to find the most trustworthy site / group of players. That way, you don’t risk losing anything on your account or getting banned because someone else used a third party software while online in your acc.
Thanks for reading and until the next CS GO themed article!