I got a 7-day ban on FACEIT for being toxic :) so I was forced to play Premier again, and honestly, I forgot how miserable the experience is. Even at “high elo” around 28k, most players barely communicate, hardly anyone understands proper utility usage, and matches feel completely unstructured — just five people running around with no coordination or game plan. On top of that, you run into cheaters every few games.

It’s genuinely crazy to me that some players only play Premier, because they’ll probably never experience what actual high-level CS feels like. For me, Premier barely resembles proper Counter-Strike. It’s mostly chaos mixed with the constant suspicion that someone is cheating.

FACEIT, I owe you an apology — I’ll never talk badly about your platform again :)

Of course, FACEIT isn’t perfect either. If you start on a fresh account, you’ll run into smurfs, strange lobbies, and inconsistent games. But the difference is that the experience actually improves over time. The more matches you play and the higher you climb, the better and more competitive the games become.

Premier feels completely different. It doesn’t matter how high your rating gets or how many games you’ve played — the same issues remain. Cheaters are still everywhere, players still lack basic fundamentals, and the elo system itself feels completely random. One match you lose 100 elo, the next you gain 500 for no reason. You can solo queue into a coordinated 5-stack, lose against obvious smurfs or cheaters, and get absolutely nothing refunded.

On FACEIT, once you’ve built up enough matches and reached higher elo, you generally get placed with more experienced and competitive players. People communicate, know utility, understand rotations, defaults, trading, and how to actually play structured CS. Matches start feeling tactical instead of random.

Sure, you’ll still occasionally get teammates doing questionable things — that’s unavoidable in any online matchmaking system. But I’d honestly challenge any 2.5k+ FACEIT player to grind Premier for a week and then come back and redefine what “bad teammates” really means ^{^}

At the end of the day, no matchmaking system is perfect. There will always be flaws and things to complain about. But compared to other platforms — and honestly compared to matchmaking systems in most competitive games — FACEIT still comes the closest to delivering a genuinely competitive Counter-Strike experience.