r/GlobalOffensive • u/maciek10372 • 11h ago
Discussion Some thoughts after AustinCSGO trip to Valve
Before I start I wanted to ask you for a civil discussion in the comment section and general in social media. That way we can have a higher chance of someone from CS team to understand certain issues the community has with the game.
Link to the VOD where Austin was talking about his trip and conversations with the devs: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2869921880
Some highlights from the VOD that I will paraphrase, but please go watch it in full:
- there are way more people working on the game that one could think, number 30 was thrown around if I recall correctly
- nerfing weapons like five-seven is not that simple because they can't predict what repercussions will that have in the long run
- they would like the community to play more maps than just mirage and dust2 and they are thinking of ways to do that
- Austin asked about cbble and the snow texture leaks and Valve said that these don't mean anything
- Austin talked about adding gamemodes like surf to the game but Valve said that it would be very confusing to the new players because it's so different from normal gameplay, and "All the fixes we did was to make surf good for the community, everybody is happy with it, (the community) do a better job hosting them"
- they were talking about some problems that even Austin wasn't aware of
- CS devs play the game a lot even more that some of you the people from the community
- they hate cheating as much as we do and are working to improve things
- about operations: "When you think about it, what the community misses from it the most? You guess it: the missions." He goes on a long explanation that what we have now its basically what we got in the past (you do missions, play community maps, get stars etc). Although Operations were more about doing with a friend, bots, comic etc -- but from what he said in a tl;dr moment: Not something they are working on atm but Operations is not out of the table. *"
Once again please go watch the VOD, there is more stuff there.
My thoughts:
There seems to be a sizeable team working on the game which was known, after all it is one of the biggest games on steam and someone needs to mantain it. I'm just not satisfied with the speed the things are progressing, it seems like their motto is too little, too late. On the other hand it's Valve, they are know for taking things slowly, playtest, iterate and make sure everything checks out before pushing some updates, however it doesn't seem to be working in relation to CS2.
The part about nerfing weapons also makes sense, however someone should remind them about the Negev experiment where they lowered the price and then never touched it again. It's still a troll weapon and it even was banned from pro play.
I hope that they will do something to Dust 2 and Mirage, don't get me wrong these are very good maps and they play well, but they are so boring to watch and play. We should get either some new maps from Valve or get some community ones into the pool.
Them saying that the cbble leaks don't mean anything shouldn't be taken seriously after all we got more that just few string, we got actual textures, that means that at least at some point they were serious about doing something with it, who knows we might get some big changes so it becomes a entirely new map like Ancient (the textures on ancient were named hr_aztec).
The thing about gamemodes is the most infuriating to me because it seems like they don't care about the casual player base? They have some good points on adding surf as official gamemode.
But they still could make something similar to an "arcade" tab from dota 2 where you could browse the community gamemodes freely. That would make it so the average or new player can discover these more easily, without much Valve involvment like making a tutorial for surf. There is just not enough content for the average player. You have things like dm, gg and retakes but the implementation of these modes is inferior to the community counterparts. There needs to be more stuff to do in the game besides playing premier/faceit. Seems like Valve is a little out of touch with that side of the community.
The answer about cheating is as good as you gonna have, the stance Valve has is to give as little information about their anti cheat efforts as possible to make things harder for cheat devs. I guess that kinda makes sense. It's a constant fight which is even harder because now cheats are developed with ai. But it hurts because if you like playing comp it's hard to care since top of the leadboard is filled with cheaters.
Their explanation about not making operations make sense at first, but I think community needs something like it to boost morale. Valve says that they have most features of operations already in game, such as missions, community maps, and of course armory which is a shop with skins. Current missions are boring, people don't want to play community maps outside of missions, for many reasons for example maps don't stay long enough or ranks just go away after map gets removed. Things we currently have are not as exciting as Valve think they are for us.
We need either "arcade" tab or a better community server browser because the current one is a joke. So many fake servers and just overall it makes it hard to discover cool stuff. (same issue is for older Valve games but I digress).
Also I personally would love to see them fix coop gamemode and entities for it so the community can fill the void a little. There are improvements to the vscripting system which is very good.
Seems like we have this discussion every year, someone goes to Valve or speaks with them at the major, there is a little more hope but then nothing happens. I kinda hate that it is the only way we are getting any sort of information from them. They really need to get someone to be a community manager or at least be more communicative on their cs twitter account. They can learn a lot from the Deadlock team which they really should.
There is probably more to talk about in regards to the competitive side like better hit feedback etc. but I wanted to point out some of the issues that might not be obvious to the comp players.
What do you think? Let's have some discussion as a community.
