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.
From today, hostage positions will be randomly assigned at the beginning of a match. Once found, hostages will need to be picked up and carried by CTs at a reduced movement rate, rather than led on foot. Players will need to hold +use for four seconds to pick up their charge, or equip a rescue kit to decrease the time to three seconds.
The updated mode also features a reduced round timer, which is extended when the first hostage is picked up. CTs win a round when the first hostage is rescued.
cs_office, cs_assault and ccs_italy have all been tweaked to accommodate random hostage spawn points, and money rewards have been rebalanced. What’s more, hostages now indicate whether they are above or below you on the radar.
Outside of hostage rescue, Valve have made one other significant change to the fundaments of Counter-Strike – the action of defusing a bomb will now end if the players turns their view too far from facing it.
As for the CS:GO Community Support Passes we reported on yesterday? Valve have removed all reference to their officially hosted community map servers. In its place, they’ve left us a single line:
“CSGO_Ticket_CommunitySeasonOneSpring2013_Leak” “lol”
See the rest of what’s coming to CS today below, courtesy of the good sorts on the Global Offensive subreddit:
- Players always play a quiet client-side jump sound that can only be heard by the jumper.
- Players play the regular jump (step) sound when moving greater than walk speed that can be heard by both the jumper and all clients in earshot.
- The timer that performs the random map selection visuals now properly gets killed when the scoreboard hides.
- Fixed convar mp_weapons_allow_map_place not properly eliminating map-placed weapons. NOTE: FY servers will need to set this convar to 1.
- Added an option to func_dustmotes entity volumes that lets them choose to not be affected by wind.
- Fixed in-game clipping for triple-monitor rendering configurations.
- Added overtime indicator to GOTV spectators miniscoreboard.
- Radar should now correctly follow spectated player when spectating via GOTV.
- Adjusted score and MVP rewards for gameplay events related to planting, defending and defusing the bomb, and for reaching, protecting and extracting hostages.
- Steam overlay game details will now correctly show players score.
- Fixed special characters of player name not correctly displaying in some UI elements.
- Fixed a bug where friends were banned from joining parties where one of the members failed to recently accept a competitive match.
Are you a hostage map regular? What are your thoughts on the changes?