Unfortunately, despite Valve’s efforts, the default matchmaking in CS:GO has many issues. The low barrier to entry, especially now that the game has gone free to play, means that there are many players that aren’t particularly committed to playing well. Instead, you can often find trolls, griefers, racists, and – surprisingly regularly for a game with a functional anti-cheat system – cheaters. These problems persist throughout the entire ladder system. Thankfully there are alternatives, without having to switch to another game. The main options are FaceIt or ESEA.īoth offer their own third-party matchmaking systems and servers to their own dedicated communities.

While the overall offering from both of them are pretty similar, there are differences that can make one more appealing than the other depending on what you’re looking for. If you’re looking for reliably balanced matches FaceIt has a larger community than ESEA, meaning there are more players covering the skill spectrum. Further to this, the larger player base, generally means shorter queue times too, though this will vary by region and time of day. Part of FaceIt’s popularity in Europe is that it has a large number of servers.

In North America, however, it only has three different server locations which can mean you get a worse ping than you would on ESEA which provides a broader selection of NA infrastructure. Both services offer 128 tick servers, so to get the most of that you really want a low ping.

Faceit anti cheat only