To do this, they developed a “trust score,” which utilized “Naïve Bayes” machine learning algorithms to determine if a player was likely to cheat. Valve thought that one alternative to banning cheaters was to instead reduce their impact on players who wanted to play fairly. Pathways to Just Digital Future Watch this tech inequality series featuring scholars, practitioners, & activists Exhibit 3: A typical user comment found on CS:GO’s Steam forum expressing dissatisfaction with Valve’s existing anti-cheat program. Cheating complaints represented the bulk of negative comments. negative (red) complaints on the CS:GO steam forum. Exhibit 2: The chart above shows positive (blue) vs. These challenges created a “treadmill of work” for Valve developers, so they turned to machine and deep learning as potential alternative solutions (McDonald, 2018). Second, because banning was such a serious offence that can have huge customer satisfaction implications (banned players lost access to content that they paid real money for), Valve had to be 100% sure that someone was cheating. First, VAC required Valve developers to write thousands of detections to find individual cheat programs, but once the cheat developers got wind of new detections they just modified their programs accordingly. Valve already had a mechanism in place called Valve Anti Cheat (VAC) that was used to detect client-side modifications and ban users that were utilizing these modifications form using their system (, 2018), but they were struggling to keep up with the developers of the cheats. Exhibit 1: The user interface that a player would experience in a game of CS:GO.įrom 2016 through the first quarter of 2018, despite generally positive reviews, Valve received an increasing number of complaints on their forum (Exhibit 2), most of them related to general dissatisfaction with the rampant cheating occurring in the game (Exhibit 3), to more specific accounts of cheaters using “wall-hacks” (being able to see through walls to easily identify where you opponents are) and “aim-bots” (a cheat that gives you 100% shooting accuracy without having to aim with your mouse). Players have credited it’s skill-based, deep gameplay ( Exhibit 1) with it’s long-term success however, this “skill-based” aspect was challenged by an increase in the perception of cheating within the game. 5 format with 49 officially recognized tournaments that had a combined tournament prize pool of over $5.7 million in 2017 (, 2018). CS:GO is also played competitively around the world as an “e-sport” in a 5 vs. At the peak of it’s popularity in 2016, CS:GO boasted 850,000 concurrent players on Steam (Statista, 2018). Counter Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) is a popular online first person shooter game released by Valve in 2012.
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