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Valve Instituting Steam-Wide "Trust Factor" System For Counter-Strike: GO Matchmaking
The only thing Valve loves more than money is algorithms and they have figured out a way to apply said algorithms to help lessen the wild west that is Counter-Strike: Global Offensive cheating.
The new "Trust Factor" system that Valve has announced today looks at your behavior in all Steamworks-enabled multiplayer games, like Left 4 Dead 2 or PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds or DOTA2, and decides what group of players you should be playing with in Counter-Strike. In other words, if you're reported a lot for cheating in other games, or generally just being a toxic player, you get matched up with people who have similar dossiers.
It's sort of like an actual game of Battlegrounds but no one wins.
So what criteria will you be judged on? Valve isn't saying."We’re not providing the list of factors in the Trust Factor matchmaking system for a few reasons," the developer writes on their blog. "We don’t want players to have to worry about any particular action while they’re playing CS:GO or other games on Steam."
Valve also explained that they're constantly tuning, adding, and removing criteria from the Trust Factor system, so a published list would, in their eyes, be pointless.
Back in 2016, Valve instituted Prime Matchmaking, which let players at level 21 or above give their phone number for verification to enter a special pool of approved and verified players. Players who were Prime verified have a higher Trust score from word one, but since that score is not displayed anywhere, it's anyone's guess what exactly that means.
[Source: Counter-Strike: GO Blog]
Our Take
Valve's hesitance to surface any of this leaves me ill-at-ease, but hopefully it is a lot more broad than it sounds.
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