Valve last night pushed out one of the biggest updates to the game and GOTV for a very long time. For the last three weeks, there had been consistent rumours that maps were being re-introduced and dropped, and that there was a “major” update coming round the corner. Last night did that, with some hilarious side effects too.
The biggest of the changes highlighted would be the new Revolver R8 which as demostrated has been incredibly powerful, some people are calling it a “pocket AWP” similar to how the CZ-275 was introduced a year ago with it being called a “pocket AK”. The Revolver R8 comes with 8 bullets and two clips, and can kill people dead with one shot, you can right click where it fires incredibly fast or left click where it takes a moment to prime itself and then fire. Obviously this has been really received well in the community, with many professionals and others calling for an immediate hotfix to the revolver.
The other notable change is to the competitive timers, where matchmaking (which many people have complained about), have now had the timers changed slightly reducing from 2minutes to 1minute 55 and reducing the bombtimer from 45 seconds to 40 seconds. The difference here is that Valve have announced that this timer in matchmaking will be the standard across their tournaments in 2016. Which is what everyone wanted…. right?
There were some positive changes though despite the issues in this update, there were GOTV changes and additional support brought into the game for production values outside of the game for streams and stage production.
Full patch notes can be found on the official CS:GO Blog:
[WINTER UPDATE]
– Slight adjustments to Holiday Cheer.
– Gifts are now available for purchase. Gift leaderboards will be displayed until January 15th.
– Added the Revolver Case.
– Added several new community sticker capsules, currently available as offers.
– Added Service Medals for 2016. Players achieving Global General rank after December 31st will receive the new year’s medal.[R8 REVOLVER]
– Added a new secondary weapon, the R8 Revolver, which occupies the Desert Eagle loadout slot.[GAMEPLAY]
– In Competitive Matchmaking times are now 1:55 and 0:40 for round and C4, respectively. These are also the new times for CSGO Major Championships.
– Adjusted recovery time on the AK47, M4A4, and M4A1-S assault rifles to reduce the range at which spraying is preferable to tapping/bursting.
– Increased move inaccuracy on pistols: Elites, Fiveseven, Glock, P2000, P250, Tec9, USP, CZ75a.
– Added team timeouts to Competitive Matchmaking, which can be called with a vote. Default is 60 seconds, set by mp_team_timeout_time.[KILLER REPLAY]
– Added new Killer Replay to Casual and Demolition modes. GOTV must be active on the server to enable the feature.
– Menu option Help/Options->Game Settings->Automatic Killer Replay will turn replay off.
– Several convars are available to customize the Killer Replay. Search for ‘replay’ in the console for a complete list.[COMMUNITY]
– Game servers and GOTV relays not logged in to a persistent game server account with a Game Server Login Token (GSLT) will only allow clients to connect from the same LAN.
– Community servers can now be only connected by their real public IP or their internal RFC1918 address.
– To create a GSLT, visit the GSLT creation utility here: http://steamcommunity.com/dev/managegameservers
– Each GSLT is restricted for use on one dedicated server instance only, and should be passed on command line with +sv_setsteamaccount THISGSLTHERE -net_port_try 1
– Added an option to report servers for misrepresenting players’ inventory and/or rank.
– Game servers will now display their SteamID to an operator’s status request in the server console.
– Game servers with GOTV enabled and GOTV relays that need to support external clients connecting on GOTV port must set tv_advertise_watchable 1[MISC]
– Users’ options are now stored independently in a Steam account-local data folder and can be different across Steam accounts on the same machine.
– Administrators setting up tournament Active Directory logons with Roaming Profiles can create a directory inside the user’s roaming profile storage and expose that location to the game by setting an environment variable USRLOCALCSGO=%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\csgo
– Video options for shadow quality, model/texture detail, effect detail, shader detail, and texture filtering mode can now be autodetected at startup to adjust for multitasking with other background applications. These video options can also be permanently set by the user to remain the same regardless of other background applications detected during game launch.
– Minor sound mix tweaks. First person footsteps slightly quieter, third person footstep volume remains unchanged.
– Highlights and Lowlights now transition smoothly between clips.
– Lowlights will now identify the target using the same visual indicator as the Killer Replay.[MAPS]
– Fixed some surfaces playing the wrong footstep sounds in Mirage, Overpass and Train.
– Fixed a DM spawnpoint in de_dust where the player would get stuck.[STEAM CONTROLLER]
– Made toggle crouch work
– Fixed several bugs[GAME STATE INTEGRATION]
– CS:GO’s game state can be relayed remotely, allowing third parties to integrate their services with the game. For example, game state integration was used at the CS:GO Major Championship at DreamHack Cluj-Napoca to present special stage effects (e.g., lighting and pyrotechnics) during a match.
– For details on how to set up your service to use game state integration, visit the wiki page here: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Counter-Strike:_Global_Offensive_Game_State_Integration[SERVERS]
– Added official servers in Hong Kong
One video creator has uploaded this video to YouTube which gives you an idea on what the Revolver R8 can do:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeCY4H-uSZI]
Meanwhile there is also a bugs thread on the CS:GO Subreddit which is collecting important data for Valve, the most highlighted bug of this update (although it was prior to this patch but wasn’t 100% reproducable) is the smoke alt tab bug where if you alt-tab out of game at the moment a smoke is deployed, then the smoke won’t even be seen in game. This can be found through this video below:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7hCfFtHx30]
Most important note for everyone heading to insomnia56 this weekend, is that the Revolver R8 will be banned for competitive use and that competitive timers will stay the same currently although Head Admin Jon “ViciousHorizion” Kelly has mentioned that he may not see any change to the competitive timers in the future too, but that will be assessed post insomnia56.
