Fans of Valve are well aware of their fast-paced military shooter series, Counter-Strike. It has that infamous Valve polish, thousands of people play it everyday, and it has a grand reputation for those in the twitch-aiming competitive shooter community. That is until recently.
The latest patch for the game made some subtle but nonetheless major changes that has been very controversial in the CS community. Outside of the usual imbalances that happen with new weapons, notably the R8 Revolver was seen as overpowered but has since been nerfed, how rifles and revolvers were fired. Extra recovery time was added to spraying, which is the predominant way the weapons are used in the game, compared to more conservative tapping or bursting. According to a post on the official Counter-Strike: Global Offensive blog, this change was done in an attempt to encourage more deliberate firing, but instead caused more inaccuracy across all types of gunfire, leaving players outraged.
Luckily Valve knows when they made a mistake, and have released an update to undo this recent change. As for trying again, Valve will try to be less intrusive about it. Their recent post stated, “We failed to anticipate the reaction of the community to changes in such heavy-use weapons, and we clearly need to re-evaluate our process for making and communicating about changes in that space. We still think there’s value in trying to find a better balance for pistols and more skillful ways to use rifles so we hope to tackle rifles and pistols again in the future.”
If you’ve left Counter-Strike because of this change, looks like things are back to normal for now. Enjoy.