If you’ve played Counter-Strike: Global Offensive in the past year or two, chances are you’ve met with a cheater or three. If you queue into matchmaking daily, it’s nearly guaranteed that you’ve run across players flaunting their cheats as they spin-bot and wallhack to make themselves feel better.
It’s a constant thorn in the side of competitive games that affect developers, fans, and users alike. Riot opted to go with a mandatory 0-level anti-cheat that had interesting results with their fan base, as evidenced by a seemingly infinite number of posts across forums about how unfair it was. They still had cheaters actively ruining games in the closed-beta.
Developers fighting against cheaters eager to ruin gameplay for others has been an ongoing struggle, and as gaming continues to reach the lowest-common-denominator of the public, the effects of cheating are likely only going to continue to grow.
In the past, Valve has implemented Prime matchmaking to counter Counter-Strike: Global Offensive going free to play, along with trust scores and a veritable load of mechanics that ultimately continued to result in cheaters running rampant in CS:GO.
Just now, Valve has now pushed out a new optional beta branch of CSGO that allows players to run a very strict anti-cheat in their system. The new program greatly limits the number of programs that can interact with the executable, and results in a much higher trust score.
Called ‘Trusted Launch’, it aims to remove large segments of cheats rather than the cat-and-mouse development game that occurs as cheats are developed, and then countered by anti-cheat. Instead, it looks at the root of the cause, which is third-party applications interacting with the Counter-Strike executable.
Valve is asking that players that are interested in helping trouble-shoot the new program to opt into the beta and give it the proverbial whirl.
If applications are found that are attempting to interact with CS:GO, users will be blocked from joining VAC-enabled servers. You can tick the option to remove the ‘Trusted Launch’ option, but Valve warns that doing so will temporarily lower your trust score at this time.
It’s frankly difficult to look at as a bad thing, regardless of how invasive this may be. CS:GO is currently riddled with cheaters, with many users running into multiple cheaters every day, and something needs to happen to stymie the influx of aforementioned LCD gamers looking for a cheap giggle while hiding their cheats.
All that’s left to do now is opt into the beta, and keep your eyes out for the inevitable frustration of players that don’t like the intrusiveness of the newest form of anti-cheat. You can opt into the beta by going here and following the instructions.