Find out how to get started playing and using faceit features

FACEIT CS:GO. Beginner’s guide

You think that your level of play is higher than in regular matchmaking, and your opponents are no longer surprising as before? Then this article is for you!

A large number of modern competitive CS:GO platforms offer you an opportunity to play with players who are really interested in development. FACEIT is the most popular of these platforms. Here you can find real like-minded people who like esports and who want to develop in it.

FACEIT. What is it and how to start playing?

FACEIT is a gaming platform that provides the ability to create competitive CS:GO games outside of Valve’s established matchmaking system. This platform supports its own league system, and also supports a large number of games, including CS:GO. Let’s try together to figure out what FACEIT offers to the average player.

On FACEIT you can:

What do you need to start playing on FACEIT?

In order to start playing on FACEIT, you need to go through several steps:

Anti-cheat in disabled

If the anti-cheat is already running, just click on the corresponding ‘Run’ button in the window that appears:

Enabling anti-cheat system

After the anti-cheat is launched, the system will change the shield icon to green:

Click on the PLAY button to find the game

There are three game modes available here: Alone, In a group and In a team. Choose the appropriate one and go to play.

After the game is found, you will hear a beep and see a button confirming the game:

Match is ready

After accepting the game, you will be taken to the match lobby, where the captains can choose a map. Then you just need to connect to the server through the console or click on the ‘Connect’ button and do it automatically.

Levels, leagues and the ELO system on the platform

In order to divide the players according to the level of play and make the selection by the opponent as balanced as possible, the platform uses a certain system. This system divides users into levels depending on the level of their playing skills.

FACEIT highlights 10 levels of players. And the ELO points system determines the number of conditional points for each of them.

The ELO scoring system is a platform mechanism that uses conditional points for winning or losing a match and determining the level of a player.

You can go from one level only by winning matches and farming ELO points. Such a transparent system allows the player to track his progress on the platform at any time.

All FACEIT levels:

Remember that at each level you may come across players of completely different levels, who, for one reason or another, cannot move to the next level. For example, a person with 3000 hours in the game can meet at both 3 and 10 levels.

Don’t forget to analyze your in-game mistakes to get another level even faster. Check your performance on SCOPE.GG!

For even more comfortable games on FACEIT, play with friends or as a player of the whole team. This will help you navigate the FACEIT level ladder more efficiently.

10 level FACEIT. What’s next?

After reaching 2000 ELO points, you have the opportunity to break through to the professional level of the game. However, here you will need the status of a premium account.

Leagues on FACEIT

FACEIT Premium Account

Premium account is the status of a player’s account with a paid subscription to additional services from FACEIT. These services can be: access to premium matchmaking, additional options for matchmaking, the priority right to the role of captain, etc. The difference in the availability of these options determines the level of paid subscription.

There are two levels of subscription:

The subscription on FACEIT

Disadvantages and advantages of FACEIT

It should be understood that the FACEIT competitive platform has a number of advantages and disadvantages. Let’s try to highlight some of them.

Advantages of FACEIT:

Disadvantages of FACEIT:

The FACEIT platform is a great way for a player to go all the way from an amateur to a true professional in the world of competitive CS:GO and get a boost to start an esports career. The current trend proves that a huge number of eminent players (ropz, etc.) received their recognition precisely after recruits were able to notice their progress on the platform.

Train, join the leagues and improve your skill level. The higher you can advance, the higher your chance of breaking into real esports.

Find out how to get started playing and using faceit features

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

You think that your play level is higher than in regular matchmaking, and your opponents are no longer surprising as before? Then this article is for you!

A large number of modern competitive CS:GO platforms offer you an opportunity to play with players who are really interested in development of their skill. FACEIT is the most popular among these platforms. There you can find people who like esports and who want to get a real progress.

FACEIT. What is it and how to start playing?

FACEIT is a gaming platform that provides the ability to create competitive CS:GO games outside of Valve’s established matchmaking system. This platform supports its own league system with the large number of games, including CS:GO. Let’s try to figure out what FACEIT offers to the average player.

Levels, leagues and the ELO system on the platform
In order to divide the players according to their play level and make the selection by the opponent as balanced as possible, the platform uses a certain system. This system divides users into levels depending on the level of their playing skills.

The system has different skill 10 FACEIT ranks or levels. The ELO points system determines the number of conditional points for each of them.

The ELO system is a platform mechanism that uses conditional points that a player gets or looses after any match. These points determine the player’s level.
Winning the matches will get you to another FACEIT level. Such a transparent system allows players to track their progress on the platform at any time.

After the registration on FACEIT, you receive level 3 and 1000 ELO points. Then you have to play several games, which will help tp determine your skill level. Here you can win up to 300-400 ELO points (from 50 to 25 points for each of them). Each subsequent game will equal on average 25-30 ELO points. The number of points may vary depending on the balance between the teams. The players from the first team receive the same amount of points, which the players from the second team lose.

Introducing the redesigned FACEIT Matchmaking: More intelligent, accurate and balanced than ever before

Starting from today, the redesigned FACEIT matchmaking system will feature two new core changes, multi-dimensional matchmaking algorithm and adjusted skill rating, which we expect will bring significant improvements to the quality of your experience on FACEIT.

Today we’re sharing a series of important updates regarding the redesign of the FACEIT matchmaking system.

In recent months, we have been collecting large amounts of feedback that many of you have been sharing around FACEIT matchmaking. The feedback we have received can be summarised as the following scenarios being perceived as unfair:

In order to effectively address these issues, a few months ago we took the decision to make some significant updates to our matchmaking algorithm, and in particular, on some of the core logic that defines how matches are created and balanced. After months of testing and improvements, the changes are now implemented in full.

The redesigned FACEIT Matchmaking

The redesigned FACEIT matchmaking system will feature two new core changes: Multi-Dimensional Matching Algorithm and Adjusted Skill Rating. These have been designed by analyzing over 6 million matches played on FACEIT, with the goal of solving the two main issues that we identified with the old system by:

From an engineering standpoint, explaining exactly how these two features work is not an easy task (which we will follow up on with a technical blog post to explain this in greater detail). Within this post we are going to focus on how their combined effort will have a positive effect on the quality of the matches created.

Multi-dimensional matchmaking algorithm

The new Multi-Dimensional Matching Algorithm accomplishes the important task of creating matches that combine parties and players that share as many characteristics as possible between each other (in addition to their skill rating).

While the old algorithm matches players based on player skill rating and map preference, the new one now takes into account several other characteristics of players and parties to create matches.

In particular, the updated algorithm will now take the following into consideration when matching you:

Whenever you and your party join the queue, the new system will try to match you with other players and parties that share similar characteristics to your team, based on the attributes listed above. By applying this more sophisticated approach, the Multi-Dimensional Matching Algorithm alone will have several positive impacts on your experience:

While the positive impacts mentioned above could be obtained consistently in a ‘’perfect world’’, the magnitude of those effects is reliant on the number of players currently searching for a match within each segment. It’s possible that a particular segment is not filled by a sufficient number of parties and players to create a balanced match. As a result of this, the allowed differences in characteristics between parties expand based on the time spent in the queue.

To make things easier to understand, let’s imagine a situation where you join the queue with a party of two where both of you are skill level 6 (a duo party with low discrepancy in the skill rating).

The following illustration shows a simplified representation of what would happen while you are in queue waiting for a match:

Projecting that same exact principle simultaneously for all the other dimensions should give a good idea on how the Multi-Dimensional Matching Algorithm works across multiple dimensions against the time spent in the queue. As we gather more data about matches we will now be able to consider adding or increasing the importance of additional dimensions to improve the quality of matches.

The good news is that even in those cases where the search band expands considerably and the similarities cannot be enforced perfectly, the new matchmaking algorithm will be able to guarantee a good balancing for matches thanks to the new Adjusted Skill Rating, the second core feature of the new system that we are going to explain below.

Adjusted Skill Rating

The matchmaking system will now apply a new Skill Rating system to more precisely address the strength of players and parties that are queuing at any given time.

The new formula has been developed by running a machine learning model and it takes into account several attributes such as the number of matches played, skill discrepancy within the parties and Elo to predict more precisely the win probability of each faction for every potential match.

The application of the Adjusted Skill Rating will positively impact your experience for two main reasons:

Among other things, the new algorithm will penalize parties that have high skill difference or high variance in terms of matches played within the party. To understand these new behaviours more clearly, let’s start from an example of a match (Table 1) to highlight how a team with high skill difference (Team 1) would have been evaluated under the old matchmaking algorithm:

The old system was treating the example above as a “balanced” match by simply looking at the average skill rating of the two teams, with both teams having a 50% win probability and a consequent +25/-25 update in the rating of the players at the end of the match.

With the new system, the win probability will be more precise, and as a result, this match would likely occur less:

If the ‘’less-than-desirable match’’ in Table 2 is the only possible match at the time for that set of parties, the new balancing formula will produce a more accurate rating update for the players as shown in Table 3:

Since the skill rating calculation is now based on a more sophisticated formula than before, as of today, inside every ranked match, a balance indicator will be displayed (Picture 3) which contains the expected new win probability that will be used to calculate your new skill rating update at the end of each match.

Final Thoughts

We don’t expect this update to put an end to all the issues you face while playing on FACEIT, but the data shows it is definitely a step in the right direction to deliver a better experience. Thanks to this new technology, we can now be faster at incremental changes to improve the quality of your matches on FACEIT. All of this is just the first step and we are very much looking forward to sharing with you more data on how the new matchmaking algorithm is performing and new updates based on this milestone and your feedback.

We are closely following many community channels (Reddit, Twitter etc.) to make sure we are always aware of what are the current main issues you are experiencing and align properly our decision on what projects and areas we need to invest our time and resources in.

Sometimes solutions are easy to find and develop. Other times things can get more complicated and actual solutions for a problem can require much more time and resources (especially for general and complex areas such as gaming infrastructure, toxicity, smurfs, cheating, matchmaking quality and so forth). That said, we are always striving to bring more updates by investing into new technologies and solutions to improve your experience on FACEIT.

Thanks for reading this post and we are looking forward to meeting here again in the next few weeks to share with all of you other important projects we are currently working on regarding toxicity, smurfs detection and few other new exciting features we are currently working on.

Announcing Krunker Ranked Season 1 and the launch of the Open Beta!

Dear Krunker community! We are excited to announce that we are officially entering open beta! Ranked Season 1 launches in Europe, North America, Asia, South America, and Oceania tomorrow at 16:00 CET / 10:00 ET.

We would like to extend a warm family hug to everyone who participated in the closed beta. We made many significant improvements with your help, and we promise to continue working hard to improve your experience during open beta, so keep the feedback coming!

We can’t wait to share all of the exciting new features and news we have around the corner, but for now, let us present what Season 1 has in store for you… 🔥🐉

In this blog we’ll go through:

Welcome to the Season of the Dragon

‘’ Season of the Dragon’’ is the official name and theme of Ranked Season 1, which will take you on an adventure to slay dragons, discover rare treasures, and get richer in KR than ever before! It begins tomorrow on December 3rd, 2021, and will officially end on February 3rd, 2022.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have enough budget to do CGI dragons, so you will have to make do with slaying players instead… Anyway, let’s get to the part where we make you dragon-rich.

Enrich your KR balance

Until the 19th of December, your KR and XP gains will be doubled in Ranked matches. Each player will earn 60 KR per round victory and 20 KR per round loss. For example:

If the round score is 2–0:

If the round score is 2–1:

After the launch promotion ends on December 19th, your KR and XP gains will still be + 30% higher than unranked matches. You will earn 40 KR per round win and 15 KR per round loss. TL;DR: you can keep getting richer and richer.

Enrich your inventory

The Season of the Dragon introduces 36 exclusive dragon-themed items including 5 sprays, 30 weapons skins, and 1 cosmetic. They will only be available during Krunker Ranked Season 1 and will be replaced by fresh Season 2 skins on February 3rd, 2022.

Season 1 skins can be purchased exclusively via the FACEIT Shop with FACEIT Points (FP). FP is the FACEIT platform currency you can earn by playing in ladders, missions, and ranked leagues; more on this later.

Enrich your skill

In Krunker Ranked you will get to improve and challenge yourself against opponents at your skill level. We’ve received overwhelmingly positive feedback from tens of thousands of closed beta testers who told us that they felt significant personal improvement from the competition that Ranked brings to the game.

Season 1 will give a fresh start to everyone. After you finish five placement matches, you will be placed in one of the five divisions:

You will receive a fancy Rank badge to show to friends and foes in matches across the Krunker platform. Your Rank badge is dynamic and will change as you’re promoted or demoted to different ranks.

In other words, the Rank badge is now the best way to tell how skilled someone is at Krunker.

How to earn FACEIT Points

FACEIT Points can be earned by competing in many different activities.

Premium experience

If you wish to support Krunker Ranked and get more out of your matches, you can buy FACEIT Premium. As a reward for your support, Premium players gain access to special features and extra rewards:

Premium players also unlock exclusive features to improve their Ranked Matchmaking experience, including:

Click here to browse all of the premium benefits.

Gameplay improvements

Last Tuesday in our Chat with Community blog, we shared some things with you that have been fixed, some of our plans for future improvements, and more information on hot topics that you gave us feedback on during the closed beta.

We are excited to share some new improvements we made to the experience in the past two days that will go live today and tomorrow for the Season 1 launch:

Ranked league improvements:

Match balance improvements:

As always, thank you for reading, and thanks for being a part of the Krunker Ranked community

Enjoy the grind, and keep the feedback coming! ❤

Launching the FACEIT Developer Portal

Throughout the year, the FACEIT team has been working hard to bring to life the FACEIT Developer Portal and a set of tools for all the amazing developers that have been contacting us to integrate their apps with the platform.

Today we are finally able to release a first set of tools that incorporates most of the feedback from the early testers and enables many of the experiences these developers wanted to build.

We’re just getting started, and have many cool tools for developers coming in 2018. Stay tuned and if you want to join the fun we are hiring!

These are the tools we are launching for developers:

App Studio

App Studio is the section of the Developer Portal to create and manage apps that use FACEIT APIs and other developer tools. Through the App Studio is possible to obtain API Keys for officially supported FACEIT APIs unlocking access to competitive data, social features such as real-time chat and also push notifications for upcoming events and live updates from faceit.com.

App Developers — Case Studies

We are happy to showcase a first set of Apps using FACEIT Developer Tools. These partners and developers have been early adopters of our Developer Tools and designed valuable experiences for their users by merging FACEIT data and features with their core services.

Plays

Plays has implemented FACEIT Connect (OAuth2) for account linking and FACEIT APIs to retrieve specific match info by player_id. This way all video and media content produced by Plays users who connected their FACEIT account are tagged with FACEIT metadata and automatically added to players profile pages. (plays.tv)

ZNIPE.TV

ZNIPE.TV has implemented FACEIT APIs and Webhooks. A real-time notification is sent by FACEIT to ZNIPE.TV servers as soon as a CSGO FACEIT Pro League (FPL) is ready. ZNIPE.TV receives the POST with match details, it connects to GO TV and renders a high resolution video of the match. All media produced are then tagged with FACEIT data and posted back to FACEIT for automatic publishing. (znipe.tv)

TF2 Pro League

TF2 Pro League has implemented FACEIT Connect (OAuth2) and FACEIT APIs to run a global Pro League for TF2. All matches are played on FACEIT in specific Hubs for different countries and skill level, created and managed by the TF2 Pro League organizer. All statistics for matches, players and teams are retrieved from the FACEIT Data API. (tf2pl.com)

FACEIT Connect (OAuth2)

We are providing FACEIT Connect to allow App and Game Developers to implement account linking and single sign on to FACEIT users.

Based on the OAuth2 standard, FACEIT Connect offers the possibility to:

Data API

We made FACEIT data available through the FACEIT Data API. This means that all data from players, teams, competitions, organisers, statistics etc. are available as standard RESTful resources in JSON data format.

Example uses of the FACEIT Data API include:

Click here to explore and live test the new FACEIT Data API.

Chat API

We made available a new set of API, namely the Chat API, to allow developers to create apps that interact with other users through chat messages.

Developers can create FACEIT Chat Bots that have the same qualities as their human counterparts: they have profile photos and names, they exist in the FACEIT community, they can be direct messaged or mentioned, they can post messages, and they can be invited to public and private channels.

Webhooks

Webhooks are POST messages from FACEIT to third-party servers. Developers can configure REST endpoints to receive real-time, live notifications from FACEIT.

We are starting with a first set of push events mainly focused on the lifecycle of a match, such as

We are going to add many more webhooks over the next weeks and we will post an update using these pages.

Widgets

Developing and writing code is fun, but sometime you just want a simple way to embed FACEIT data into a website or blog. No complexity.

For this purpose we made FACEIT Widgets, a collection of HTML/JS components that you can easily embed into virtually any web application.

You can use the Web Widgets Configurator to pick and configure web widgets and get HTML embed codes. Copy, paste and you are done.

Join the Community of FACEIT Developers by registering here on the Developer Portal (developers.faceit.com).

Developer Forum

Get in touch using our new FACEIT Developers Forum with your thoughts and suggestions about how we can continue to improve.