It’s the weekend! What better way to spend your precious days of freedom than to coup yourself up in your room and watch people play video games. Dreamhack is in full swing with all the best games: Starcraft 2, Dota 2, League of Legends, Counter Strike, and even some Super Street Fighter IV if you fancy that. You can go outside, but only if it’s to get some beer or something.
Whenever I feel the need to be bewildered, I’ll head to Youtube and watch the CS veterans bounce grenades from the tiles of a nearby roofs just so. Cue an angry ragdoll or three at a chokepoint half a map away.
Today in CS:GO: a new tool that will make that sort of thing easier to learn. Simply type “sv_grenade_trajectory 1" into the console on a private server, and you’ll be able to see the arc of your bombs before you throw them.
Also! An update of classic map de_mirage, now playable on Casual, Competitive, and Deathmatch servers.
The various wings of Valve have been busy cracking down on undesirables this month, with more than a little help from their players. The Dota 2 dev team announced this week that, thanks to player reports, their MOBA has seen a 35% reduction in negative interactions since the introduction of temporary chat bans. They’ve now joined in developerly pride by the CS:GO team, who say their Overwatch experiment has been “encouragingly successful".
In a recent game update Valve have added a new feature to Counter Strike: Global Offensive: Overwatch. This new community centric tool allows for qualified members known as “Investigators" to watch footage of reported cheats/hackers. Upon reviewing the footage they can submit a verdict based on what behaviour was shown. The results of these verdicts can mean warnings and even temporary bans if the consensus deems it.
Our Spotlight units plug content our journalists have made, that our advertisers want to promote. Sometimes the promotion is paid for, but the content they go to is always independent with no client oversight or approval.
Last week saw the launch of Steam’s trading card game, a new system that sees cards dropped while playing through some of Valve’s catalogue. Collect a full set of cards and you can craft them into a badge for XP that levels up your player profile. Collect a set of cards again and you can craft a better badge.
The folk over at NeoGaf have collected together all the badges discovered so far.
Below, see them in all their glory.
If you’re a regular user of Steam you may have noticed that they do free weekends from time to time. As of right now, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is free to play until Sunday afternoon. If you don’t already have CS:GO, then we’re giving you a direct order to go play it.
We were left scratching our heads last week as to what Steam Trading Cards were. They’d been spotted in the Steam database but Valve weren’t talking about their newest initiative. Well, the curtain’s been drawn back to reveal that they’re a development of Steam achievements & badges which will reward your playing of games with a deeper profile page and money off coupons.
The latest in an increasingly morbid series of CS:GO updates sees Valve pondering the nuances of firing a bullet through one body part and hitting another.
That’s the most gruesome feature of what’s turned out to be a pretty sizeable update for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive this week. Bullets will now travel through limbs and out the other side. That is, the game will calculate whether a hit to an arm or leg would continue on into a head or stomach, and if so, apply the appropriate increased damage multiplier instead.
That’s not all. The patch has also seen Valve tweak the stats of a number of weapons, reevaluate the rules for one game mode and fix bugs throughout Operation Payback’s community maps.
Earlier today we reported on news that users of the ESEA server client had found malware installed to their graphics cards. The hack was using the GPUs to generate Bitcoins for an ESEA computer. All told, from the time since the hack was installed into the client software and till it was discovered, the exploit created $3,713.55 of the internet currency.
ESEA have now issued a formal apology and explanation, claiming that “an employee acting on his own and without authorization to access our community through our company’s resources" is responsible for activating beta code that the company never intended on using.
The ESEA server client, commonly used as an anti-cheating measure in games of Counter-Strike, StarCraft 2 and Team Fortress 2, has been discovered to carry malware that uses unsuspecting players’ graphics cards to mine Bitcoins.
Users of the client have reported that their GPUs have overheated and been disabled by the bitcoin mining process.
It’s been a longer time coming than we expected when mumblings of a CS:GO community map support pass first began in March, but Operation Payback has arrived exactly as expected: a ticket to play seven top-rated, community-developed maps on official servers for the next three months.
Today Valve reveal plans for a new subscription based payment plan, to be built directly into Steam. It’s designed to “give gamers flexibility and control" of subscription based games, by allowing them to managed all in one place. Unholy Wars, will be the first to use the new system.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive team VeryGames roundly beat fnatic at Gadget Show Live’s Mad Catz tournament this weekend. Their solid 2-0 victory was secured across two maps, and the French team left with a sizeable chunk of the £10,000 prize pool.
Today’s CS:GO patch is as big as they come. Valve have reintroduced aged hostage map cs_militia, and sworn in a host of major tweaks to the way hostage rescue mode works.
Valve have made a rare whoopsie and released the newest-most CS:GO update a day ahead of schedule. Though the patch was swiftly recalled via an emergency rope-and-pulley system, the internet has many eyes, and enough of them were able to compare notes to confirm that Counter-Strike players are getting paid-for access to top community maps hosted on official servers.
A recent update to the Steam client has provided budding artists (and seasoned artists) a place to show off their game-related wares. Each Steam game’s Community hub now features an artwork tab where anyone is free to upload pictures and videos of their related works, these are then free to be upvoted by that game’s community. It’s like having a potentially hundred thousand-strong committee running the placement of exhibit pieces at a virtual gallery.
Valve are making us all art critics and to get started they’ve submitted some of their own work for critique.
Xfire’s long been one of the go to game chat systems, before Steam it was one of the better ways to talk to friends playing across different games, butl now they’ve launched a new system, Battleground. It lets you launch games with friends, jumping into Xfire-owned servers, and play to collect tokens which put you in line to win prizes.
Tactical Intervention is finally to be released (in North America). From the co-creator of Counter-Strike, Minh "Gooseman" Le, Tactical Intervention is a free-to-play team-based multiplayer shooter that sets up a team of counter-terrorists against a team of terr... wait a tic, this all sounds mighty familiar. Yes, Le and his team over at FIX Korea does sound to essentially have remade the game that brought him fame back in 1999 but it has a lot more going on under the hood than just rehashing what made Counter-Strike a hit.
VanillaIce commented on Xfire unveil Battleground, their new gaming tournament hub