Well, it was no surprise that CS:GO was going to be 'free to play' regardless of its effect on the game, considering their huge profit increase after they did the same to Team Fortress 2, and neither was the community's quite negative reaction to it.
To be honest, I can't say I have observed an increase in the amount of cheaters when playing with prime enabled and a high trust factor. There were always many cheaters in this game and there probably always will be a lot of cheaters since the developers hardly give a s**t about this fact. (Hah! I even heard some theories about them selling hacks themselves, banning some every now and then, just to sell new ones thereafter)
But turn off prime and you will see the huge amount of hackers. It is ridiculous. You won't be able to find a single game without cheaters. I dare you, create a new account and try it out, it's free... By making this game free to play they turned every non-prime game into a playground for cheaters to try out whether their new hacks work and stay undetected or not and frankly it's quite depressing to see how poor Valve's Anti-Cheat system is, because this applies to every other part of this game.

Well, it was no surprise that CS:GO was going to be 'free to play' regardless of its effect on the game, considering their huge profit increase after they did the same to Team Fortress 2, and neither was the community's quite negative reaction to it. To be honest, I can't say I have observed an increase in the amount of cheaters when playing with prime enabled and a high trust factor. There were always many cheaters in this game and there probably always will be a lot of cheaters since the developers hardly give a s**t about this fact. (Hah! I even heard some theories about them selling hacks themselves, banning some every now and then, just to sell new ones thereafter) But turn off prime and you will see the huge amount of hackers. It is ridiculous. You won't be able to find a single game without cheaters. I dare you, create a new account and try it out, it's free... By making this game free to play they turned every non-prime game into a playground for cheaters to try out whether their new hacks work and stay undetected or not and frankly it's quite depressing to see how poor Valve's Anti-Cheat system is, because this applies to every other part of this game.