CS:GO Trust Factor Fixed For Linux Gamers With Mesa Drivers

A few weeks ago we wrote about Mesa 21.x drivers with OpenGL threading causing issues for the "Trust Factor" within the popular game Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Thanks to possible intervention by Gabe Newell, this trust factor issue seems now resolved for allowing these Linux gamers with open-source graphics drivers to play on the more competitive CS:GO servers.

Following the change earlier this year to Mesa 21.0 that enabled OpenGL threading (gl_thread) by default for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Linux gamers began reporting their Trust Factor being lowered. Valve's Trust Factor is their matchmaking system in use for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive for finding gamers to compete against with similar scores. Cheating and other opaque inputs go in to calculating the Trust Factor value for a particular game. Presumably in the case of Mesa OpenGL threading, the Trust Factor algorithms were seeing a differing thread count from what is normally expected and ended up causing the Trust Factor to be lowered thinking it was a possible hack/modification.

Valve contractors working on Mesa ended up disabling the OpenGL threading for CS:GO due to this apparent correlation with gamers TF values being unfairly impacted by this change. But now it looks like Valve has finally addressed the issue themselves.

After one of the affected gamers emailed Gabe Newell himself this week, he ended up getting a response a day later from another Valve Software employee. They believe they have now found the underlying issue and believe it to be fixed.

Valve believes it to be fixed and the latest comments in the bug tracker also appear to point to this CS:GO Linux issue now being resolved so that gamers can enjoy the more competitive gameplay servers.