After starting testing Trusted mode in beta in June, Valve officially added it to CS in last night’s patch.
You can use a command line option to launch the game in untrusted mode, but you won’t be able to play on VAC-secured servers and Valve note this will negatively affect your trust score. That’s the complex metric they use to judge how legit a player is, and folks with lower trust scores can get placed into matchmaking queues with other less-trusted people - who are more likely to be cheats or wrong’uns. Some third-party tools will still be able to work with CS:GO if they have signed .dlls, but some seem straight-up blocked. The makers of OBS explain on Twitter that this blocks the software’s Game Capture mode, so “Players will need to use Window Capture with non-fullscreen modes or use the –untrusted launch option if you must play in fullscreen.” That’s not ideal. Some players are also finding they can’t get the game to launch in Trusted mode, and it won’t tell them why. Trusted mode isn’t meant to be a panacea for all CS’s cheating problems; it’s just another tool in Valve’s anti-cheat arsenal. Reportedly some cheatmakers have already bypassed it, which, yeah, that sounds like the endless anti-cheat arms race to me.
