Being a competitive game, customisation in CS:GO is a dangerous thing. It’s not as
bad as in some games, where you can spend money on statistically better equipment- that’s
pay to win, pure and simple. But even Counter-Strike’s cosmetic items can change the balance, one
way or another. Everybody seems okay with gun skins. They
still do the same damage, fire at the same speed. It’s just that one looks like a gun
and another looks like pic’n’mix. Or a wall from Tron. Or a million laughing, demonic
faces. They cost money, but won’t make you play better. OR WILL THEY?
What if a scout skin looks like an AWP, tricking an enemy into mistakenly picking it up at
the end of the round? What if the custom skin is used for camouflage in certain spots on
certain levels? It doesn’t seem like the community has a problem with this. In fact,
we idolise the brightest and flashiest looking weapons, even though they’re more likely
to give away our position than a lowly desert camo one would.
As you probably know already, when Operation: Shattered Web shipped last week, it came with
custom player models. This is the same concept as a custom weapon skin, but also different
for a number of reasons. For a start, it’s bigger. It changes your
whole player model. It’s no longer just a tiny bit of what you look like. It IS what
you look like. As the target that enemies spend all game trying to locate and shoot
at, your appearance is important. Suddenly, all the players on a team have gone from looking
similar, to potentially all looking completely different from one another.
Or maybe they’ll all choose the EXACT same skin, which teams used to deliberately do
in older games because then enemies wouldn’t know how many different characters were poking
out from cover one after another, provided they deliberately poked out one at a time.
Also, unlike the weapon skins, these player models aren’t just a texture change- they
also use different models, and thus, have different outlines. Even if care is taken,
this is inevitably going to happen to some extent. But it’s something they deliberately
avoided doing with the custom weapon skins because they wanted to keep readability high,
so it does seem strange that while they deliberately avoided it with weapons, they’re okay doing
it with character models. But because they’re different shapes from
one another, some player models will be concealed in spots where others won’t be. Thanks to
their weird sticky out bits, some could unfairly give their positions away. Zool posted a fantastic
video where he compared the size and shape of all of the models against one of the default
skins. Just so you know, their hitboxes are identical- it’s not like choosing a skinny
character will make shots miss that would have hit a fatter character!
But while hitboxes are the same for all of them, visually, some are definitely more compact
than others! And last and most importantly… some models
are a lot better camouflaged than others. Here are some examples where a custom skin
has given a player an advantage over using the standard player models. This reddit post
shows several examples where they’re next to invisible when stood in certain spots on
Cache. Even though the player’s stats are the same, surely this could still count as
pay to win? The way the community has reacted, it’s
clear that they’re not happy with it! Videos have been shared showing players dying to
enemies they can’t see, just because they had been wearing these custom skins. ESEA
has just announced that they’re banning custom skins from play. This isn’t a problem
that’s just going to go away. Valve will need to do a lot more than just to brighten
parts of their maps to fix this (Which is what they tried in an update at the end of
last week)- plus how long will this go on for if they manually have to change bits of
their levels every time bad visibility is reported somewhere? It will take years, and
many games will be ruined along the way. I get the feeling that these map changes were
done just as a temporary measure to show that Valve were acknowledging the issue, and maybe
to see if these sorts of changes would be enough to satisfy the community. But I don’t
think it is. Plus the problem isn’t just with Valve-made maps- EVERY map for the game
will need to be thoroughly tested with dozens of different coloured models in all possible
locations. It just isn’t feasible, nor should it be expected of map makers to have to do
this simply because Valve rolled out custom models.
So what should Valve do next? They could admit defeat, and remove custom
skins completely. But I seriously doubt this will happen. Trying to do away with stuff
with monetary value is a bit like putting the lid back on Pandora’s box. And it’s
not how they’ve dealt with things in the past. When the Howl skin was shown to be plagiarised,
Valve didn’t just remove it- they changed it and gave it a special category so as not
to punish the players who had already bought it. It ended up rewarding them, sending the
value of the skin to the moon. So I think there’s got to be a compromise.
There have been suggestions that you should only be able to see custom skins on your own
team, or that there should be an option to disable them completely for the players who
care. Maybe more tournaments will start requiring players to use default skins.
I still don’t know how good any of those options are though. Being able to force them
off defeats the purpose of custom models in the first place and will limit their popularity
and value- 2 things Valve will consider important. Plus, why go to that effort to get a rare
skin to make your friends jealous when they can toggle it off with the flick of a switch?
Also, it seems a shame to remove a feature that comes with its own perks. It will be
rewarding for fans of the competitive scene to be able to identify which player they’re
looking at simply from the skin they’re using. Next up they should scan in the faces
of pro players to make it more personal when rain sneaks up on Stewie, or when Smooya teabags
KennyS or whatever. I hope Valve will come up with a cleverer
solution than just to disable the skins or to manually update specific areas of their
maps whenever someone is unfairly killed there. Maybe they’ll change the colours of the
problem skins. Or maybe they’ll add an optional feature to add an outline to players, to make
characters ‘glow’, or -my personal favourite- to give them higher contrast lighting than
their surroundings in some way. That to me sounds like a Valve-esque solution, since
it would improve visibility on ALL skins to a higher level than ever before in the history
of CS:GO, ensuring that custom skins would only serve the cosmetic purpose they were
intended for in the first place. But until then, it’s clear that custom player
models give you an advantage in certain spots on certain maps. Judging by how much commotion
this has caused, it shouldn’t be long before something is done about it. Valve, pls fix.
And add a colour-blind mode while you’re at it.
Also check out Zool’s playermodel comparison video here. Thanks to him for doing the hard
work, so I don’t have to.