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Counter-Strike: Global Offensive patch fiddles with freeze time, prevents fowl play

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Constant cacophony. That’s what your Battlefields and Black Opses ask you to tune into – an endless, noisy bazaar where players trade in bullets and jibes. Even in TF2’s set-up time, the racket of errant rockets and unheeded calls for medics destroys any hope of a moment’s meditation.

Counter-Strike has always been a little different. Every round begins in freeze time – part ceremonial second of silence, part practical gear purchasing allocation in a game that far predates persistent loadouts. And from today, freeze time has the potential to run on just a little longer.

Valve have added a new server command to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. When enabled, sv_matchpause_auto_5v5 will track if fewer than five human players on each team are connected at any one time. If so, it’ll pause the match during the nearest sensible freeze time and wait until both sides are back up to full strength.

To ensure such an occurrence isn’t the epitome of tedium for spectators, the dev team have also introduced a new panel to the spectator UI that shows an event’s logo during freeze time, plus a spectator number and viewer item drops. What’s more, spectators of competitive games can now mosey about their inventory during dull moments.

All of this gardening in the name of spectatorship comes just a week before DreamHack Winter 2013, where teams of 5v5 will compete for a $250,000 prize purse, as it’s called. You’ll now find an allocated DreamHack space in CS:GO’s watch panel, where you can witness and download all of its matches from November 28.

To be eligible for Souvenir Packages, all players need do is watch live DreamHack tournament matches on GOTV, or watch the live matches on Twitch with a linked Steam account.

Here’s the rest of the most recent patch:

  • Fixed ADR showing the value from the previous half on round 1 of the second half.
  • Fixed case where a data series could exceed the chart range.
  • Grenade collision with doors is not affected when the grenade kills a chicken.
  • Players can no longer throw weapons through displacement surfaces.

Is any of that lot of interest to you?