// KOTAKU — GAMING
Counter-Strike 2 ‘Slur Tracker’ Reports 17 Percent Of Matches Contain Racist And Homophobic Language
Roughly five days ago, the Counter-Strike 2 community collectively reacted with fear after news of a public third-party chat-logging service for Valve’s 2023 first-person shooter hit the internet. Today, we know why so many users were scared, as CS2 Tracker’s new “Slur Tracker” has publicly outed the top “f-slur,” “r-slur” and “n-word” users in the game, and concluded that a whopping 17.6 percent of Counter-Strike 2 matches contain a slur.
When players realized that CS2 Tracker’s website allowed anyone to find the in-game chat messages of any Counter-Strike 2 player by simply searching their Steam username, many complained about how it was “a big consent abuse” issue and immediately rushed to the website in a bid to remove their publicly accessible chat logs from the site.
Gee, I wonder why. Could it, perhaps, be in any way related to CS2 Tracker’s newly introduced “Slur Tracker” leaderboards?
For context, players’ Counter-Strike 2 information, which includes stuff like stats, total playtime, and, yes, in-game chat logs, has always been publicly available by default—CS2 Tracker is just one of the first sites to capitalize on this and turn the data into a searchable database.
They tracked 5.5 million chat messages and found nearly 1 in 10 matches in their sample had someone dropping an n-word variant.
And now they’ve made a fucking LEADERBOARD for it. Only in Counter-Strike would we have ranked racism… pic.twitter.com/CiFNiqOF1g
Well, I’m guessing a lot of folks are probably wishing they’d set their profiles to private sooner, as the site’s new Slur Tracker feature has unveiled a hefty amount of slur-related data.
For instance, out of the 494,946 players measured in CS2 Tracker’s sample, the site concluded that over 7 percent of all Counter-Strike 2 players have dropped some form of slur in chat. It also concluded that over 2 percent of all messages contained a slur of some form, which roughly equates to 1 in every 48 messages.
When lined up with total player metrics, CS2 Tracker estimated that this means Counter-Strike 2 players collectively drop somewhere around 204 million in-game chat slurs every year. More specifically, they estimated that this means over 180,000 “Hard-R” n-word slurs appear in chat every single day.
As anyone who has played Counter-Strike 2 for more than five minutes will attest to, this isn’t much of a surprise, as the game’s player base is known for being extremely toxic.