I recently started playing CS2, about maybe 4 weeks ago to play with my friends who are all long time players. They informed me that my Trust Factor is orange which worried me a bit at the time but I didn't think much of it as I was entirely new to the game and figured the system just didn't have any info on me and was suspicious because of that.
Now it has dropped to red and I have no idea why.
I have googled around a bit but none of the factors mentioned seem to really apply to me:
I don't cheat and never have in any game, I shouldn't even have any software installed that could even potentially be suspicious as Vanguard (from playing League) would instantly nuke my PC. I don't play nearly good enough for people to suspect me of cheating either.
I'm not toxic at all, I rarely type in chat aside from the odd gg or drop pls or whatever. I'm also rather shy so I avoid the voice chat, I try to communicate useful info but I find I rarely have anything useful to say as a new player.
I don't grief, int, kill my teammates or have ever even once left an ongoing match or even disconnected or had a crash of some kind. Sometimes I do hit my mates during firefights, maybe an odd molly or stray bullet when somebody walks into your crosshair, it happens, but not often enough to be out of the ordinary. I've seen it happen to other players with some regularity too.
3.1) The only thing I could think of for this point is maybe some tilted players might report me for griefing when I was just playing poorly due to being very new and having almost 0 experience in competitive shooters as a whole. I have had games where I'm bottom fragger with like 5 frags and a death almost every round sometimes when the enemy is just plain better, but I also regularly have >10 frag games where I'm sort of middle of the pack. (I play in low silver btw, on most maps I'm around Silver 2-4).
I have Prime and my Steam account isn't new, 10 years old in fact, my Counter Strike download is just fresh. I don't use my steam account super regularly and have maybe 2 dozen games on it some of which have a couple hundred hours but I don't log in that often outside of recently for CS2. I'm not banned on any other game on steam aside from a potential online ban in Dark Souls 1 - and even that's uncertain, I never cared for the pvp or online aspect of fromsoft titles - 10 years ago for installing mods, but there's no way that explains it. My steam lvl is 10 which isn't high but again its not a new account with no play time either.
I exclusively play with my friends and only play "competitive" and sometimes the odd wingman while we wait for another player to come back. My friends are all experienced players that used to play in high elo around 8-10 years ago, maybe the system thinks I'm being "boosted"? They have a high trust factor too which is why they're being told by the game mine is low. I play almost every day, around 1-3 matches, 4-5 on weekends.
I have a VPN set up on the entire home network for security and privacy, which I guess could affect it by switching my IPs, but its never been an issue in literally any other game. It's also never cited as a significant factor anywhere. It would also be very stupid of Valve to make that lower your trust factor as it is a very basic safety feature many people have. It doesn't change my country or region either. Its always an IP within the same region I am in in my country. It doesn't affect my ping or connection stability whatsoever either, not in other games either. It's not a "set IP to india to get games for cheap" situation.
At this point I feel like Valve is just rage baiting me, they do nothing about cheaters but just a new player gets hit with a low trust factor through normal play.