For the past few weeks, my friends and I have been playing a lot of games together, and one of the games we’ve been playing is CS:GO. It’s a game that I’ve been playing for almost five years, so it’s really nice seeing some of my other friends starting to play. One of the main problems that we’ve been facing though is with the game’s matchmaking system. However, we were able to solve it by using something called FACEIT.
FACEIT is a separate client from Steam which is the platform that hosts CS:GO. When you use FACEIT, you are still playing the game off of Steam, but you are playing the game on FACEIT’s servers. The FACEIT servers are pretty much an alternative version of Valve’s official matchmaking system.
I’ve used FACEIT in the past before, but only to play a few games. However, the reason why my friends and I are using it more now is because of Valve’s matchmaking system. With the official servers, players that want to play together have to be within a certain skill ranking of each other. Since I’ve been playing the game for much longer, my rank is a lot higher than the rest of my friends. This means that we aren’t able to play together unless we have a full premade team of five people. Often times this proves difficult, and so we’d always be missing one person to fill the last spot on the team.
Fortunately, FACEIT fixed this problem for us because since I’ve never really used my FACEIT account too much, my level is around the same as my friends who’ve just made new accounts. This lets us play together without having to go through the hassle of trying to find a group of five people.
Playing with your friends isn’t the only reason why other people use FACEIT though. A lot of the people that play on FACEIT servers are looking for a more competitive experience, and the skill ceiling in FACEIT is considered much high than the official matchmaking system. Some players currently playing for big-name organizations used to play in FACEIT’s pro league. FACEIT servers are also run on 128 tick servers which are more responsive than the official matchmaking servers.
Some issues we’ve had with FACEIT though is the fact that you don’t always get to choose which maps you want to play on. CS:GO has different maps with different layouts, and since most of my friends aren’t too into the game they don’t know how to play some of the maps. In FACEIT, each team has team captains and they go back and forth banning different maps until there’s only one left. The map that wasn’t banned is the one everyone plays on. Sometimes you don’t get to be team captain, and sometimes the other team bans the only maps you know how to play. This sometimes results in devastating losses where our team just can’t play as well as the other team. To us though, it isn’t really too big of a deal since we’re mostly playing for fun anyways.
Overall, FACEIT has been a good alternative to the official CS:GO matchmaking system for when my friends and I want to play. There is a bit of a trade-off, but to be honest it’s a lot more convenient to be able to play with whoever I want without being held back by skill difference.