Dealing with CS:GO Free to Play and Addressing Toxicity in Matches
By: Ronald Pompa
Tags: Esports, Changelog, Gaming, Community

Hey everyone,

It’s almost Christmas and over the past few months we have been working on a number of things related to the new CS:GO update and your feedback on behavior and toxicity on the platform.

TL;DR

Non-Prime accounts forced to use AC client after first match

Faster bans for cheating & smurfs

More aggressive FBI system based on reporting

Improved stacking bans for repetitive abuse

Next steps on dealing with toxicity

CHANGES LINKED TO CS:GO BECOMING F2P

Since CS:GO has changed to free to play we have been seeing some concern around the impact this could have on your experience on FACEIT.

We’re excited about the new updates and believe this will bring the game to a new audience.

We do understand that this also opens up the door for potential increased abuse which could lead to a worse experience on the platform. Therefore we have decided to implement a couple of changes to protect current users.

The first step involves enforcing the Anti-Cheat client on a significantly larger player base. Today any new user that i) doesn’t have prime status enabled, ii) has a low amount of hours played or iii) has a relatively new Steam account will be automatically required to use our Anti-Cheat client.

This will significantly improve our ability to detect i) cheaters and ii) smurf accounts trying to take advantage of the F2P version to circumvent bans.

Additionally, we have implemented a number of changes that will lead to faster bans of these accounts, to make sure that they are taken care of within a few matches, as well as better detections of multiple accounts and cheaters. Since this change, the amount of automatic daily bans on new accounts has risen by over 3x.

ADDRESSING TOXIC BEHAVIOUR

For the past months, we’ve been closely listening to the community’s feedback on abuse, talking to you directly about problems around toxicity, especially in CS:GO.

We want to ensure that playing on FACEIT is an enjoyable experience and we have started working on a number of potential solutions, some of each we are ready to announce today.

The first thing we did was recalibrating our current system. The current reporting & FBI (“FACEIT Behavior Index”) systems have been built with the purpose of automatically detecting certain toxic behavioral patterns and taking immediate actions to correct them (i.e. ban / warn the specific user).

So far, the system has been really good at detecting and banning players that showed consistently negative behavior towards teammates and/or opponents, but it has always been lenient towards players that may simply have had a bad day.

That said, we noticed that a lot of complaints were not linked to consistently toxic players, but rather the latter category of one-off and part-time offenders.

Following this update, the algorithm has been updated to take this into account and will start targeting users more aggressively.

To share some insights with you, in November alone we had over 650,000+ reports for abusive behavior.

Based on the previous system, approximately 25,000 corrective actions would have been issued, which would have targeted the most toxic users. The new system instead has resulted in over 90,000+ corrective actions, as it targets a wider range of behaviors.

Daily Corrective Actions to prevent & punish toxicity increased by 3.5x since the changes

IMPROVED STACKING OF BANS FOR REPETITIVE ABUSE

A notable change is that we have now improved our systems to give harsher punishments to players who often show abuse on the platform.

If you tend to dodge or leave matches often, you will get longer bans for each abuse.

NEXT STEPS

What excites us most is that we’re ramping up development of new systems to learn and find more effective methods of detecting abusive behavior and taking actions against it.

Our goals for this are to:

increase certainty of identifying and punishing all toxic behaviors (i.e. a player that is toxic in a match should always know they will receive a ban the same way they would for leaving a match), decrease the time it takes us to identify toxic behavior, and change the corrective actions in a way that maximizes the incentive for players (either by making it more painful for toxic players or by making it more pleasant for positive players).

We will continue to share more updates on that as we go.