Never mess with Counter-Strike balance
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is a finely tuned, tightly balanced game. While on the whole that’s a good thing, it does make the game a house of cards: when things go even slightly wrong it can throw the entire game out and make a lot of people very unhappy.
That’s exactly what happened recently, as Valve made changes to weapon accuracy and recovery times (how long it takes for a gun to return to a neutral position, when it is most accurate, after firing). The idea was to encourage people to use burst fire techniques as opposed to simple spray-and-pray by changing the recovery times of the weapons most prone to being sprayed. Unfortunately, the result was most weapons were less accurate and more difficult to use, no matter how you fired it.
In a blog post, Valve announced it will be rolling back the game to before these updates ever happened:
Since we likely changed too much too quickly, in today’s update we’re rolling back both the rifle and pistol adjustments to their pre-Winter Update state.
We failed to anticipate the reaction of the community to changes in such heavy-use weapons, and we clearly need to re-evaluate our process for making and communicating about changes in that space. We still think there’s value in trying to find a better balance for pistols and more skillful ways to use rifles, so we hope to tackle rifles and pistols again in the future.
We’re constantly reading community feedback and while we don’t often respond directly, understanding the community is one of the most important parts of working on CS:GO. Mistakes happen, but when they do, we’re committed to making sure they get fixed.
This comes less than a week after Valve had to make major changes to the recently introduced R8 pistol, which was massively, massively overpowered when it released.
It seems like Valve has thankfully managed to identify the cause of the mistakes it’s been making lately: updates have introduced too many changes before it’s able to really assess the impact they’ll have on the game’s balance.
Hopefully things will return to normal now that Valve appears to be on top of things again.
Recovery Time [Counter-Strike: Global Offensive]
