Valve has stepped up its anti-cheat measures and issued almost 95,000 bans in the last week alone.

In July 2017, we reported that on 6th July Valve banned over 40K Steam accounts for cheating, making it the single largest banhammer the company had ever deployed.

Emphasis on "had", though.

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A new CS:GO update has blocked players in the Netherlands and Belgium from opening containers - the game's version of loot boxes.

Valve's change comes after both Dutch and Belgian authorities declared some in-game loot boxes were gambling and warned publishers to remove them from games or face the consequences.

In April, the Netherlands' gaming authority looked at the loot boxes in 10 games and found four contravened its Betting and Gaming Act. It did not publicly name the games in question.

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It seems the Netherlands' threat to prosecute video game companies over loot boxes has claimed its first victim: Valve.

Players of CS:GO and Dota 2 in the Netherlands were today greeted with a message from Valve saying the company had pulled item trading and Steam Marketplace transfers for both games.

Valve said the move was in response to the Dutch threat to prosecute video game companies who failed to alter their game's design by 20th June after it found some loot boxes were gambling.

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Hot on the heels of the Netherlands declaring loot boxes are gambling and therefore illegal, Belgium has had its say.

The Belgian Gaming Commission looked at Star Wars Battlefront 2, FIFA 18, Overwatch and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and found only Star Wars was not in violation of the country's gambling legislation - and that's only because EA stripped out the game's loot boxes after its launch debacle.

It determined FIFA 18, Overwatch and CS:GO's loot boxes are a game of chance and so are subject to Belgian gambling law. Battlefront 2, at the time the investigation was conducted, did not have loot boxes, so escapes unscathed.

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I have no idea how dunking a bunch of 20-somethings in a hole in a frozen lake helps pro esports organisation Fnatic find a new Counter-Strike: Global Offensive academy team, nor how watching a largely unfit group tackle a kind of special ops obstacle course helps their cause, but it's cringingly fun to watch. And that, I suppose, is what Season 2 of CSGO reality show Gamerz is all about.

Gamerz whittles CSGO applications from all over Europe (this is the Euro edition) into two teams of six players, then moves them into a house together for 20 days, and peppers them with various challenges in addition to playing the game. Over the course of the show, underperforming players will be turfed out and replaced by new challengers entering the fray.

There's a new episode every day, in addition to live lunchtime practices, and Episode 3 airs today. Episode 1 follows the gang, which includes two UK players - ardiis and neph - as they meet each other, do the military exercises mentioned above, and settle into their new house. It's all a bit contrived and awkward, naturally, but settles in Episode 2 when the two fresh teams get down to business in a best of 30 CSGO match.

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Counter-strike: Global Offensive has a new matchmaking system which takes into account your behaviour across Steam - not just in CS:GO.

Valve's new system assigns every player a hidden value, known as their Trust Factor. This score is derived from how you have played CS:GO - whether you have had reports lodged against you for cheating, for example - but also your activities in other Steam games.

In a blog post explaining the system, Valve said it deliberately avoiding explaining what other activities it was monitoring that would be folded into your Trust Factor value.

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