https://steamcommunity.com/games/CSGO/announcements/detail/4257672198473442892
Remember when Valve used to be the pinnacle of gaming? All they've pushed out are a couple of half-arsed bug fixes. I also don't know too much about what their PR is like but it seems they do very little to try and interact with the community these days. I hate when developers do this, especially when it's a problem that's pretty big and they refuse to address it. It's also funny how people were bitching about ranked and how low skilled players could easily game their way up now.
If you don't have experience with a Valve-run game specifically, they are not interested in PR. They aren't interested in community managers, or hubs for people to speak with developers or complain with developers.
That being said common complaints for games do usually get addressed but it is entirely on Valve Time and they do not adjust this due to people complaining (typically).
The reason I am saying this is because I have played dota 2 since closed beta (10ish years now?), TF2 in early years, and they just have always worked on their own time. And they are typically not interested in having a community facing worker, as that work fucking sucks.
That makes sense to a degree, it's just when a problem becomes that fucking massive and you have potentially millions of people who are simply quitting the game and never going back. I mean there are pro players and streamers who have basically played Counter Strike out the womb that have said the cheater problem is out of control.
That's one of the worse things ever for a game, when your multiplayer just becomes a total ghost town and at least on the EU servers it seems to be filled with a bunch of weirdo Turkish gamers and other retards who greatly overestimate their own skill and throw cheat accusations against good players and try to abuse the vote kick system to get rid of them.
Yes PR managing sucks, I wouldn't do it all that often, but you'd think they'd at least drop a post and go "We're aware of this guys and we're trying to fix it but it will take time to come up with a solution people are happy with" That would be totally understandable. What I find amusing about gamers is how they've decided that PUBG of all things is apparently the game to go to now even though it's got the exact same problems and runs like shit because the maps are too big and it's got vegetation vomit everywhere which shows how non-existent the optimisation is. Oh and these problems with PUBG existed back when it was released too, nevermind all the spyware and DRM they put in it.
I'm not disagreeing with you at all man, it is just that they run their games, the way they want to run their games. Sometimes, with cheaters, griefers, ruiners, etc, Valve works on a fucking MASSIVE update for their games, at least in my experience with Dota.
We got a massive update to dota, along with a huge cleanup of cheaters, talking about hundreds of thousands of accounts of cheaters got deleted overnight one day. It was big news for dota, and they had spent a considerable amount of time with the biggest cheats to find what they do, how they work, and how they can keep them from accessing dota. It was irreversible VAC account bans for anyone using the tools iirc, and the community rejoiced.
It didn't delete cheating, but it made a big impact, and also got rid of many smurf/griefer accounts based off of other factors so it was a big win for the game. One big part of this was overwatch (not the game) which is a system Valve uses to have players judge whether someone was actually griefing/cheating/etc. It's quite a great system, and I think it came from CS:GO originally, so hopefully they can apply the same big update they did for dota, for CS eventually.
All that to really close out with, Valve didn't say they were doing this, they didn't have a PR person saying cheating/griefing/smurfing is a priority, but they were always working on it, and dropped it on us out of nowhere.