The new hotness coming from Valve has had many users excited as to the possibility of finally hopping into competitive matchmaking servers and experiencing a fair fight against other players that simply enjoy the title.
Top laughs were had, as users queued into matchmaking today and found that the biggest application blocked from CS:GO wasn’t cheats; it was the perennial favorite Open Broadcasting Software, better known colloquially as OBS.
Which is a shame; OBS is a big favorite to use in the streaming world with its transparent development, accredited to it being open-source, and Counter-Strike is similarly a favorite title for many users to stream on a daily basis.
Yet OBS has reached out multiple times, and can’t seem to get their drivers signed by Valve to allow for interaction with the CS:GO executable; despite a workaround being developed in the first hour that the anti-cheat layer was added, it admittedly seems a bit unnecessary to need to use workarounds for transparent software used to stream the title.
Meanwhile, many cheaters are still infecting the platform.
It’s a frustrating case, but the Trusted Mode which recently launched was never meant to be a fully-formed anti-cheat that would bring the technology to the next level. Instead, it’s an additional layer that has been added to make cheating a bit more difficult in the title.
If they have a whitelist that can contain OBS, they haven't reached out. Our DLLs are signed and are whitelisted by most standard anticheats.
— Matt (@WizardCM) July 9, 2020
This isn’t the only game to suffer from bots and scripts coming from Valve, either: Team Fortress 2 has been an unfortunate breeding ground for many bad actors to try their scripts out while servers crashed again and again: an issue that took Valve over a month to collaborate on and finally solve for the remaining TF2 population.
Granted, this is the first official roll-out of the security layer, and it’s likely that there were going to be a couple of issues from various sources; it’s unfortunate that OBS is affected, but some applications were bound to be.
Community Moderator for OBS, Matt Gajownik, stated on Twitter that OBS is readily recognized by most standard anti-cheats, and Valve has yet to reach out regarding the proverbial whitelist that would allow OBS to run in tandem with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.
If you’re suffering from making OBS work with CS:GO, you can run OBS in a window capture mode and place CS:GO in a borderless windowed mode, which will allow you to stream until all of this is sorted out.
To the credit of the CS:GO community, many are taking this well in stride, with many asking for even more invasive anti-cheats to be rolled out by Valve in the near future to help keep the matches competitive.
