Valve has just come forward with more anti-cheat tech for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. This is the so-called “Trusted Mode”, which does not allow any third-party software from interacting with your game. And that is not all! Trusted mode also stops some legitimate software such as Nvidia Freestyle graphics filters and even a few modes in OBS, which is a tool for streaming and for capturing. Well, we hope that the issue will be fixed in future patches.
Trusted mode was tested in the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive beta last month. The update was now part of the patch that just went live yesterday. The game is now able to restrict the both the types of files and players that interact with the game on a regular basis. Players will launch the game in Trusted mode by default, thus blocking third-party files from interacting with it. The result is that, if you run a third-party app or something else that is not allowed, you will get an error on your screen and be prompted to restart the game with all the third-party apps blocked.
Of course, you can simply use a command line option to start up the game in a so-called untrusted mode, but that will stop you from playing on servers secured by VAC and, even more, Valve will write this down and drop your trust score. They use a complex measurement to rate players ranked by trust, so people with a lower trust ranking will be matched together with other people that have a low score.
Apparently, some things will work fine with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, but only if they have some signed .dlls in the game. Some, however, seem to be completely blocked. In the case of OBS, that is because the software’s Game Capture is blocked by Valve.