Valve is an infamously ‘quiet’ company. It doesn’t look like they do much, but sometimes
they make a game. And they claim to lurk about on social media, watching what’s happening.
But they seldom get involved, preferring to be a fly on the wall, simply there to observe
the community in its natural habitat. Once in a blue moon they comment, often leading
to many upvotes and much fanfare. You can see a compilation of Valve comments here.
As well as this, I believe they also skulk about on Youtube, watching me and my 4 brothers’
content. I can’t say for sure, but I believe certain
things have been added to the game following my suggestions, like improved clipping on
Dust2’s stairs, and HRTF audio just months after I moaned extensively about how terrible
the surround sound was in the game. And of course, in the next few months, a number of
new disability features will be shipped to aid those with impaired vision and hearing…
WON’T THEY, VALVE. If you’re lucky… like, VERY lucky, then
you might even get your name featured in the patchnotes when you help inspire change. In
the whole time I’ve been cover CS:GO content on this channel, I’ve been mentioned…
once. What I’m trying to get across is, firstly
how great I am, but also that Valve does listen. And there’s been recent proof that they
are STILL lurking and listening.
Just the other day, Birkir posted on reddit about a problem with Valve’s HRTF audio.
As you know already, HRTF audio more accurately simulates surround sound, making it easier
to distinguish whether a sound is coming from behind, above or below you.
Birkir discovered that a command had been added ‘which allows HRTF to more closely
match the perceived direction of a sound source as seen by the actual player behind a monitor’.
Here’s the crazy part- by default, it’s set to play sounds as though your ears are
100 units behind your character in-game. I’m pretty sure you’d quickly realise in real
life if everything was playing as though your ears were 8 feet behind you, but apparently
this seems just fine in CS:GO! PROBLEM IS, you were free to change the value
to whatever you wanted. You could have it set to 0, 100 or 1,000 units behind your head.
Or if you want to know what sounds are being played in front of you, you could set it to
a negative value which transported your ears to in front of your position! That’s like
the audio-equivalent of wallhack! Birkir even posted an example of this in action.
In my opinion it’s a bit confusing to use in practice, but that’s okay cos you can
bind 2 buttons to gain momentary super-human hearing before returning it all to normal
again. Just so you’re aware of the limitations:
it’s not REALLY like your ears are however many units are ahead or behind you. It seems
to keep the same volume as they would be from where you’re actually stood. So if a sound’s
out of range of your player’s viewmodel, it still won’t play, no matter what value
you set it to. But it WILL change the direction it appears to come from, and will reduce the
muffle and distortion effect, which could make certain quiet footsteps easier to hear
than they would be from your actual standing position. And with practice, it would make
it easier to pinpoint where distant sounds are coming from.
So I think you’ll agree, it was still an exploit that needed fixing!
So Birkir emailed Valve in August, notifying them of the bug, how to replicate it and detailing
out why he thought it could be a problem. Here’s the email address, in case you have
bugs that you consider need fixing. …and then, in this rather unassuming patchnote,
Valve quietly fixed it. So there, Valve does fix things! It’s just
that even if they do, you might not know. In this example, they didn’t reach out to
Birkir to thank him, nor did they feature his name, nor specifics of the problem, in
the update. It was only thanks to his own detective work that he even discovered that
Valve had patched the problem he had reported. I know Birkir’s name cos he’s a very knowledgeable
person who’s forever posting on the CS:GO subreddit and correcting me when I skip over
something. He’s been at it for years, silently helping
improve a game that millions of people play for no reason I can think of other than because
he wants to help. He even got mentioned in an update post. Once.
He even helped me with this video by linking to a Valve presentation in 2014, where Valve
actually discussed their policy on external communication. And it helps explain why they
communicate so infrequently with the community. But I’m going to warn you now: knowing why
still doesn’t prevent it from feeling like a raw deal.
They put it like this: when notified about a bug, they may start with good intentions.
They may set out to fix it, only to run into problems that make it NOT so easy to fix.
Or maybe fixing it would lead to other problems. Or maybe they can’t fix it. Or maybe they
SHOULDN’T fix it, because it’s not actually a bug, merely a feature.
Because of that, they think it’s best not to promise things. THAT’S why they don’t
comment; they don’t want to shape public perception of the issue by taking a stance
on the bug, as it would ultimately influence public opinion about it going forward… potentially
forever. And they don’t promise things because they
believe with ‘games as a service’, like CS:GO, it’s important that they can change
their mind. What’s right today might not be right a year later. Valve doesn’t discuss
stuff because they don’t want to limit their options in the future, and they don’t want
public comments of theirs being used against them later on. They’d rather just work on
improving the product. And sadly, one of the unintended side-effects of means not thanking
people. Though I still think they could more often.
There are times when they do reach out, especially when the community’s opinion of how things
operate is so wrong that it’s actually getting in the way of discussing the topics themselves.
That’s when they would reach out to clarify. In other words: they communicate merely to
prevent forum debates from being derailed from misinformation.
In this presentation from 2014, they even discuss update posts, saying that fewer, high
value posts are better than regular, boring ones. So maybe that’s why they deliberately
make the tiny bug-fix updates like this one look so dull and generic- even I didn’t
bother investigating it. And I’ll just end with one time when Valve
did respond, and perhaps later regretted it when their response on the hitreg became a
meme.