In July 2015, Valve had issued a warning to the server hosts of the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive community that if they continued to deploy mods that offer players customized skins for weapons, then the company would initiate action.
True to its promise, Valve has now swung the ban hammer on Counter-Strike: Global Offensive servers that are not adhering to specified guidelines.
For the unfamiliar, the breach of the following guidelines riled the developer, prompting it to take action and blacklist the offenders:
• Interfering with the player's access to inventories, items, or profiles.
• Giving falsified competitive skill group and profile rank status or scoreboard coin.
• Letting players have temporary ownership of CS:GO items such as weapons, skins, knives and others.
While opinions on the developer's decision (which will alter the game's ecosystem) remain divided - with many gamers thinking it is not for the better - Valve has made a decision on what to do with the Game Server Login Tokens of players who did not follow the established rules.
"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," notes Valve.
Basically, the Game Server Login Tokens are needed by the operators of the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive to create the servers. Now, because of the ban, operators who aided users in falsifying inventory content face a permanent ban from using the tokens.
This is the first time Valve is taking action against the creation of mods. The developer's action has left many in the Global Offensive community upset and players took to the subreddit page of the game to express their views. Most gamers feel that it was the freedom associated with the custom servers that made them splendid.
Interestingly, Valve has struck off a part one of their guidelines, possibly easing things slightly for gamers:
"To clarify: it is also not acceptable to provide players with custom models and/or weapon skins that do not exist in the CS:GO ecosystem."
Valve's statement is not about a change in policy, but the particular line might be interpreted as such, that's why it was altered, as explained by an employee.
"Innovation is awesome and almost every mod we see is fine. 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," the developer's representative further explained.
