Back in July, Valve went around to the operators of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive servers asking them to "stop providing services that falsify the contents of a player's profile or inventory" - which basically meant to stop providing players with access to items that aren't in their inventory or they weren't skilled enough to have access to yet. They noted that they'd be watching to see if further action would need to be taken. Now it has.
A few days ago server operators began to notice surprise bans of server login tokens and led to a large Reddit thread where July's message was recalled and people began to wonder if the warning had included custom weapon models, which had been thought to be allowed. Some of the servers did report that they had left some of the forbidden plugins sitting in directories, but they were inactive and disabled ones. Valve seems to have decided to draw a line in the sand.
“In January 2016, we permanently disabled Game Server Login Tokens belonging to server operators that were providing free or paid services that falsified the contents of a player’s profile or inventory. The Steam user that generated the tokens is now also permanently restricted from creating new GSLTs,” it wrote. “A new Steam user account associated with a new qualifying phone number will be required to create new GSLTs. To avoid future disruption game server operators are best advised to comply with CS:GO server operation guidelines described above.”
Valve has since clarified that custom weapons are allowed, only those plugins that allow players access to things they shouldn't have have been disallowed.
“Innovation is awesome and almost every mod we see is fine,” the rep said. “Our only concern, as the community correctly understands, is with mods that specifically misrepresent a player's skill group/rank or the items they own.”
