A month ago I made a video about the deagle, asking whether it should be changed. It’s
a shame that some of you used it to call out Woody, who proposed changes to the weapon
in the first place. His post was well thought out and one of the most interesting I had
seen on the subreddit in some time, so thank you for posting that Woody. Please, don’t
ever be afraid of asking questions, or to start debates about stuff. People act all
knowledgeable with hindsight but the reality is, most don’t know enough about it to say
for sure. I certainly don’t; going into that video, I learned a lot. One of the reasons
I make these videos is to learn about the topic for myself. But even then, my video
shouldn’t end the debate. It’s just my contribution to it.
I was just very fortunate to have Slothsquadron there to help me with that video since he’s
the only person I know who DOES know all there is to know about the weapon’s stats. He’s
worked on his own weapon balance mod for the game for years, it’s his business to know
the weapon’s stats inside out. And even then, having that knowledge is only half of
the story. So I don’t think you can ever rule out proposed changes to a gun entirely.
So today I’m going to be the one asking the questions: ‘What price should the M249
be?’. Again, there’s no right answer to this. It might not even come down to what
price it should be, but rather ‘what changes would make it viable’, or ‘what purpose
should it serve in the game?’. But for simplicity’s sake, I’m going to assume that the M249
is perfect just the way it is, bar the price. We’re just trying to find out how much the
gun, in its current state, is worth in the game, in 2020.
…and 2021
In earlier games, the M249 was THE machine gun in Counter Strike. THE gun to get if you
had all the money, and not a care in the world. But for CS:GO, the Negev was introduced and
was more expensive and generally bigger and better than the M249 in every way, overshadowing
the weapon. After all, if you’re going to spend more than $5,000 on a machine gun, why
settle for second best? It’s only recently- (well not recently any
more, it was way back in 2017, where did those years go) that the negev suddenly had its
purpose changed. For those of you who are unaware, the negev is now a suppression device;
you can’t use it like a rifle with lots of bullets anymore. You instead have to hold
the fire button down, waste about 10 bullets before it becomes accurate enough to be useful,
and then for about 11 seconds the bullets will go pretty much where you want them in
a continuous, lethal stream, preventing enemies from passing until you either stop firing,
or run out of ammunition from its 150 bullet drum. All this for just $1,700. A steal for
what it is, but since it’s only good for one very specific purpose, it’s hardly ever
used for anything other than memeing. Though I must admit, when I use it I get more kills
than I expect to.
But where does that leave the M249? It’s kind of weird to think that there’s a machine
gun in Counter-Strike isn’t it. Should it behave like an SMG but with higher damage,
or a rifle but with more bullets? Well, it’s nothing like an SMG. They might
be most similar to it, in terms of ammo capacity, but the M249’s run-and-gun accuracy is SO
bad that there’s no point in comparing it with SMGs, which typically rely on their run-and-gun
accuracy to be any good. And to make up for their low damage… which the M249 doesn’t
have to do! Instead, I think the M249 is best compared
to the Famas! The accuracy values are very similar. It does a bit more damage, a bit
more armour penetration, fires a little faster, and of course, has a lot more ammunition.
But the negatives are that you move a bit slower with it, and it’s worse when running
and gunning. So there you go- the M249’s like a more powerful Famas with lots of ammunition.
So that puts its value somewhere above the Famas’s $2,050.
If it’s priced above the Famas, we’ll need to compare it against the other rifles
in the game. Damage-wise, it’s definitely better than
the Famas. Its combination of high base damage and good armour penetration means a shot will
inflict good damage, regardless of the armour equipped, even dealing competitive damage
at long-range, thanks to its low damage drop-off of 3% for every 500 units travelled.
Against unarmoured enemies, it’s similar to the M4. Against armoured, it gets even
better, behaving more similarly to the AUG. If you’re CT and are looking for one-hit
kill weapons against helmeted enemies, your only real choices with automatic weapons are
the Aug and the M249. Neither of these can one-hit headshot at insane distances, but
the M249’s the best of a bad bunch by being able to one-hit kill up to a range of 390.
Which looks like this. So for that reason alone, it’s worth more than the Famas is.
Let’s check out first shot accuracy- which is very important. It doesn’t matter how
much damage your bullets deal if they miss your target- you want for them to go where
you shoot them! I shot a wall 100 times with various different weapons from a range of
2000 units, which is the sort of distance your typical long-range engagement would be.
This is how the Famas performs. The M249 performs a better than that. But when I show you the
AK’s results, and then the suppressed M4’s, you can see that maybe it’s just that the
famas is bad, rather than the M249 being good. Other than the famas, all other rifles outperform
the M249 for first shot accuracy. Crouching will improve your chances, but even then it
only improves in line with how the others do.
Moving onto 3 shots, this is where things get interesting. THIS is how the M249 does.
It’s not great- the second shot is already noticeably off to one side, and the third
is way out, so if you’re going to burst fire with a machine gun at some one in Counter-Strike
you may be better off starting down and to the left of them slightly. The Famas doesn’t
have the same problem. Firing 3 shots with this might not be too precise, but it’s
a lot more central than the M249’s was. But the Famas’s burst fire feature works
a treat. The first shot in this mode is extremely precise. The second lands just above the first,
and the third’s pretty useless to be honest. Firing 3 shots with the AK looks kind of similar
to the Famas’s burst fire mode really, only with an inferior first- and probably second-
shot accuracy. And last is the M4, just to show the rest up by being a lot better than
any of them. So even with 3 shots, the M249’s not exactly shining.
And now, what about the first 20 shots? From a range of 512 units, this is how the weapons
compare. My goodness. There’s a big difference between
all of these. The CT weapons, like the Famas and M4, have much smaller spray patterns which
don’t require such large mouse movements to cancel out. The M249’s is a lot more
like the AK47’s, albeit a vastly different shape. Let’s swap the CT weapons out for
the scoped rifles.
Still doesn’t look great for the M249, does it. It requires a lot of mouse adjustments
to cancel out its distinct, wavy pattern.
The one time the M249 shoots ahead of the rest is when we compare the first 100 shots…
which none of the other rifles can do.
It won’t come as a surprise to discover that the M249’s function is different to
the other rifles in the game, and shouldn’t be used in the same way. It’s got more bullets,
which is good because you’ll probably fire more before you kill your target. Which takes
more time, and makes the gun less useful because if they’ve got a rifle then they’ll probably
have already killed you.
So, at a pinch, the M249 can do rifle-y stuff, but just not as well as a proper rifle can.
It’s the gun’s other uses we’ll have to look at to determine whether it warrants
a higher price.
The benefit of this weapon is of course its extra ammunition. With 100 rounds before it
requires reloading, that’s a lot of bullets. There will be situations, like when 5 enemies
rush out of B tunnels, where you might run out with traditional rifles before all of
them are dead. This certainly won’t be a problem with the M249! It has enough ammo
to spare that you can happily fire dozens of rounds through the smoke in the HOPE of
hitting something, probing the area for activity, while still having enough left over to shoot
the enemies you CAN see. This makes the M249 an inferior rifle, but one which doesn’t
need reloading. I can imagine B site of Dust2 being a great
place to use this weapon. Or perhaps B site of Mirage, to spray down apartments if the
enemy team smokes them up. I think it’s pretty obvious that the M249 is a more appealing
weapon for the CT’s to be using, since they’ll be able to sit back and wait for enemies to
come to them. And there’s another reason why it’s more appealing to CTs as well:
and that’s because CT rifles are more expensive than terrorist rifles are. Trying to price
the M249 so that it’s useful for both teams is going to be a difficult challenge, since
by the time it’s cheap enough for terrorists to justify using instead of a $2,700 AK, it’ll
be the obvious go-to choice for CTs instead of their $2,900+ rifles. So I think we’re
going to have to accept that the M249, if it’s ever going to be used, will likely
have its uses reserved for CT side, for when they’re sat, camping a site and spraying
at smoke grenades. You know which other gun’s good for this
sort of situation? The negev, with a bigger 150-round drum. It
also has higher base damage, a faster fire-rate, though slightly less armour penetration than
the M249. The kicker, though, is that the negev is priced at just $1700. You could get
3 of them for the same price as the M249! Of course, the negev’s a bit rubbish for
anything BUT spraying down areas, your moving speed with it is dog-slow and its first shot
accuracy is atrocious. So if you’re going down the negev route you’ll want to also
buy a decent pistol of some kind as well, for every other situation you find yourself
in. So that leaves the M249 in an awkward spot:
it’s a bit like a slightly rubbish rifle, but also a slightly rubbish negev. I guess
one way of looking at this is that it’s a flexible weapon that can be used in all
kinds of situations. To wallbang dangerous spots, to prefire corners, and to spray down
enemies when they take you by surprise. But at $5,200, you could have had a rifle, a pistol
AND a whole assortment of grenades instead. Or an AWP. Or an autosniper. This all makes
the machine gun a hard sell, doesn’t it.
I asked Slothsquadron what he’s done with it in his weapon balance mod, and he suggested
dropping its price to $4,000 and upping its base damage from 32 to 35. He’s still not
super happy with these changes though, since it doesn’t address the T VS CT side issues,
but he wanted to keep the changes to the gun simple, and easy to implement. He experimented
with some new recoil seeds as well, but decided against it as he considers the M249’s difficult
recoil pattern to be a valid ‘feature’ of using this weapon, and he didn’t want
to standardise everything for the sake of it.
He also suggested a few other changes that could have been made to it, like reworking
it to function more similarly to the negev, so that all LMGs in the game have the same
suppressive fire role. Or even to make the M249 exclusive to one
side, and the negev for the other, reverting that weapon back to how it used to be, and
then balancing each accordingly against that team’s rifles. The AWP’s the sniper of
choice for people who have the money to invest heavily in a round- why shouldn’t the M249
be the automatic rifle equivalent?
But NO, because this video’s about what price this current M249 should be. So let’s
put a pin in these sorts of changes, and return to the question of pricing.
Historically, the M249 used to be even more expensive- it started its life in Counter-Strike’s
Beta at $8,000! As a real ‘money no object’ choice for players who had cash to burn. It
quickly dropped to $5,500, then sat at $5,750 throughout 1.6 and CS:S’s lifetimes, and
getting a stealthy change to its firerate for Source which might have changed things
a bit. But it’s only with CS:GO that it’s dropped down to $5,200, and I suspect part
of that was the addition of the bigger, badder Negev above it. So as for as its value in
2020… and 2021, I guess, I’m a big believer in letting the community decide the value
of this weapon. Valve should drop its price and see if people begin using it… and then
to raise / lower it accordingly to how popular it ends up being. But not in a rubbish way
like in CS:S. The community isn’t always perfect at doing
this. And they certainly don’t cotton on to things instantly. Remember how long the
SG and AUG sat unused until suddenly they became super-popular when the pros started
using them. So with that in mind, while I think the M249
should be $4,200, I’d be tempted to drop the M249’s price all the way down to $3,200.
Not because I consider that to be balanced, but because that might be what’s needed
to get players out of old habits and to actually try it, in competitive situations and so on.
Only then can we see what kind of purpose this weapon has in CS:GO, in present day.
Maybe I’m grossly underestimating this weapon. Maybe, when priced at $3,200, the M249 would
become THE weapon of choice, and for a few terrifying days, all matchmaking games would
be terrorised by all-M249 load-outs and the unrelenting sound of machine-gun fire every
round. …at which point Valve should quickly raise
the price again until it becomes high enough that it’s still used occasionally, but not
frequently enough to be disruptive. I can but dream.
Maybe we’re looking at this all wrong. As the only people to actually use this weapon
right now, what would CS:GO’s zombie escape community want from the machine guns in this
game?