For a long time, CS:GO has been a target for cheaters. If you die in this game, you remain
DEAD until the next round, making a kill in this game more meaningful than in games where
you immediately respawn. Plus, in CS:GO, bullets don’t always go where you’re aiming. You
have to learn a different recoil pattern and bullet spread for each and every weapon, making
the game incredibly difficult to master. Both of these things make it an excellent
target for cheaters. Even an unskilled player will gain a huge advantage by using them,
and will quickly frustrate and upset the enemy team, especially when trapped in a match with
them for an hour of their lives. This all makes CS:GO very appealing to cheaters.
Even before it was made free-to-play.
And yet still, for a long time, the game’s price has been seen as a deterrent to potential
cheaters. CS:GO has always been cheap- at $15, it’s a lot less than most games are.
But having to spend at a bit of money on a new account every time you’re banned, it
puts up at least some kind of barrier against cheaters.
But now the game’s free to play, a lot of people have seen this as Valve opening the
floodgates, drowning the game in cheaters. If it’s free, then what penalty is there
for using hacks? What’s stopping everybody from spinbotting and ruining the game for
others? I do not work for Valve and don’t have access
behind the scenes to the stats and figures, but I’m going to talk about the anti-cheat
measures still in place, and why making the game free to play won’t necessarily make
your experience any worse.
For a start, how effective was the price as an anti-cheat measure? Some gamers may not
have a lot of money, and to those, the concept of splashing out money on a new copy of the
game every week, month, or whenever you get caught, must sound like an effective deterrent.
But is it? Price may deter a certain type of person from
cheating, but it discriminates. There will be many poor gamers who won’t cheat, and
many rich gamers who will. Making the game cost money isn’t a magical solution to the
cheating problem. I have spoken with cheaters who have revealed
an extensive black market of hacked and discount accounts. To them, buying new accounts may
not exactly be fun, but it’s NOT costly for the amount of enjoyment they get from
the game, and is far from being a penalty big enough to stop them from cheating.
In fact, rather than being about cost, it’s something else. I believe there are 2 kinds
of cheaters: those who don’t mind being caught, and those that do.
Take me, for example. I don’t want to be banned. The cost of buying a new copy of CS:GO
wouldn’t be an issue. For me, my reputation is more important. As a CS:GO Youtuber, with
a 14 year-old account and hundreds of friends, games and achievements unlocked, being banned
for cheating would be CATASTROPHIC! It wouldn’t matter if a new CS:GO account cost me 10,
100 or 1000 dollars. The impact on my reputation would be more painful than having to buy a
new copy of the game. I don’t cheat. You’ll have to take my
word for that. That and my consistently mediocre K/D ratio. But there is a kind of cheater
who is similar to me, in that they don’t want to be banned either. They’re the cautious
type. You won’t see them spinbotting any time soon! I’m talking about the sort who
use subtle cheats to gain a slight advantage. They want to pass as a good player! And to
them, their reputation is worth something. Probably enough for them to spend money on
a good, undetected cheat of some kind. Making the game free to play won’t matter to them.
They don’t intend to use a new account any time soon.
Making the game free does encourage a certain type of cheater, though- the sort who doesn’t
care if they’re caught. The kind who uses publicly available, free-to-use, blatantly
obvious cheats! They cheat with the sole intention of DESTROYING the other team and making them
rage. To them, the cheats are the reason to play. And they have nothing to lose by being
banned. There will be skint players like this, and there will be rich ones. Making the game
free will increase the number of players like this… but… so what. You’d only care
if you’re being put in a match with them. As long as they’re kept separate from you,
it doesn’t matter if there are a million of these players in the game!
And that’s what Valve has done. They realised that cheating isn’t about cost, it’s about
intention. And making a system that separates these players based on how much they care
about their account is more effective than any financial barrier would be.
Years ago, they implemented The Trust Factor. How it works has been kept as a bit of a mystery.
It looks at your account and tries to work out how much you care about it. It might be
the number of games you’ve got on it. It might be the playtime. It might be how old
the account is! It might be your friends and what kind of players they are. It’s likely
a combination of all of these things. But I believe its use is to silently split the
community in 2. The obvious cheaters are put in one category, and the innocent players
and subtle cheaters in the other.
I’m not going to cover the subtle cheaters much in this video. The best hope we have
against spotting these is VAC. This is Valve’s traditional anti-cheat method. It gets a lot
of criticism for not being that good, but it’s as good as the people who update and
maintain it. If they go wild one month and add lots of new, active cheats to it then
it’s going to be good for that particular month. It’s an ongoing project and will
always lag behind the latest cheats being used to some extent. But it will at least
quickly and accurately ban older cheats. Free and publicly available cheats will quickly
be added to its database, so the people using these on their new, free accounts will be
detected by VAC within a matter of hours, if not minutes. Any ban delay will only be
to lure them into a false sense of security in the hope of attracting more potential cheaters
into using them before the jig is up and they’re all VAC-banned in the next wave.
I have a lot of respect for this kind of cheat-detection system. Some other games use invasive anti-cheat
measures, or ban people because something on their PC looks a lot like a cheat. But
there will be false-positives with these- and I think that’s a bigger problem for
a cheat detection system than one that lets some slip through! An automatic cheat detection
system should never ban innocent players. At least with a VAC-ban, there’s a near-perfect
100% chance that you were cheating. And then of course there’s the overwatch
system, letting you report players you suspect of cheating to go through a community-driven
judging process. I don’t know what ties this has to VAC and trust factor, I suspect
at least some but I don’t blame Valve for remaining quiet about it, since the more they
reveal the easier it will be for cheaters to exploit the system.
So, we’ve established that the game separates obvious cheaters from the rest of us. And
that there’s VAC to hopefully spot the subtle cheaters. But what is there to deal with obvious
cheaters who want to try and slip in to games with the rest of us?
The answer to that is effort. Valve deems your time as being a more efficient deterrent
against cheating than having to spend money is.
The Trust Factor takes time because you’ve got to show that your account means something
to you. But in addition to that is Prime. In order to get into matches with other prime
players, you must either spend money on your account, OR you can now grind your free account
to level 21, which will take hours of gameplay to reach. I should probably calculate how
long at some point. Even if you ultimately intend to cheat once you reach prime, you
must first grind through hours of games without obviously cheating- which will already result
in better matches for the people you play against on your way to Prime!
For those keeping track, having Prime and the Trust factor effectively splits CS:GO’s
player base into 4 categories. All of these are protected by VAC and overwatch, but Prime
and Trust Factor offer EXTRA protection against cheaters. The best is obviously to have both
Prime AND a high trust factor. But how to get there?...
…With the new free-to-play system, you can reach it completely for free, IF you’re
willing to grind. This is going to be most difficult if you’re on a new Steam account,
since you’ll have to prove to the game that you’re trust-worthy, all the while grinding
up the levels in CS:GO in order to reach Prime. Although I don’t know the inner workings
of the Trust Factor, I think it’s safe to say that by investing enough time into an
account, you’ll eventually obtain both Prime and a High Trust-Factor, all without spending
a single penny! It may not be enjoyable, but I like that this is possible- it will make
CS:GO’s most cheat-proof matches accessible to the players who deserve it, even if they
haven’t spent any money. But of course, you can speed this process
up by buying prime. That doesn’t give you immediate access to the most secure servers!
You still have to prove to the system that your account is worthy of a high trust factor.
But money does serve as a way of bypassing some of the most cheat-ridden parts of CS:GO,
for those who deem the skip worth-while. And then of course there’s the overwatch
system as well, which is a whole extra layer on top of everything else, but I don’t see
the need to cover that in depth in this video. In conclusion: I think CS:GO becoming free-to-play
reflects Valve’s idea that there are better ways of separating cheaters from the non cheaters
than a simple financial barrier of entry. They must believe the benefits of making the
game free out-weigh the problems that free-to-play cheaters might cause. And they must have enough
trust in the game’s other systems so as to believe that honest players won’t have
their games ruined by free-to-players. I felt this video was necessary because so
many have argued the opposite, and I don’t know what these claims are based around, other
than the idea that cheaper games result in more cheaters. I feel it is important to understand
the anti-cheat measures the game has in place before making such claims. It still has the
trust factor, prime, VAC and overwatch. I believe that all these combined lead to CS:GO
being more cheat-resistant than almost any other multiplayer game out there, to the extent
that making it free to play won’t make much of a difference. And may actually help the
game in many other ways.