Valve trusts the Trust Factor. Maybe more than you do. I don’t think any of us were
expecting another game-changing update just 24 hours after the last. Yet here we are.
Trust-Factor has been used to judge how trust-worthy player accounts are, then used to put low-trust,
toxic or players suspected of cheating in matches together, away from the rest of the
community. This is to try and make matches a more pleasant experience for those that
are deemed ‘good’ players. But some people don’t have a high ‘trust’ in this system,
because I regularly get messages from players who claim to have unfairly been branded with
‘low trust-factor’, thrown in endless games with hackers and griefers. To them,
the Trust Factor is a shocking display of dictatorial power being used to curb free
speech, and literally what AI did to that guy in 2001 a Space Odyssey.
Of course, there’s nothing I can do about this. I don’t know who you are or what kind
of player you are, and of course I’m not going to get messages from people for whom
the Trust Factor is working as intended.
Valve has said in the past that the system errs on the side of caution- in that you’re
more likely to be a bad player put in good matches, than you are to be a good player
put in bad matches. But again, no way I can vouch for this. It’s just what Valve has
said.
And this new update says more. ‘Matchmaking has been adjusted to increase the weight of
Trust Factor.’ So bad players are going to have worse games, and good players are
hopefully going to have better ones. This also means that, while you might not, Valve
has confidence in the system! Up till now it’s been in some kind of muted ‘beta’
testing stage, but it’s now been fully unleashed! You really won’t want to be put into a low-trust-factor
experience now. If you feel you have, Valve tells you to email
them with the title ‘Cheating in High Trust Matches’ and a link to your profile, the
approximate time of your match and the gamemode you were playing. So please, stop contacting
me about it. Another long-requested feature is the ability
to report players from demos! Before, you could only do it during the game that you
were playing. The temptation was to report people ‘just in case’, because otherwise
you might replay the demo and realise they were cheating and you had missed your chance
to report them. But not any more! There’s now less urgency. Less reason to
report people during the match itself, which should hopefully reduce the number of overwatch
cases with false-positives. But what about this? ‘Overwatch users should
experience significantly fewer obvious spinbot cases.’. I don’t know what this means
exactly. Maybe it will require fewer people to judge these cases as guilty. Or maybe it’s
now left to Valve’s AI-powered servers to detect and to judge these cases, leaving overwatch
for the more nuanced, less obvious examples. It’s worth reminding people that Valve have
hundreds of servers analysing each and every match of CS:GO that has been played, scanning
for suspicious behaviour and mouse movements- which should quickly detect spinbots. But
it does mean that at least one game will need to be played before this system can kick into
action. If spin-botters are being banned during their first game then there’s more going
on than meets the eye.
Trust Factor has already had a major impact on Counter-Strike. I believe it enabled the
game to go free-to-play. The old belief was that games costing money was incentive enough
for people not to cheat and to lose their accounts. But clearly, that wasn’t the case
because cheating has always been a problem for the game. There would always be bad people
with lots of money who didn’t mind buying new accounts. Rather than use money as a disincentive
to cheating, they’ve chosen to use the Trust Factor. Sure, you can play the game, no matter
how badly you behave! It’s just that you won’t get a nice experience unless you play
by the rules. And from this day moving forward, that’s more the case than ever before.
But it’s worth re-iterating: if you think the game has given you the wrong trust-factor,
email them with the info they need. This isn’t the only thing that’s changed
in today’s update. That new buy menu that was added yesterday was a bit controversial
because of how it teleported your mouse to the centre of the buy wheel. But today the
option’s been added to disable the cursor-teleporting, so those with thousands of hours of muscle
memory can happily cling to their older, inferior method of buying weapons.
And for some reason they’ve added another to disable the OPTIONAL buy buttons, which
I see absolutely no point in myself unless you’re accidentally mashing your keyboard
with your potato-like fingers constantly, or have wasd bound to 1234 or whatever. Stupid
option. But it’s there if you’d like it! Buying a Mac-10 will no longer CRASH YOUR
GAME. So that’s nice. And they’ve ‘optimised amount of models
loaded for agent scenes in UI’- so I assume previously it was loading them all and swapping
in the ones needed, but now it just loads the ones that are needed.
Dangerzone has been given this nice vacuum-y effect when you pick up certain types of items,
which feels – in equal parts- intuitive and terrifying. Here’s a nice slow-motion
of armour mimicking a headcrab. Half-Life 3 confirmed.
And the para-drops now have a chance of dropping lots of money instead of a weapon. How much,
you ask? I got $2250. Those big money blocks are $650 each. I guess this is kind of disappointing
if you were hoping for an AWP, but it does mean that even if you have a weapon you want
to keep, there’s still a reason for going for these drops, as extra ammo and equipment
is always handy. And as well as this, the 15th week of operation
missions has been launched. There’s never been a better time than now to load the game
and to get 200 kills with the UMP on Dust2.