The Counter Strike community can be a *little bit* critical at times.
There’s the belief that the game is broken beyond repair.
A flaming wreck that Valve is too busy printing money from to bother to fix.
Or something.
I see a lot of this- people come to me asking to investigate things, or sometimes just to
rant about how bad the game is and how little Valve cares.
I had some one the other day saying it was unfair that Panorama was being forced upon
us.
Really, Valve are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.
But they’ve done a few things that I think are very clever.
Perhaps more so than they appear at first glance.
Let’s take 2 of the biggest problems with the Counter-Strike community: toxicity and
cheating.
We’ve all likely encountered and suffered from these things in the past- and they’re
valid reasons to complain about the game and even to stop playing it.
Which is why I think the Trust Factor and Overwatch are so clever.
Suddenly, the ball’s in your court.
Rather than it being a problem that Valve needs to fix, it’s something that you, yourself,
can do something about.
Which immediately takes the edge off complaints about these things- since the burden is offloaded
onto the person complaining about it in the first place!
Let’s talk through the features in more depth, and the ways in which they may indirectly
benefit the community.
On the surface, Overwatch is a way of handing the ban hammer over to the playerbase.
Watch demos, decide whether or not they’re cheating, press some pretty, clicky buttons
and feel as though you’re doing something about it.
But it’s a bigger deal than just that.
We always wondered what difference reporting somebody in-game made.
Did it do anything?
But hook it up to a system like overwatch… and it makes sense!
Suddenly, if some one’s ruining your game, you feel like that report screen is linked
up to something that COULD make a difference.
Sure, they might have rekt you and ruined your match!
But at least now, you might have a say in whether their level 0 account gets banned.
Suddenly, another bit of the game makes sense thanks to the inclusion of overwatch!
If that person I’ve reported is cheating, then every encounter I have with him is a
chance to prove that to the system.
I almost want him to be blatant.
And if he’s innocent, well, no harm done in reporting just in case.
Don’t bother trying to persuade your teammates that he’s hacking and that your death was
unfair.
Instead, use Overwatch as a late-replay system to give you sympathy and justice!
I also like to think that people report me occasionally, so some poor soul on Overwatch
has to watch a case where he can see how great I am at the game, without cheating at all.
Everybody loves a good ego boost.
The matches are being recorded and stored before being analysed by other humans, and
by cutting-edge machine-learning…
things.
Kind of makes me feel special.
It won’t catch everybody.
But maybe it doesn’t need to.
Perhaps, simply knowing that Big Brother is watching will be enough to satisfy players
that enough is being done about the cheating situation.
That balance will be restored at a later date thanks to that ominous, anonymous ban hammer
in the sky.
It’s like having your own personal Batman, isn’t it.
And if you’re still feeling hard-done by after a match then you can always load up
some overwatch cases to let off steam and to dish out your own serving of justice upon
the cheating community.
And for the cheaters themselves, it’s got to add a bit of anxiety to their experience.
Surely!
And even if it doesn’t stop them from cheating, perhaps it makes them do so less blatantly.
Maybe they’ll turn their cheats down to such a low level that we don’t even realise
they were cheating in the first place!
Ignorance is bliss, right?
At least until VAC catches up, or until Valve tweaks Overwatch to make it even more effective.
And secondly, Trust Factor!
It analyses your account, how you behave and influences your matches accordingly.
Are you meeting lots of toxic, low-trust people in your matches?
…maybe you’re one of them!
Isn’t that clever!
If you’re having a problem, then perhaps you’re part of that problem.
You can see the impact it’s had over on the forums.
If there’s a complaint about cheaters or toxic teammates, it used to become a big circlejerk
about how bad the whole community is.
But now, there will always be someone who brings up their ‘Trust Factor’, questioning
if it’s low, and if so, if it is for a reason.
It’s a way to get us to dismiss complaints about the game.
It’s no longer a big toxic community; it’s US VS THEM, and we’re in this together against
the toxic crowd.
When I see complaints, I think ‘well I’m not experiencing this, I MUST HAVE A HIGH
TRUST FACTOR’ and feel all smug.
I can’t be alone in feeling this way.
Again, I think the consequences of Trust Factor extend a long, long way.
Rather than just to separate people based on trust, it being there might be enough to
make people nicer at ALL trust values.
It may be the thing that stops you from shooting a teammate after they insulted your Mum.
It might be the thing that stops them from insulting your Mum in the first place!
It might even make people say nice things instead.
I can but dream.
Trust Factor adds value to your account.
If you have a high rating, the game you play has acknowledged that you’re a good person!
Suddenly, your account is more valuable than the games you’ve bought and the hours you’ve
clocked up in them.
Now, it’s the thing that separates you from the toxic parts of the community.
Once again, a bit like batman.
Valve could have cracked down on bad behaviour in a more traditional way- but I think the
idea behind the Trust Factor is far more appealing.
It’s deliciously vague, and manipulative.
And I can’t help but love that the worst people are all put in games together.
It could be a reality TV show.
Valve has been incredibly smart with these systems- they’ve thought outside the box
a bit and have invented novel and powerful ways to make Counter Strike a better place.
The reasons you have for not playing this game are gradually being eroded- if at a pace
measured in Valvetime.
So what’s next?
Personally, I hope to see something done about the workshop soon.
It’s now in the state that toxicity and cheating was a few years back.
It’s a wild west of adverts and manipulation.
I mean, what’s content like THIS doing on the front-page?
Oh wait that’s mine.
I HOPE they’re working on something that will fix the workshop, so that things are
rated based on how good they are, rather than how many spambots the developer has to rate
theirs up, and others down.
But better than that, like Overwatch and Trust Factor, I hope it’s something clever and
dynamic that doesn’t just solve the problems the workshop has, but that will also help
to integrate community content with the official game.
To give us a new -and exciting- reason to boot the game up again.
If you like talky videos like this one, then HERE’S one about the AMA that Valve did
last year over on Reddit.
And here’s one talking about VACNET, which is integrated into Overwatch to automatically
select suspicious players to be submitted for review.