It was a simple idea that could have had a sizeable impact on the match-making scene if it wasn’t immediately circumvented by bad actors; now Counter-Strike: Global Offensive‘s matchmaking has gone from bad to almost completely unplayable.
There are rampant cheaters at all levels of the title, regardless if you’re Gold Nova or Global Elite, and they’re running around with relative impunity thanks to the newest anti-cheat measure that Valve pushed out recently, adding an additional layer that was meant to help stymie said bad actors.
Trusted Mode was pushed out, intending to block third-party applications from interacting with the CS:GO executable. This, in turn, would limit the number of cheats that could get by Valve’s competitive first-person shooter and turn the matchmaking into a better overall experience.
Users that launch Trusted Mode get a boost to their Trust factor; a behind-the-scenes score that Valve uses to automate how likely one is to cheat or grief other players.
This boost, while intended to encourage users to opt into the program, has instead boosted the Trust rating for cheaters, meaning that they are now running rampant in every tier of competitive Counter-Strike play with little recourse offered to actual players other than to opt-out of the experience for a couple of months.
Being that the trusted launch was circumvented within the first fifteen minutes of the beta, cheaters are now using Trusted Mode to place higher, ruining matches that would previously be a bit cleaner than they were prior to the Trusted Mode.
The entire experiment fell flat on its face within minutes of the beta, and now cheating is somehow worse than it has ever been across a wide medium of ranks.
A frustrating blow for the player base of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive that just wants to log in and click on some heads; meanwhile, other third-party applications such as ESEA and Face-It are having far fewer issues with cheating.
Valve is officially competing against third-party matchmaking services for the legendary Counter-Strike title, and they’re losing in a very impressive manner.
The community is begging Valve to offer more intrusive anti-cheat measures to keep matches competitive; versus the blowback Riot experienced with Vanguard, which also seems to have failed as two of the highest-ranked players in North America were allegedly manually banned.
The oft-touted notion that ‘there will always be cheaters so just accept it’ is a far cry from what many are hoping to experience when hopping into a fiercely competitive title such as Counter-Strike. It’s starting to look, however, that there’s simply no hope of playing clean matches in the near future.
