14 DAY TRIAL // A brand new patch for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has just been rolled out by Valve, bringing some much needed improvements to the matchmaking system, not to mention tweaks to the smoke grenade and quite a few other changes.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is slowly but surely bringing the old series back to its glory days, becoming more and more popular and attracting a lot of active players on Steam and professionally during major tournaments.
After a period of no updates, Valve has just rolled out a fresh patch for CS:GO, via Reddit, making some major changes to quite a few key systems.
First up, the official competitive matchmaking system has seen some significant tweaks in order to prevent incomplete matches from starting.
More specifically, the warmup timer before the start of the match is now set to start at 5 minutes and, once all players connect to the server, it will drop down to 30 seconds. However, if a player hasn't connected before the end of warmup, they will receive an abandon penalty and the match will be aborted.
This is a major change, as quite a lot of players were forced into matches with incomplete teams and bots.
Big tweaks have been made to the smoke grenade, as it will interact better with Molotov fire, and the smoke volume is now more consistently shaped as a round circle, instead of a square. What's more, Valve has also tweaked the minimum distance from the center of a smoke grenade in which a player's view will be completely obscured.
In recent months, the infamous "one-way smokes" have become quite popular, as players would throw down a smoke grenade in certain spots and sit just on the edge, so that they would see enemies but enemies wouldn't see them.
Plenty of other tweaks have been made to different other mechanics, including the Coaching system, but also for dropped weapons. Bugs relating to armor buying or voting have been resolved, as well as different crashes experienced by players.
Last but not least, two maps have received some tweaking, in the form of Mirage and Vertigo. Mirage finally has collision on the corners of its Arch and quite a few spots where the C4 bomb got stuck have been fixed. Vertigo no longer allows the bomb to fall out of the playable area, and improvements to the B site dumpster, the signage, and the elevator shaft have been made.
The new Counter-Strike: Global Offensive update is now live on Steam and will be downloaded automatically by the service when you are connected to the Internet. It weighs in at 57MB.