The problem of cheaters in any competitive game has haunted players and developers alike for decades. It’s next to impossible these days to find a competitive shooter without cheaters in it. Companies like Valve and Riot have developed advanced anti-cheat systems like VAC and Vanguard respectively to curb cheating in their games. While both of these anti-cheats do a decent job at keeping cheaters in check, a portion of cheaters still continues to slip through undetected, ruining the games for legit players.
In an attempt to strengthen the battle against cheaters, on July 8th, Valve introduced a new form of anti-cheat in CSGO called “Trusted Mode”. This Trusted Mode would automatically block most third-party programmes from interacting with CSGO unless they were licensed by Valve. While the aim of this update was to prevent cheating applications interfering with the game, this mode also triggered many false positives and blacklisted popular streaming softwares like OBS and other genuine software like Discord, Overwolf or Spotify.
However, even after a few weeks have passed after the Trusted Mode update, players are continuing to complain that cheaters are still haunting their matchmaking games quite regularly. Videos of matchmade games and Overwatch cases showing blatant cheaters are still found every so often on platforms like YouTube, Reddit and Twitter.
Twitter user “XperiaFPS” has asked CSGO to “fix” their game while attaching a video of one of his competitive matches where both his enemies and his teammates are clearly seen cheating. He said in his tweet, “This is my first game this morning & had a full team cheating & a guy on my team start Spinning. Not to mention the team kill at the start & the guy on Palace having an anti-aim to flick me away from him. Fix the damn game.”
While players still have the option to opt for other third party matchmaking services with separate and stricter anti-cheat systems like the ESEA or FACEIT, the fact that even the Trusted Mode couldn’t fix the cheater problem of the game is indeed ruining the reputation of CSGO as one of the top competitive shooters of this age.
