CS:GO – Hackers abuse Overwatch and Trust Factor

Counter-Strike has always had to struggle with players trying to cheat. Valve developed tools to fight those dishonest players but now these tools have been compromised.

Overwatch and Trust Factor are two of the measure Counter-Strike: Global Offensive introduced to the game to prevent the spread of cheating. Ironically cheaters are now abusing those two for their own ends.

CS:GO’s Overwatch usually acts a a community-driven tool that allows players to review anonymous replays. Afterwards they would be allowed to judge whether or not a player cheated or griefed in a match.

it’s so bad that if you get matched against cheaters you recognize, you’re not allowed to AFK or else you’ll get reportbotted by them for griefing and then get a 30+ day ban.

This is how @Pimp_CSGO/@fl0mtv got their 30 day griefing bans.

2x griefing ban = Permanent Game ban.

— Haci (@DonHaci) August 15, 2020

But now cheaters have found a way to abuse the system. They utilize a bot mass reporting innocent players, leading to those ending up in Overwatch instead of actual cheaters.

Innocent players get banned

It gets even worse as innocent players have been hit by bans as well. A single round of AFK is often enough to be counted as griefing, resulting in bans. As the occassional AFK is hard to avoid more and more innocent players are receiving griefing bans.

YouTuber Sparkles brought light to the issue as he interviewed a cheater in a video. Said cheater blatantly used cheats in several matches and was still not banned at the time the video vwent public. Sparkles shows the tools that cheaters employ to bypass and abuse Overwatch and Trust Factor.

Anonymity for players in Overwatch has also been compromised. If a group of cheaters is interested in targeting specific players they can easily mass report him.

Using the same exploit cheaters have also employed bots to rate their own Overwatch replays as “innocent”.

Trust Factor does not matter anymore

Valve’s Trust Factor system was initially introduced to separate matchmaking pools between accounts with extended activity and community interaction from new or problematic accounts.

But cheaters have slowly discovered new methods to bypass the separation. Some forge commendations for their accounts, others trade with high value inventories to fake the requirements for high Trust Factor accounts.

The cheater in Sparkles’ video goes as far as to claim that Global Matchmaking with high Trust Factor is full of cheaters.

Until Valve fixes the weaknesses in their systems ambitious players might be better off playing on third party services (like FACEIT or ESEA) with better servers and more invasive anti-cheat software.

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Image Credit: Valve