Trust factor FAQ

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Content

Introduction
What is trust factor?
How can I check my trust factor?
Does pellix lower my trust factor?
Does feature X lower my trust factor?
What lowers my trust factor then?
How can I improve my trust factor?
Disconnect method

Intro

The purpose of this post is to answer some commonly asked questions about trust factor, such as how to determine your trust factor, what lowers it and what you can do to improve it.

What is trust factor?

Trust factor is a score valve attributes your account, influencing your matchmaking experience. People usually split trust into 3 main categories: green trust, yellow trust, red trust.

How can I check my trust factor?

There are 3 ways to check:

Method 1: Join the lobby of a friend that plays legit and you are certain has green trust

if they get no warning, you are green trust
if they get a warning that says "Your matchmaking experience may be slightly impacted because the Trust factor of username is lower than yours", then you are yellow
if the warning says "Your matchmaking experience will be significantly affected because the Trust Factor of username is substantially lower than yours", then you have red trust

Method 2: Go into the looking to play section:

if you have 20 people with prime you are green
if you have 20 people but 5 without prime, you are higher end of yellow
if you have under 18 people but over 10, you are around lower end of yellow, or higher end of red (trust is more of a spectrum, the exact split is uncertain)
if you have under 10 people, you are red trust

Note: This method is inconsistent in some regions like NA and AS while it is consistent in EU and SA. I have no information regarding other regions.

Method 3: Look at enemy profiles, generally if you are green trust, you will get legit players, with either a lot of service medals (not random medals) or a faceit account, especially at high elo (20k+). Red trust will generally have semiragers and similar type of people, you will experience cancelled games etc.

Does pellix lower my trust factor?

No, getting reported does.

Does feature X lower my trust factor?

Not on pellix.

What lowers my trust factor then?

New accounts start with yellow trust, and can easily get it lowered. Only known relevant factors are money spent (confirmed) and if you have at least 1 medal (unconfirmed, although it is confirmed that the total amount does not matter)
Trust factor gets lowered by:

getting reports (main reason, especially in combination to having a new account/ no money spent in the account)
having out of the ordinary stats (unconfirmed)
griefing (unconfirmed, but it might get you reported)

How can I improve my trust factor?

There are a few ways to improve your trust factor:

the fastest way is just adding money to your steam wallet from external funds (we are speaking about around 300$ from red to green). Note that I only tested by adding with a debit card, other methods are untested. In order to check the exact amount you applied to your steam wallet, go into Help (top left of the steam client) > Steam Support > My Account > Data Related To Your Steam Account > External Fund Used. No, skins you bought on 3rd party websites do not count. I did personally test this method and it worked without playing any match, I spent 200 euros for this post and I am still green on that account (note that my account already had medals, account age and active playtime, but I do not know if they are required). It does not matter what you spend it on as far as I am aware, most of it is still in my wallet unused (I recommend armory passes though). Some people claim this keeps you in green trust permanently, but I cannot confirm that fact, although it is generally taken as fact.
the free way to improve your trust factor that is somewhat time efficient is losing wingman matches with the disconnect method, the explanation will be further down, because it is too long to fit in this bullet point. I recommend 70 losses to get from green to red, it takes around 4 hours from what I was told. Note, this method is known to give you a volatile green trust factor, which means if you get reports you will lose it again fairly quickly. Honestly if your cswatch.in stats are bad or you keep getting called out, either accept red trust or do method 1.
playing matches completely legit. This is not efficient, you might still get reports, and it might not even work. This might be more fun for some people than spending hours connecting and disconnecting from the game, but I strongly recommend against it if the end goal is to get better trust. At this point, just get a new account to play legit on because you will have to play like that for a long time to actually improve trust anyways.
inactivity. Not playing on an account for a while will reset it's trust factor to an uncalibrated state. This technically improves your trust, but it gives you an extremely volatile green trust, which means your account will be back in red after a very small number of reports (considerably smaller than for method 2).

Disconnect method

Purpose

I would like to start by mentioning I have never attempted this so I hope I get it right. The idea is to queue wingman and lose it as fast as possible, in order to have many matches played with no reports. Although there are no reported bans for this, intuition (and our beloved 270) suggest it could cause manual bans in the future.

Requirements

The account you are trying to boost trust factor on, a 2nd prime account (might work with nonprime but it is untested). If you don't have this, get a 2nd person that is trying to boost their trust factor to help you.
A way of running 2 instances of CS2 at the same time. Some solutions are:

using 2 computers
using Avast sandbox for the 2nd account (I would advise against as it is commonly used for case farming and might get you a vac ban as valve targets farmers a lot)
using a virtual machine for the 2nd account (should be fine)
again getting a friend to help you

Method

Party up with the 2nd account and queue any/all wingman maps.
Disconnect one of the accounts after warmup ends (preferably the one you are trying to do the method on, but if doing with a friend it doesn't matter, people usually do not report you for this, you can alternate who disconnects)
Using the other account, disconnect the moment your round starts to instantly lose it, then connect back. The goal is to finish the match before the 1st account gets a cooldown for leaving the match.
Repeat until you get your desired trust factor (in order to check your trust read How can I check my trust factor?)

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