VALVE trade-bans Armory Pass exploiters!

In the most recent update VALVE decided to crack down on Armory Pass lobby abuser.
A huge part of the community has been seen getting banned after exploiting bugged Deathmatch Lobbies.

People who abused the bugged lobbies, even content creators and influencers, such as PSP1G, Aquaismissing, Epidemic, and Arrow, were just now banned until 1 October 2025!

The abusers of the bugged lobby system, which could earn you 5 Stars per pass, have been dealt a one-year trading suspension.
It is important to note that this only refers to the boosting in these “bugged lobbies”, that also XP Farmers use to get the yearly service medal to the highest grade.

Normal “Casual” and “Deathmatch” XP farming lobbies for Stars are fine and impose no risk to your account or trading status!

Another thing is, that it is ONLY a one-year trade ban. The individuals are still able to play Counter-Strike 2 on official servers, possibly even still earn stars.

Here is a look at content creator DanskiCS, and what one of these “suspensions” looks like:

Arrow’s tweet after getting banned for using the same exploit:

Arrow via Twitter/X.

Some people like Epidemic take it with good sport. He said that he "isnt even mad", and proceeded to unbox the "first knife one an Exploit banned account"

Epidemic via Twitter/X.

Conclusion

A lot of people seem that the ban for it is way too long- on the other hand some people from the community are saying, that it is good that they just got “a little slap on the wrist”, as this could have been a permanent ban, similar to the likes of “Medal boosting”, a one-year suspension from trading being not that terrible as a permanent ban from Counter-Strike.

The amount of skins unboxed that are now trade-banned for a year might affect the supply- but in the grand scheme of things we are very glad that these bans are not permanent for the users who exploited the bug!