Counter-Strike 2’s last update drought ended earlier this month with the release of “The Armory” update, which featured special passes for sale that allowed players to earn ‘stars’ by playing games. These ‘stars’ that would be earned can later be used to redeem new charms, stickers, and skins, one of these items being a special Desert Eagle skin unique to each player that had redeemed theirs, available for a limited time. Players can purchase up to 5 passes, making it possible to stack their ‘stars’ and redeem more rewards of their choice, as there is a limit on how many stars you can gain with a single pass.
With the release of the update, ways to make the process of earning stars much faster have been found, causing many servers to be full of users who just want to farm stars instead of playing the game as intended. Some Counter-Strike 2 content creators have made videos about this issue. One of them is Anomaly, who is concerned by these developments and has called on Valve for a quick fix to the glitch.
A few days later, it appears that Valve had decided on what should be done to put an end to the problem. Not so long after these exploits were out, screenshots of people receiving trade bans lasting a year due to “exploiting bugged XP lobbies in deathmatch on official Counter-Strike 2 servers.” started to surface on X.
A trade ban means that players who received it will not be able to trade off or sell the skins in their inventory for the duration of the ban. It appears that there is no rollback of the situation yet, so those who have earned their ‘stars’ with bugged methods can use them to redeem rewards, but not be able to sell or trade them until their ban ends. This may change with an update that rollbacks ‘stars’ earned through bugs, though.
