A tweet from the official CS:GO Twitter account
and an accompanying blog post announced that Valve will now restrict
third-party software from interacting with the game in an effort to better
combat cheating.
The short blog post announced that Valve will now block many
third-party applications from running alongside CS:GO, but it declined to
mention the exact type of softwares that will be blocked. The update is
currently live in CSGO’s beta. Developers say that while users can disable
the option, players who choose not to block the un-named programs will have
their trust factor lowered.
The beta will ‘significantly restrict’ the number of third-party
programs and files which are allowed to interact with the game, thus reducing
the likelihood of cheaters running any sort of cheating software in the
background. In case a player runs the game with these types of restricted
programs, they’ll receive a warning after launching the game which will
indicate the name of the blocked file and will be prevented from joining any
VAC-secure servers. To fix this issue, players can choose to disable the
‘Trusted Launch’ which can be found in the in-game settings, however doing so
might temporarily reduce the trust factor of the player, as mentioned by the
devs in their blog post.
CS:GO’s ‘trust factor’ is an indicator that Valve uses to root out
suspected cheaters. No one knows exactly how Valve calculates a player’s trust
factor, but the developer has revealed that it is based on a combination of
account age, reports against users, and playtime. An experienced player who
creates a new Steam account to play with their lower-ranked friends, for
example, will likely have a low trust factor. Low trust scores act like what
some call a ‘shadow ban’, meaning that accounts with low trust will only be
matched with other low-trust accounts. But it can’t be denied that the
developers have started to make their titles cleaner!
