My red 2022 service medal is from retakes, a lot of retakes. 1000+ extra hours of retakes. It took a long time but it was doable and hard to do but I did it 100% legit. I also played retakes in non-prime if that matters to you. Of the 5 accounts starting the retakes at least one of them was always non-prime. just made it easier to not take space from players wanting to play who actually bought the game.

TL;DR
I spent almost 6 hours a day 6 days a week getting UP TO 86 xp per retakes game (after getting reduced XP) for most of November & December 2022 to get my Red service medal legitimately without using automation hacks or cheats. 100% manual. With 7 exp boosts from Operations. I logged this with a google doc to help figure all this out and track things.

When valve released the steam deck around july 2021 I had an idea. What if I filled a retakes server and I could get XP faster. Then I had a better idea. Why wait till the steam deck? Buy some old computers and do it now!

When I finally got things together sometime in early September 2021 I had 7 of my computers with 7 accounts holding the spots. Mostly older laptops and HP Z420s with old graphics cards running CSGO in windowed mode. Type +left; +right; in the console for the space holder accounts so they don't get kicked. This is a manual process or a launch command in CSGO (it doesn't work in CS2 they would get kicked now)

I figured out that in retakes you can get 250 xp per game by getting 63 points or more before reduced. The goal was to get this done. Kill the last terrorist after defusing the bomb gets more points. After the reduced xp this 250 xp became 44 xp per game. I found that by avoiding playing dust2 or Inferno The game time was under 5 minutes, ~4.91 minutes each full speed. I quickly realized that 44 was not the max reduced exp per game from what was originally 250. That 250 cap did NOT APPLY when in reduced EXP. It would be a while before I could figure out how to turn that into the full 88 xp I ended up with.

This was great. I would spend about 5 minutes playing retakes while chillin and get there faster. I was spending about 2 hours a day playing this type of CSGO.
Then after watching the Stolkholm major I ran through my bandwidth cap. I upgraded to faster uncapped fiber then I noticed something. Sometimes I could get 4 terrorists. I added one more computer and would put this extra computer in there to hold the place when It happened. I went through the rest of 2021 getting a bit more than normal but the plan worked. I was left with a pink service medal on December 25th 2021.

I started 2022 with the goal of another pink service medal 20k exp per week 20k * 52 weeks is 1.02 million exp you need 1 million for the pink service medal. no problem!
I was spending ~132 minutes getting to reduced exp then another ~587 minutes per week to get that total to 20k exp per week. I then realized it didn't matter that I got 20k per week, just needed to get to reduced every week then AVERAGE 20k per week. my spreadsheet helped me out. So some weeks were heavier than others.
In july 29th 2022 we had a breakthrough. By this time I had 10 computers, well 8 computers and 2 steam decks. I had 4 TERRORISTS per map reliably! This was huge. I figured out how to somewhat reliably get those 5 terrorists per map. This meant 65 xp per retake map.

After this I figured out what Retakes was. It was cut down Casual mode. So it was actually a 10v10 Valve game server that was mostly limited to 3v4. But the checks for how many terrorists didn't happen correctly so if the terrorists all joined at ~the SAME TIME then I could get 6 terrorists in there for a total of 88 xp per map with a perfect map, 86 if imperfect. I bought gaming keyboards to align them so I could use my two hands to press 1 on 4 terrorist keyboards at the same time. This would usually leave 1 or 2 open slots for a 5th or 6th terrorist. If they didn’t join that they would just spectate.

So at this point I tried to amp it up. I spent quite a bit of time. Through the end of October to December. The most time I spent from my records seems to be 35.35 hours (2121 minutes) across the 7 days between Wednesday 11/16/22 to Tuesday 11/22/22 for a total of 39048 exp that week.
Edit: let me break that week down for you. Subtract the ~134 minutes for the first 11167 exp. So for 27881 exp I spent ~1987 minutes. Estimating 5 minutes per retake about 397 retakes averaging ~70 exp per retake map session. I was not able to reliably get 6 terrorists in the game. only 5 reliably. Which means a max EXP per game of 76xp (4 pts for defusing the bomb while terrorists are alive and killing the 5 terrorists before round end 14 pts per round * 8 rounds per game = 112 pts when you get to kill that last T after the game actually ends, do this by queuing up a headshot on the last T while defusing the bomb. It was not consistent. So usually 74 exp even though 88 was possible when 6 Ts were in the game. 88 is double the 44 you should get if 250 was reduced xp properly.

This is to add context for how possible this was to manually do. Yes I did take short breaks for food, bathroom & laundry but remember I figured out its 4.91 minutes per map retakes when going full speed. So there could have been more retakes than 397 there. But if it was more retakes then it was lower xp per map. I stopped tracking how many retakes and only used the Game session time from Steam overlay to track since tracking individual retakes maps was tedious.


By December 24th 2022 I was burnt out. I had been sitting too much and developed some issues in my legs. So for 2023 the plan was the base exp and nothing more. Play other games and don’t bother getting much more than reduced. I would still probably end up with the Blue service medal. 52 weeks * 11167 xp per week is 580k EXP of the required 600k for Blue, so bump it up to 11538 for the average and things would be fine.

Little did I know how much trouble my red service medal would bring me.

In all, the red service medal cost me at least $3000 in extra computer hardware, mostly that is the two steam decks, 5 older computers and gaming keyboards I needed that I didn't already have that all fit on this extra table. But it cost me much more in my health and was not worth it. Also this false Overwatch game ban doesn’t help the mental at all.

Valve please remove my CS2 game ban.
Thanks
-Kosh