Counter-Strike 2 News

Release Notes for 7/6/2021

[ MATCHMAKING ]
– Premier matchmaking can now be selected together with other competitive maps.
– Added competitive matchmaking presets and ability to save/load favorite map selections.
– Added a link to CS:GO Fair Play Guidelines when playing on official game servers.

[ MISC ]
– Bullet penetration check will ignore the firing player model entirely.
– Fixed bot difficulty selector to correctly apply for offline with bots War Games matches.
– Stability improvements.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive update for 6 July 2021

Read patchnotes on SteamDB...

CSGO's player count has fallen by nearly 17% since Valve started charging for Prime

The average player count for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive dropped almost 17% in the last month, the highest drop-off in players since April 2018 - the third-highest fall in a single month since the popular FPS game came out - which may be attributed to Valve's decision to start charging for Prime matchmaking.

According to SteamCharts (via DotEsports), the average player count in CS:GO for May was 659,889 people, but then fell significantly to just 549,347 players in June - a drop of around 110K players in a single month, or 16.75%. The only months with a higher fall in player count in the game's history are April 2018 (18.4%) and straight after launch in October 2012 (32.88%, which CS:GO quickly made back up again).

While we can't be certain, it seems likely that the reason for the change is because of Valve's recent decision to start charging players who want access to Prime matchmaking - so now players have to pay $15 to get Prime status and get all of its features, such as ranked play, drops, Skill Groups, or the ability to receive XP.

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CS:GO moan bind: how to set up a player radio moan keybind

Keybinds are a big talking point in competitive Counter-Strike, with players often researching the binds of their favourite CS:GO pros to see which actions they map to which keys or buttons.

Recently though, a rather strange discovery using CS:GO's player radio function has seen players looking for a rather different keybind. It's not one to aid in gameplay, but one that will instead bewilder your teammates and opposition instead. It has come to be known as the CS:GO moan keybind.

Why is it called that? Well, because with the press of a key, you can trigger the 'moan' you hear from a CS:GO character's death cry. Recently, players have managed to create commands for the player radio that can not only result in your character making some questionable noises, but also produce messages that trick people into thinking you've been VAC banned. It's all rather bizarre.

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CS:GO players are bamboozling teammates with custom radio messages

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) players have recently found a new form of entertainment after the recent emergence of radio commands. The discovery means players can paste codes into the in-game console, which needs to be enabled under game settings, and play voice clips on demand. There is even the option to bind a death sound to a key so that players can make their own dedicated moan button.

But now, as players continue to experiment with radio commands, more and more techniques are being unearthed. Unsurprisingly, the online community have found a new way to use their new-found powers for evil with fake in-game messages to confuse others in their lobby.

Now that most are familiar with the alt-f4 pranks, CS:GO players can instead troll each other with messages that are almost indistinguishable from official messages sent in the chat by the game. Though, there is a limit to the trolling as seeimgly only teammates can see these messages.

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