Valve waited until I was on holiday to launch a game-changing update to CS:GO.
So while you were all playing Austria, Biome and Subzero…
I was staring at this mushroom.
Or something.
SO!
Update.
It seems as though the casual gamemode is being used as a kind of ‘beta testing’
for potentially competitive maps.
And Austria has been deemed worthy!
It has been promoted from casual to competitive.
Canals has been demoted to casual.
Shipped and Insertion have been removed entirely and replaced in the casual map pool with Subzero
and Biome, which are both defuse maps which I have previously covered.
Subzero is FMPone’s latest project which he spent over a year on… and Biome was featured
in, and won last year’s Mapcore competition.
These are 2 of the most visually pleasing community-made maps released in the last year
in my opinion.
But I’m sure they also play well.
Subzero has received a few changes since I covered it earlier in the year, so as always
the best way to check them out is to play them for yourselves.
The SECOND big update is to the game’s economy.
In competitive mode in CS:GO, the more rounds you lose in a row, the more money you’re
given at the start of the next.
The first round you lose gives you $1400, then 1900, 2400, 2900, then finally 3400 dollars
for each round lost after that.
After you win a round, this is reset and you start the whole loss ‘reward’ from 1400
dollars again.
BUT this has been changed for the first round of every half- and not just the second half
like I keep hearing people saying.
Lose a pistol round and you immediately start the next round with 1900 dollars as the loss
bonus.
As an example: say, for the pistol round, you buy Kevlar and a decoy because you waste
money like that, you’ll have 100 dollars left.
Say you then lose the pistol round like normal without getting any kills.
Before this update you’d have started the next round with 1500 dollars.
But, thanks to this update, you’ll have 2000 to play with instead.
And get this: say you choose not to buy anything second round, and fail to kill anyone, you’ll
start the 3rd round with 4400 dollars- 1000 more than you’d have in the same situation
BEFORE the update!
This change will help the losing side to get back into the game sooner by providing them
with significantly more money, and therefore options for the subsequent rounds.
This will lessen the importance of pistol rounds.
I did a video just over a year ago where I talked about this- before the update, if you
won both pistol rounds, you had a 68% of winning the entire match, and just a 23% chance of
losing it.
For so many games to be determined by just 2 rounds can bring about a few problems.
One such case would be cheating- imagine you wanted to cheat but didn’t want it to look
too obvious.
You could sneak them on just for these 2 rounds every game and it would tip the odds nicely
in your favour, without looking too dodgy in overwatch since for the rest of the rounds,
you’d be playing normally.
But even without cheating, it’s debateable whether so much should depend on just 2 rounds
being won.
Back when Physicaque did the original research that led to the 68% figure, Valve responded
saying that there wasn’t any evidence that pistol rounds were more decisive than any
other round.
But have made this change any way.
Note this loss bonus only occurs in competitive play.
Casual mode always rewards you with 2400 dollars for a loss and 2700 dollars for a win.
As if these changes weren’t enough…
…They’ve changed a load of the weapons!
The SG553 has had its price dropped from 3000 down to 2750, and the AUG has gone from 3300
to 3150 dollars.
This means they’re now just a 50 dollar premium over our favourites, the AK47 and
M4s respectively.
So although they perform the same as they did before, you’ll no longer be financially
punished as much for opting for them over the normal choices.
It’s hard to gauge what difference this will make in competitive play- though it has
been a few days since the update so I should probably load up a competitive match in a
bit and take a look.
Honestly, I would have been interested to see what would have happened had they been
made 50 dollars CHEAPER than the AK and M4.
Would it have reduced CS:GO to a rabid, broken mess?
Perhaps it’s just as well I’m not in charge of making these changes.
As well as these changes to the rifles, the tec9 has been buffed and the CZ, kind of nerfed.
With the tec9, regardless of whether you’re stood or crouched, recovery time is shorter,
making sprays more precise.
It remains relatively terrible so you’ll still want to fire single shots, but if you
do panic and fire a load in quick succession you won’t be punished as much.
For tap-firing, the CZ has also been improved a tiny, little bit.
But it’s also been made a lot worse for spray-and-praying… which is surely what
we all buy it for!
Whether we want to or not.
Previously, the first 4 bullets sprayed would all land very close to one another in the
recoil pattern, but now you’ll have to control the spray pattern if you want these first
4 shots to land roughly in the same place.
I SAY roughly because even before the update, random bullet variance would result in a messy
4 bullet spray, no matter how precisely you countered for the recoil pattern with mouse
movements.
Thank you to Slothsquadron for these demonstrations of the spray pattern, before and after.
There’s also a cool new option in the audio settings that we should all care about: VOIP
Positional.
If enabled, teammates will now be heard speaking from the direction they’re in, relative
to your position.
I think this is really cool.
It means that when they shout ‘I NEED HELP’… just run towards where their voice is coming
from!
Or away, if you’re a bad teammate.
Not as much need to look at the map to find their whereabouts any more.
This is a very nice, simple and intuitive change that I wish I had thought up first.
Apologies if this video is later and briefer then you might like- I swear they wait for
me to go on holiday before releasing the most juicy updates.
You can thank me in the comments section below.
OR ON TWITTER!
Which I also have.