Everything arriving with FACEIT Season 9: new anti-cheat, Vertigo, and five-year bans
The countdown is on. FACEIT Season 8 ends tomorrow, August 4, at 12:59 CEST and Season 9 begins on the 5th, with barely a few hours of maintenance in between. This is no ordinary season rollover: a new anti-cheat layer, a rewritten sanctions policy, a new map, and a different reset formula all land at once. Here's the full rundown.
Elo reset: softer, but personalized
Let's start with what affects everyone. FACEIT will apply a soft reset — your Elo doesn't zero out, it shifts back toward the average — followed by ten placement matches that determine your real starting point.
The novelty is in the calculation. This reset is lighter and more personalized than in previous seasons: instead of applying one flat correction to everyone, it weighs recent activity, win rate, and a performance score from the last few weeks. The practical consequence is interesting: two players finishing Season 8 on exactly the same Elo can start Season 9 at different points, depending on how they actually played over their final stretch of matches.
The advice is obvious for anyone wanting to lose as little as possible: play before tomorrow's cutoff. And mind the deadline, because the window closes abruptly, not gradually.
Vertigo returns, chosen by vote
FACEIT let the community decide which optional map would join the matchmaking rotation, and with nearly 100,000 votes the winner was Vertigo, joining on August 5 as an optional pick with full Elo.
One practical detail the platform got right: every candidate option was already in CS2's "competitive" queue, so there's nothing to install and no Workshop subscriptions required. It's a lesson learned from Cache's arrival in Season 8, when several players missed queues for not having the map downloaded. With Workshop maps, one player in the lobby lacking it is enough to stop the match from starting.
The AI anti-cheat and five-year bans
Here are the two big headlines, which we covered in detail but take effect precisely now.
The first is Human Input Detection, the new machine-learning layer that catches cheaters by how they play — whether their mouse movements and aim corrections are consistent with a human — rather than by the software they run. It specifically targets AI and DMA cheats, which by May already accounted for 40% of all cheating bans on the platform. It runs server-side, with no downloads and no FPS impact, and doesn't ban automatically: it requires multiple corroborating signals.
The second is the new ban policy, which sharply toughens penalties for anything breaking competitive integrity: five years for cheating (previously two), six months for stream sniping (previously 30 days), and three months for the main account in smurfing cases, with a permanent ban for the smurf. In exchange, FACEIT is relaxing moderation of minor toxicity: banter, trash talk, and some profanity are no longer punishable as long as they don't escalate into harassment.
It's also worth remembering that every map in Season 9, Vertigo included, requires the FACEIT anti-cheat client running. There's no lower-stakes corner of the pool.
Two extras: half-time voice chat and the Challenger Queue
Two smaller additions deserve a mention. The first is an experiment running August 5-12 allowing both teams to briefly talk over voice chat during the half-time break before it closes again. It's framed as a one-week test, and its future depends on the toxicity data the platform collects. Fittingly, it dovetails with the relaxed moderation of banter.
The second is the Challenger Queue, a five-day event with $15,000 in prizes open to the top 500 European players from Season 8 and the top 50 European teams in August's VRS ranking. It runs August 5-9, daily from 18:00 to 23:00 CEST.
A season arriving at the perfect moment
The calendar couldn't be more favorable for FACEIT. The platform is rolling all of this out just as frustration with CS2's anti-cheat has spent weeks at its peak, with one player releasing his own open-source anti-cheat out of sheer desperation. Valve has shown recent signs — the VAC Live push and the patch that closed a VACnet loophole — but still hasn't publicly explained its strategy.
Season 9 starts on Wednesday. From there we'll see whether Human Input Detection delivers on its promise, or whether the false positives some fear start to surface.
Source: FACEIT.