How to Activate Prime Matchmaking and How Does It Work with Trust Factor
Learn the benefits of Prime, Trust Factor, and how to activate them.
Having a Prime account is becoming more and more crucial to be able to have a good time while playing CS:GO’s Matchmaking. Enabling it on your account allows you to avoid other players with new accounts and with VAC bans if they registered their number to an older account with a ban, even if it was not a CS:GO ban.
To avoid having new accounts with this system enabled, there are some requirements for it to be successfully activated:
- To be eligible for Prime Matchmaking you need to at least be Lieutenant Rank 21;
- You also need a qualifying phone number (some carriers and VOIP numbers are excluded – you’ll get a notification if trying to apply with a non-qualifying number).
Important to note that you can only upgrade one account with the same phone number.
How to Active Prime Matchmaking
Activating Prime is really simple. Once you have reached Lieutenant Rank 21, you will receive a notification in your CS:GO Main Menu telling you about “Prime Account Matchmaking”. Click on more info and you will be guided through the process.
It’s a really simple process that will involve you adding your phone number and confirming it afterwards.
That’s it – you now have access to Prime Matchmaking!
Trust Factor – What Is It?
In November 2017, Valve introduced a system that aims to improve matchmaking for well-behaved players in the long term. It’s a very complex system that uses different sources of information to improve the game experience to the dedicated and non-flaming player.
Valve didn’t give away all the factors that determine our Trust Factor score, but instead gave some hints on what is used:
- The amount of times you have been reported counts towards that score. Reports for griefing are believed to have a greater impact;
- Whether you have a phone number registered in your CS:GO account or not (Prime);
- The time you have clocked in CS:GO;
- Even time you spent playing other games in your Steam account influences the Trust Factor score.
Valve also said that they’re always aiming to improve this system, meaning that some factors that may influence your Trust Factor score today may not have in the future and vice-versa. It is also not possible to look at your personal Trust Factor score, similarly to Matchmaking Elo.
Trust Factor also works with Prime, meaning you can have both systems to work in your favor while searching for a Matchmaking game. I’ll talk more about this along with my personal experience later in the article.
How to Improve Your Trust Factor
Improving your Trust Factor score is simple, but also a long-term objective. All you need to do is, according to Valve, to be a positive member of the CS:GO community. That includes, but is not restricted to, not team-killing on purpose, insulting, flaming, and any other thing that could have a negative impact on your teammates (losing excluded, of course).
One important thing to have in mind: playing with teammates that have a lower Trust Factor than you will NOT lower your score, but the match will be based on the lowest score present in the lobby instead of your own. Every time you start a queue with someone that has a lower Trust Factor than you, you will be notified in the chat. There are two different messages: one displayed in yellow showing which teammates have a slightly lower score than yours and another displayed in red showing which teammates have a significantly lower score than yours, if any at all.
Being a system that works behind-the-scenes and as not all of the variables are known, there are always some unanswered questions. Valve have prepared a FAQ that may answer some of those questions – you can read it here.
My Personal Experience
I’ve been a Prime Matchmaking user since day one. Although not an infallible system regarding cheaters, it really does help to reduce the ones you find in your games. I highly recommend using it as soon as you unlock it.
But to be completely honest, I haven’t found Trust Factor to be a better system than Prime – in fact, it seems worse to me. I know I have a higher Trust Factor than average because messages in lobby always point to my teammates’ being lower than mine. Even when playing Solo Queue, I find myself having a better experience when selecting to search exclusively for Prime Matches – disabling this way Trust Factor.
My thoughts on Trust Factor is that is has what it takes to be an amazing system, but it will take time to become one, because it depends on learning with the way people play as well with being tuned by Valve. Please have in mind that this is my opinion at the moment of writing this article (June 2018) – my opinion may shift in the future as the Trust Factor system gets better and better.
Even without the implementation of Trust Factor, players should always strive to maintain a positive attitude while playing CS:GO. Doing so contributes to players having more fun and thus getting more engaged to the game and the community, getting it to grow even more. Basically, you should do your part to contribute for the continuous growth of Counter-Strike. There will always be those players that do everything to ruin our game of choice, but it is up to us to ignore them and let Trust Factor and VACnet do its work.
Get out there and have fun!
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