Counter-Strike: Global Offensive’s winter patch saga has come to a close today as Valve has reverted almost every gameplay change they made to the game, with apologies to the community. In a new update on the official blog they announce that the moving accuracy of pistols and spray values of rifles have been changed back to their pre-patch versions.
There are a lot of good FPS games out there. But which are the best? Well, we’ll tell you.
The post has been celebrated by the community, leaving the only part of the Winter Update to survive on live servers as cosmetics and the heavily-nerfed R8 revolver. Perhaps most interestingly, the CSGO team says that they “clearly need to re-evaluate our process for making and communicating about changes.” Throughout this latest drama, the community has been packed with demands for a Dota 2-style test client, more communication with professional players and other solutions to what’s seen as an underexperienced development team. Some of that, it seems, may be on the horizon.
Reaction to the rollback itself has been universally positive, one Redditor going as far as to style VALVe properly in his shoutout thread. That’s dedication. Mirroring Valve’s actions, community members who posted negative reviews of the game to Steam have changed their rating to positive in response to the latest patch. Now they can all get back to endlessly killing each other for control of bomb sites.
Meanwhile, Counter-Strike will continue to be one of the biggest e-sports in the world. What everyone seems to have come out of this knowing is that change is inevitable, but needs to be better planned. The developers say in the blog post that they want more options to be viable in competitive CS, and that skill needs to be the biggest determining factor in the game. The call is now for the pistol changes to not be brought back, but for each gun to be individually nerfed, while the plans for rifles are that spray ‘n’ pray is less viable than well-timed burst fire and good aim during duels.
When? The next massive tournament is the MLG Major Championship in Columbus during March. I wouldn’t expect another big patch before that.