CS2 Needs Updates, But You Don't Deserve Them
It's been a year since the official launch of CS2. There are problems with the game, but with the way many people have been complaining, I can't find any sympathy for them.
Preamble
I’ve been considering making an article like this for some time now, and this seems like as good a time as any. A year has passed since the official release date of CS2 (more if you count the initial announcement). Despite this, there are still features and updates that the game would benefit from which have not been pushed. As such, I do believe some pushback and fair criticism is warranted as we wait for the next big patch to the game.
Unfortunately, voicing this criticism is nearly impossible to do in the current climate, at least in the way I’d like it to be received. The Counter-Strike player base is composed of a large group of petulant man-children who have put twenty thousand hours into one video game, have put in thousands of dollars into cases and skins, and as such feel entitled to video game updates to an unhealthy extent.
As a result, when I wish to voice reasonable stances like “I would like some of the missing gamemodes to return”, I am pissing in the same toilets as big-time shitters who have been calling CS2 a dead game since day one.
If you want to tell me how wrong I am, or voice your support, be sure to follow me on Twitter.
My Stance (For Now)
I don’t think I’ve got anything too special on the state of CS2, but relative to the masses who lack a basic understanding of where and what we are dealing with, I guess it’s worth something. I will definitely forget something in this article and it won’t be comprehensive but it’ll be close enough for now.
CS2 arrived after over a decade of CS:GO being “polished” into the game that it was in 2023. CS:GO started as a scuffed product that everyone universally hated, and it took years before people started to fully buy into it. By the end, people had grown accustomed to it for better and for worse. People accepted the bugs and imperfections because they had no other choice, while still complaining about it the entire time (a fact some complainers like to gloss over when making comparisons now).
CS2 brought with it some much needed modern graphics and a smoke grenade mechanic shift which by now is almost universally beloved. Even the devout CS2 haters have to concede that the subtle change of smoke breaking is the right kind of touch for the game. It improved the Premier matchmaking mode, and introduced a boatload of minutiae related to the subtick system and networking which has been constantly changing over time.
There are features from CS:GO that are simply missing in CS2 which I cannot easily hand wave away. Danger Zone, the battle royale mode that most people didn’t touch, should be implemented again, preferably in a revamped form to utilise Source 2’s capabilities. Retakes, a late addition to CS:GO’s minigames, should have been added alongside the Arms Race maps - it shouldn’t be too difficult. The scripting for community maps should be enabled; it existed briefly early in CS2 before being removed, limiting some of the more creative maps we saw in CS:GO like this ROGUE map. I believe that most or all of these could have been completed in the past year, and the fact that they have not is a disappointment to me.
The other common complaints, pertaining to intangibles like the “feel” of the game, general FPS issues, people’s issues with the netcode, and anticheat, are all things that are the hardest to diagnose and the hardest to fix if there are even things to fix. It’s not something I necessarily have a specific complaint about.
That being said, I find the way that the complaints have been phrased from the majority of people online so abhorrent that I would rather go to bat for Valve most of the time - so let’s get the shilling underway.
It’s The Anniversary, Surely They Will Do Something
This is one of the most common and least understandable things I’ve seen people complain about. Time and time again, Valve has shown no regard for external milestones and timelines that they had no part in creating. Aside from a few instances here and there where it was convenient, like the CS20 case, they opt to ignore the birthdays and anniversaries, pushing nothing more than birthday hats on chickens. And yet, I am almost entirely sure that if they pushed that same kind of update for the sake of it, the reaction would be no better from the fans.
I frankly couldn’t care less about the specific day that Valve chooses to push an update. I have no idea why people do care. It doesn’t matter if they push a new case or new maps now, last week, or in a week from now. Everyone, deep in their brains, knows this to be true - and yet we will see the pattern repeat itself. This kind of complaint can be filtered from the mind.
We Deserve More
The funny thing about this complaint is that it could be true if people actually put their money where their mouth is. If the game was in such a terrible state that in-game transactions meaningfully reduced I’m sure Valve would take notice in some way or another, and yet I’m almost certain that this isn’t the case. Partially because the game isn’t in such a bad state (shocking!) and partially because the complainers are a vocal group who don’t represent the thousands of thousands who have kept playing. The game hasn’t dropped below a million concurrent players and maintains a healthy player count as we speak.
This sort of complaint takes many forms. We deserve more communication, we deserve more frequent updates, we deserve more content! In this case, I can at least understand where it comes from even if it’s still pretty irrational. More than just money, people have spent a lot of time on CS. It’s not just the money they spent on CS:GO at launch, which would certainly not warrant this much, but the subsequent investments that breeds this feeling of entitlement in people.
This is another pointless discussion. Valve never promised something for you to be entitled to it. Professional players, casters, and even content creators and streamers to some extent - people whose livelihoods depend on the game being updated in different ways - have a more justified form of entitlement, even if it extends into childishness after some time. Your average player does not deserve more. Feel free to stop paying for in-game transactions if you think the game is no longer worth your investment - that’s your right - but don’t fool yourself into thinking you entered into some sort of mutual handshake where Valve said they would give you a shiny update once a month if you opened a thousand cases. Speaking of finances…
Billion Dollar Company
This one is going to be the hardest to sell to people because some of them simply don’t understand much about how Valve work or care about the details. I don’t pretend to be an expert myself, but I have at least read Valve’s Handbook for New Employees where they talk about how they allocate resources and work on projects. Disagreeing with it is fine, but the reality is at least somewhat close to what is written in there.
Valve aren’t going to hire developers just because they have infinite money. They have it even without CS2, since they have Steam (though CS2 does make a lot of money). Even if they were to do so, it wouldn’t directly correlate with turning CS2 into the dream content paradise that people think it should be. Unfortunately, you cannot just throw money at the problem. This counts doubly so for difficult tasks like an anticheat which you can’t just “create”, especially in the way Valve seems to be approaching it.
I’m going to say it even if it’s difficult to accept - just because Valve are insanely rich does not mean that CS2 should be receiving constant content updates. I’ll go even further - just because CS2 itself makes millions of dollars does not mean that is the case either. The fans have themselves to thank for that, by proving that even in droughts of content they will keep spending money on the game, and allowing Valve to put larger content updates besides bug fixes on the backburner in favour of other projects. There are many reasons that developers would usually rather do anything but work on CS2, which I will cover afterwards.
Anticheats and Intangible “Feelings”
It’s incredible that in a game which had a phrase dedicated to being spoken when you died in it, titled after the game itself due to the oddities and quirks that constituted it, the sequel has people all caught up in their feelings. We were saying “CS:GO’d” until the day the game was taken off of the servers and yet with the way people talk about it you’d think CS:GO was a utopia and CS2 walked in and burned it all down.
I get it. It does feel different. But I don’t think people realise that it’s because they have spent ten years playing the same game that they are so sensitive to changes that are not failings of the game, but differences going forwards that they can’t accept. CS2 is it’s own product. At the start of CS2, I accepted the feelings-based comments as feedback for the beta and let it slide. Now? You better provide a spreadsheet before I start to listen to your wishy-washy complaints.
The anticheat discussion is inherently flawed in my opinion. It’s almost all anecdotal data, muddied by trust factor queues and hackusations. At the same time, there are improvements to be made in this department (though I don’t believe it got worse from GO to 2, at least). However, we will likely never get much in the realm of announcements if it does improve - Valve like to withhold that kind of information to stay ahead of cheaters (this is old now, but this lecture discusses some aspects of VAC).
The most important aspect of the discussion is the fact that Valve are not developing a kernel level anti-cheat, which you may be familiar with from VALORANT and FACEIT. I won’t get into the reasons for and against as I would rather you get angry at someone else’s explanations, not mine. But suffice to say it’s not in Valve’s modus operandi to go that route, and while players might be fine with it due to their prevalence nowadays, Valve aren’t, and so we won’t see that kind of solution. It might take time, and it may not be solved, but it’s not a new problem and it’s also not something that the majority of players face. Cheaters are generally relegated to either the highest ranks (which most people are not at) or the lowest trust factors (which, judging by the language used in some complaints, they may well be there already).
These are not new complaints and they will continue to be made. I don’t care to listen to people who complain about these aspects without providing actual statistics - your weekend of queueing against cheaters in Premier does not matter to me, and it shouldn’t influence Valve’s perspective unless it pans out that way in the wider data set.
You Guys Suck, Actually
Speaking of the CS community, let’s talk about them, and about how wonderful they are.
A lot of the complaints about CS2’s state also stem from the belief that it would somehow be better if the developers communicated their plans or timelines with us. The idea being that if Valve said “we plan to release X updates in Y months”, everyone would simply be happy and accept their answer, or perhaps be more understanding (they won’t, for above reasons). This is obviously untrue and the way I’ve seen people talk about the developers of this game reeks of unnecessary disrespect.
The attempts that developers have made to reach out and be a presence in the community have been met with mixed responses. The horde of negativity and offensive language is enough to deter any attempt at further communication. And yet in the replies and responses to people trying to call it out, you will have others saying it’s “what they deserve” and that the anger is somehow justified over a video game not getting updates.
Maybe it could have been different if an alternate mode of communication existed from the start of CS - but we don’t live in that world. I believe the state of the fanbase is irreparable and the closest thing we have to communication is the cryptic Valve-style depot watching and Office GIFs on Twitter. The fans don’t deserve to be treated considerately and they prove it time and time again.
I admit, by the way, that I would personally like more information. It would definitely ease my mind and allow me to set my expectations appropriately. But I am understanding of the reality in which we live, not merely the state of the fanbase but also developer deadlines and how publishing a timeline affects the way work gets done, and I have no problem waiting as long as it takes - something which seems to be a rarity nowadays.
Conclusion
CS2 needs updates. It has consistently been updated since release, and bug fixes continue to be the main focus. Pros and the community were always complaining about Valve’s lack of focus for the competitive aspect of CS over other facets of the game, and now that they are placing their attention towards bug fixes instead of cases and map content, like an operation, people are complaining the other way around - you can’t really win.
The map pool needs shuffling. The economy is pretty busted with the twelve round halves. The core game, which I believe is fine already, will continue to be touched up in small ways. There are missing gamemodes - and yes, there is still no operation, nor a case for you to spend your money on. All of these things are worth complaining about on some level, especially as time goes on and on. However, I can’t feel any sympathy for a community which has been complaining about these things at the first possible opportunity, before it becomes reasonable to voice those complaints.
Valve will update the game, and you will eventually get your beloved “content”. Some people will even claim that their constant pressure is what forced Valve to release an update, while others will be disappointed with the size of the update. There are a select few of you who complained when the time was right, held back at the appropriate juncture, and thus can be trusted to fairly criticise the product you have been given. As for the rest of you, I’m disappointed that I can’t withhold the updates from reaching your accounts - with the way you’ve been acting, you don’t deserve to get them.
Afterword
Thank you for reading my article! I went for a more personal grievance this time around, so it might come off a little heated. That’s because it is heated. Even if you disagree, I hope you can appreciate my opinion on the matter. If you want to hear more of my thoughts, for better and for worse, follow me on Twitter!
I continue to post content on YouTube unrelated to my CS2 articles (and have been thinking about releasing other kinds of articles, although that would no doubt reduce my niche following). Check those out if you want to see something else from me (mostly Deadlock right now, which I hope to keep up with as it grows). Here’s to another month of regular articles!