Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has a new Beta to deal with cheating

While Team Fortress 2 is dealing with racist bots, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is dealing with cheating and there's a new Beta out now.

In a blog post on the official CS:GO website, Valve mentioned their ongoing battle to reduce the amount of cheating found in the popular free first-person shooter. CS:GO will now "significantly" restrict the number of external applications and files that can interact with it. How they described it sounds like it mainly affects the Windows version but obviously a reduction in cheating benefits anyone playing across Linux and macOS too as well.

Testing it out today, the Beta appears to work fine on Linux. Valve said there's a 'Trusted Launch' option in the settings you can turn on/off but it "may temporarily impact your trust score". When looking in the Linux build, it appears under 'Secure Launch'

For developers of third-party programs that interact directly with the CS:GO executable process, we have added requirements that will impact your software. Moving forward, all DLLs that interact with CS:GO will need to be digitally signed with an Authenticode signature. Additionally, we will block signed DLLs if their functionality interferes with the game in any way. Valve

This latest Beta anyone can opt into on Steam, find it listed as "1.37.6.0-rc1" when you right click on the game and go into the Properties and then the Betas tab.

Considering CS:GO still to this day has some of the best competitive first-person shooter action around, it's great to see Valve continue to make improvements. While it's clearly over the massive player boost it received in the last few months, it's still the most popular game on Steam.

Play CS:GO free on Steam.