Did you know? Counter-Strike: Global Offensive celebrated its second birthday a couple of weeks back. Its community workshop is more active than ever, and 409,000 watched the ESL-One Cologne grand finals last month.
Valve are determined to fix the unbroken, however. Cobblestone is a CS:GO map scarcely six months old, but it’s had some major work done.
It’s the terrorists who are going to feel the changes to Cobblestone most keenly. They’ve gained extra, prioritised spawn points at a lower position on the map. If they still want to scale the battlements, they’ll need to make use of a new ladder near the base of the sniper tower.
Don’t think the CTs have got away without some adjustment, though: Valve have widened the windows to their sniper room and pushed back their spawn points.
The approach to both bombsites has been rejigged, too. The long entrance corridor to site A has been tightened, and there’s a new path from the terrorist side of the underpass into B’s tunnels.
What’s more, it seems like site B isn’t quite the defensive strongpoint is once was. The railing at the back of B has been lowered to make players on the platform easier to spot, and there are now fewer sightlines from the site to its entrances. For good measure, the dev team have cut out an area behind the toilet at bombsite B – which sounds like a loss for privacy.
Elsewhere in the game, Valve have introduced changes that’ll affect the pros. Buy time in the official competitive config has been reduced to 20 seconds, and the penalty for teamkilling edited to $300.
Players in every config will notice that the CZ75-Auto has been swapped from its P250 slot to the Tec9/Five-seveN slot, and its price has soared to $500.
The patch was published on Tuesday. Have you played CS:GO since?