Today’s update comes with an official blog post about the sticker capsules for the lead-up
to the major later in the year. The sticker capsules are all available from the game’s
main menu. The major itself is exciting as it will be the first major CS:GO has had since
2019 due to the pandemic, so while there’s still uncertainty about whether the event
will go ahead with a crowd and everything, there are at least plans FOR it at the moment,
and it’s scheduled for the end of October which gives the world 9 months to get covid
under control. The latest blog post also details some of
the rules and conditions for teams wishing to get a place in the tournament which I also
won’t be covering in this video, but you’re free to check out the link to it in the description
below. In addition to this, there are several juicy updates to stories from last year. Which
I WILL be covering! For example, last September many coaches of
CS:GO teams were finally caught abusing a spectator exploit which allowed them to view
parts of the map they shouldn’t have had sightlines to- which potentially gives their
team a massive information advantage. The ESIC launched an investigation into it and
many many man-hours were poured into scanning years-worth of match replays in search of
this being abused, some incidents being found stretching years back.
This sort of thing has a terrible impact on the integrity of esports and the reputation
of coaching positions, and today Valve has responded with their own punishments. Coaches
caught abusing the bug have been banned for a certain number of majors depending on how
much they abused it. Those who only abused it a little bit won’t be personally punished,
but some of the heaviest offenders will be banned for life. You can check out how badly
punished all the naughty coaches were by following the link to it in this video’s description.
Given how severe this incident was, how long Valve THINKS it went unreported for and how
many coaches were found to have been using it, Valve has decided to nerf coaches by preventing
them from being in the same room, server or communications device as the players when
online matches are underway for Valve-hosted events.
The next juicy follow-up is to the bot removal incident. If a teammate left a match or was
kicked, they used to be replaced with a bot who could be taken control of by any players
who had already died in the round. Valve removed this- and this was quite unexpected, and seemed
most unfair that a 4v5 was literally just that, giving the team with the player down
a huge disadvantage for the rest of the game. Valve has done 2 things to remedy this. For
a start, when a player disconnects, the game will automatically initiate a 2 minute technical
timeout which will end early if the player either disconnects or rejoins. This is a sensible
step in my opinion since you previously had to use your one timeout in the hope that it
would buy a player enough time to rejoin. So an automatic freeze is a great improvement.
Right now it looks like teams get a maximum of one of these per game, but it would be
easy for Valve to modify this, and the duration of these technical timeouts thanks to the
addition of 2 new console commands controlling these variables.
The OTHER thing they’ve done is to give the team with the player down bonus money.
Provided the player left, and wasn’t kicked, then after 3 rounds the remaining players
on the team with the fewest players will be awarded a bonus $1,000 per round to aid them
in their uphill struggle against the enemy team. This doesn’t feel like such a finely
calculated change to me, but it’s a step in the right direction and if I’m honest
I don’t see a ‘neat’ way of balancing the game once a player has left. But this
is what Valve has chosen to do for now and depending on how these updates play out in
practice we might see other changes to this mechanic in the future.
A small but appreciated feature is that pinging a location now displays the location, which
is great news for players such as myself who struggle to describe wherever I’ve just
seen an enemy poke out from. Thank you to VasaLavTV for suggesting this to Valve.
And in Dangerzone, you can now disable the parachute’s automatic deploy feature. This
didn’t prevent falling damage- but it would automatically deploy once you were falling
fast enough to die upon hitting the ground. But there may be times where you DON’T want
it to automatically deploy, like if you’re being shot and you want to leave it as late
as possible before pulling the cord. In which case, you can now disable automatic deploytion
thanks to the new console command: cl_parachute_autodeploy 0
And there have been changes to Elysion. Lots of them. It’s just, you can’t see any
of them… apart from the fire extinguisher which has had its colour changed from white
to red. This map has not been in the game for long but has already had all sorts of
adjustments to remove clipping exploits, and today’s changes are more of the same. A
LOT more of the same! We’re not talking about a few clip brushes being added here.
It’s clear the developers of this map have had enough of exploits and have gone totally
mad in a bid to clip EVERYTHING off. Just look at these comparisons. This map is now
more like a load of invisible blocks for you and grenades to bounce off, decorated to look
like a real place. Pixel walks, clippings and boosts have been remedied, and grenade
clips have been added to help them to more reliably bounce off surfaces. In my opinion
this map’s latest changes are some of the most boring, since I need to cover it, but
it doesn’t look too exciting without clipovision being turned on, and it’s not like any of
these are big enough for many people to have noticed or to have benefitted from. So because
of that I’m happy just showing these before and after pics and ending the video here.