The Trust Factor

We’ve launched a new and improved method for matchmaking players who are likely to have a good experience together.

Last year we launched Prime Matchmaking with the goal of providing a better matchmaking experience. Initially the system simply matched players who linked CS:GO with a unique phone number. Later, the system additionally required in-game experience (players needed to reach rank 21).

As these constraints were added, the Prime status created a hard boundary in the CS:GO community, and players who might otherwise be perfectly happy playing together were separated.
We’re committed to the goal of getting dedicated CS:GO players together, but we’ve been looking into improved approaches.

So what if the Prime system was re-imagined using a wider range of factors? We started with that question, and have been experimenting with matching players using observed behaviors and attributes of their Steam account, including the overall amount of time they had spent playing CS:GO, how frequently they were reported for cheating, time spent playing other games on their Steam account, etc. We call this system Trust, and these factors considered together form a player’s Trust Factor.

The results of the experiment have been positive. In matches created using Trust Factor, most players ended up generating fewer reports regardless of their Prime status.

We wanted to keep the best parts of Prime and ditch the parts that cause problems in the CS:GO community. Starting today, players will, by default, enter matchmaking using their Trust Factor rather than their Prime status and in the short term, players with Prime status can still choose to match using the old system.