Valve Actually Speaks about CS2! 

Good communication > No communication > Bad Communication > Good communication followed by No communication once things go wrong

Ngl I would kind of love a "playtest" mode where the highest rated maps on the workshop are cycled through, and then everyone on the servers can vote on it at the end of the match/round.

The release day of the revolver might be the best day of CSGO I'd played. the wild west with everyone using them, what a blast.

The ass transition at 12:55 was truly one of the transitions of all time :D

"post it online, it helps Valve to fix it" I hope the /r/globaloffensive janitors get this memo and stop removing posts of bug videos 💀💀

That part about ADS was interesting because i see some people (mostly those new to the franchise) complain about the lack of a proper ADS mechanic. I always thought it was a weird complain since every game in the series does fine without it so it's good to see that the devs also share this opinion. People just need to get used to it.

Curious why something like per-map factions wasn't brought up. I'd like to hear a damn good explanation for why we can't have our Inferno Separatists, Leet Krew on Dust 2, etc.

I am glad they are addressing these issues, we’ll see how they actually will fix these issues as time passes though

I think a ‘featured’ section for community maps that aren’t officially rolled into the game is a great way to streamline map development and get real feedback.

9:04 I feel the opposite. Sure, you can take almost all of the rifles, but that mid tier is especially restrictive. Shotguns, SMGs, and the negev all need to share that space. It's much less generous than before.

11:48 it would be so cool to have an ingame event where everyone can play test new maps which you can vote on and then the best maps get into the map pool. Would also be nice to see this with new skins instead of having to go into the community market for voting having in in CS in the store tab somewhere would be really cool.

About the maps, and how valve says the most important is players, I think the move they made in casual game mode was genius. They knew that Mirage and Inferno were the most played maps, followed by Nuke and Overpass so they decided to split them in 2 groups so the community can't keep cycling between them, and it worked, I've never seen the community play other maps so much, as a result, Vertigo, Ancient and Anubis are getting their own place little by little, and never have they been played so much as now

I find this being the most professional and honest way to deal with things. Somehow I don't feel the the same type of disconnect between community and developers as I do with a lot of other major publishers

10:26 Somewhat ominous how they only talk about "game modes". I'm really hoping they haven't forgotten Community Servers.

I thought it was glaringly obvious that the loadout system is designed for adding new weapons "willy-nilly". In CS:GO, if Valve wanted to add a new weapon it's stats and feel had to match closely to another existing weapon so it could seamlessly slot into another weapons slot. Now that massive restriction is lifted, and new weapons can be thrown in with just a type: Pistol, mid-tier or rifle.

12:51 - Excellent choice of visuals here. Really rounds things off nicely.

Im glad they are communicating, fells like it was needed. It's good to know that valve's focus is the community above all. Enterpreting their intentions based on some of their actions created many missunderstandings, bad blood and probably even turned down a part of the community during last month. Yet I would like more information on sub-tick and problems it created with movement inconsistency specifically as reasurance.

Thanks for this Philip, I stopped following PC Gamer socials some time ago, and I would totally miss this interview 👍

Thank you for highlighting the parts of the text you are talking about. Never knew how much I wished everyone did that. You are amazing! Thank you!

I actually finally started to seriously get into game development, modeling, art, etc. With Hammer 2, I am incredibly excited to try out mapping, since environment design is one of my favorite things.

I really wish there was 5v5 casual so new players can learn I recently had a friend start and its so hard to teach them without tanking rating in MM

Love your content philip! I think a video on the maps missing from cs2 would be interesting. I love de_train but it's vanished.

The game mode I mis the most is Team Death match. Free for all is to random and chaotic to enjoy (even when top fragging)

Fantasstic transition at 12:59. Well done, Philip!

i was JUST thinking "hey klicksphilip these update logs are HUGE!" i miss you reading them and showing the differences... Great to have another video anyway!

You can really feel Valve's belief in communiting in actions throughout the years. It reminds me of that Sean Murray quote where he said a Valve employee that was a fan of the game (No Man's Sky) told him: the only thing that's credible is your actions. And basically told him that rather than try to put effort in communicating to put all their effort into making the game the absolute best it can be and make amends

I also feel if they left it in beta for longer the community would have gotten a lot more upset. So, setting an end date within the year is better so they could have the test without everyone getting upset. (Or something.)

I'd love it if there had been a comment on community servers. To me it was one of csgo's and tf2's biggest strength over their respective competitor (and in the case of tf2, the only thing that's kept me playing) But valve has continued to sort of hide away the comnunity servers and the browser feels like its as old as source itself. And it constantly broke for one reason or another. Would really like to see how much they are planning on leaning into community servers in the future, or if they (wrogly imo) decide to make away with that feature entirely.

I feel like they should add a playtest Map of the day. It puts you in deathmatch with bots or players, depending on how it'll work, and will give you xp for playtesting it.

I want to see Valve communicating about fixing VAC.

Here's my big issue with CS2 atm: Back in CSGO your prime mattered, I have 3k hours on csgo and I could say that maybe 1 in 150 games I come against a cheater, when someone is just better than me you can see it in their movement, decision making, aim etc. It was extremely rare for me to call someone out as a "cheater" because the more you played without cheating, the higher your prime would go and you would only face opponents with a similar "prime level" as you. In cs2 however, the main issue is that you see all these brand new accounts, blatantly wallhacking/aiming/norecoil etc. and it feels like 1 in every 10 games or so I come against a blatant cheater, and even prior to that I think a few other maybe are sus but I am not one to call someone a cheater without feeling confident. I just miss that my prime/hours mattered, but now, so many people getting banned and just making new accounts and I get put in lobbys with them. I wish that they would fix that because then I'd feel a lot more chilled about playing & accepting my losses fairly.

I love hearing about the R8 Revolver incident because I was there, it was so OP at the time.

All this talk about cs2 is kinda annoying. Why isn't anyone talking about cs3 yet????

If 0:40 is the case, I wonder if valve will ever fix the bug that's banned people for spinning with too high of a DPI. Since they'd probably be sacrificing their detection method for spinbotters.

Great video, thanks for recapping the interview!

Coming back to this after a long quietness of not good updates is fulfilling

Correction: the R8's damage was not nerfed for a full month. Yes, there was a full month competitive was ruined by the revolver. Lol

Good. Now they've spoken we only have 4 more years for the fixes!

No background music? A classic kliksphilip experiment. Looking forward to your future video about that decision ;)

This was quiet alot i dont even know if there is a spam filter of some kind. Anyway Thank you so much for this Channel. This games means quiet alot to me and I feel like you get that. Your Channel is like a love letter to Counterstrike.

NFTs are not actually stored on chain. They typically just contain a link. Storing a full image or 3D model would be prohibitively expensive.

Havana has such a beautiful skybox in CS: Source. Great video Philip

I just wish CS2 was just that. CS2, a game that is another entry to the series, not a replacement to CSGO. I still heavily believe the skin market had a huge influence on Valve's choice to replace CSGO as to keep their skin market alive...

Imagine if Valve added matchmaking for playtesting maps, where a mapper where to upload his map and enter a queue where players are searching for maps to playtest on. You could even reward players for this in some way

5:15, we will always have to rely on valve. This is the problem with most NFT's, they offer no benefit if you couple their functionality to a centralized authority. Peope use NFT's like glorified databases, with no actual benefit (other than the ability to use buzzwords, to lure people into scams). NFT's arent unique by definition. Their entry in the blockchain is, but the thing the NFT points to follows no rules. You could also mint the same NFT twice. Valve could put skin information into NFTs (like skin ID, float, pattern index etc.), but what for? Its only their game that uses this information. Things like textures would have to be hosted separately, because its too big to fit into the blockchain entry directly. Again, its coupling the decentralized nature of NFTs to a centralized system/authority. Please stop giving this bullcrap any attention. I have yet to come across a plausible use case for this technology, it always ends up to be some kind of scam. If someone can point me to a plausible use case, please go ahead, because I can't think of one. I can only imagine how the devs eyes rolled into the back of their heads when they received that question lol

I love the fact that they are surprised we play a lot of Premier given the fact it is pretty much the only thing we can do!

I think a neat solution to adding new weapons while keeping the game balanced and not flooding the sandbox would be something like Weapon Conversion Kits where it changes the look of the gun completely but it still performs the same. For instance: You could get a conversion kit for the M4A4 that makes it look like a G36C, or a skin for the AUG that makes it look like a VHS-2 These new kits could also have skins for them so there’s all sorts of possibilities for creators to make something cool

In my opinion they really shouldn't have pulled an Overwatch "2" with CS:GO. I wish companies would stop taking away our games and replacing them with something different and often worse. Evolve, Overwatch and now Counter-Strike are the most prominent examples I can think of and Counter-Strike's the only one that's remotely acceptable to me.

I really appreciate the devs coming out and saying this stuff. This is fantastic for the game and only makes me more excited for the future of CS2.

I imagine some kind of Practice Demo map where you have really basic one color walls. Decorated with useful informations like smokes spots strategys, flash line ups, A line where the head should be while standing. A Map where all the basics for global players are explained for new ones. I bet the meta on these Maps would be quiet complex after a while.

I just hope they bring more of the default T/CT agents back in everyone's inventory so you can choose which default agents YOU prefer most while also throwing away the ''map-exclusivity'' since older CS games like 1.6, Condition Zero, and Source 1 let you choose your agent. And this also allows players who don't have the ability to buy the paywalled agents test out various radio command voice lines by utilizing said default agents that aren't Phoenix or SAS. An example would be swapping the Phoenix Connexion out for the Anarchists (the ones with the really cool sleeves on the hostage maps) and swapping the SAS out with the ST6, GSG-9, and GIGN again through the inventory or your loadout. Valve should even add 4 more default agents from Condition Zero into CS2 that I think some players are going to like experimenting with (of course someone's going to need to voice all those radio command voice line sound files): Kidotai (Japan CTs) Akunin (Japan Ts) Spetsnaz (Russian CTs) Midwest Militia (US Ts)

Man, a Philip video without any music feels weird. Philip pls fix

0:27 Ironic considering what they've done to Righteous Bison in TF2 where they've unilaterally "fixed" a bug where the projectile can go pass through players and hitting them multiple time while in fact that's a feature that even the in-game tip mentioned and Valve haven't reversed that "fix" yet. Like imagine they've fixed a bug in AK-47 and SG556 where it could insta-kill players or M4A1-S and USP-S where their gunshots are quiet.

Awesome video! I've watched pretty much everything you've made since your OG Source SDK videos. Do you have any plans to cover Source 2 Hammer at all? I've found myself not really knowing where to start as the workflow and binds seem to have changed quite a bit.

I think they're going to add an in game currency for playing certain game modes, or testing community maps. Maybe even adding ladders in premier like faceit. I believe they're have a market with skins, stickers and maybe other things that you can redeem with the points earned, kinda like the faceit market

tf2 feels like the kid in home alone, watching as his family leaves to have futures on source 2, while being forgotten and left behind

A map of the day game mode for competative would be well good. Like trackmania's track of the day, a different competitive map that you can play for 24 hours and then it changes to another comunity map.

I think to keep the official casual player base alive in CS2 long term, we need a lot more maps. Maps that aren't in the competitive pools, but a separate pool. Two weeks before consideration, run the best community made maps in a pool via an update, with a rating system at the end. Then after two weeks, introduce the top 2-3 maps into the custom pool, with some other existing maps, and do this once a quarter. Any map that made it into the testing pool, but was not selected, gets to return automatically, with introduction of new custom maps for consideration. Then we go again. This also gives a good look at possible new official custom maps, in a casual setting. This 1) keeps the game fresh and 2) creates incentives for people to be creative and, in my option the most important 3) gets new users learning Hammer and gifting themself a skill.

Communication CS is about sound and its very international. If a Player dies there should pop up a map where he can give information, without knowing the call out. A map to draw on some strategy’s would also be great. Maybe make it so that in Premier the Team has to choose an igl and he is the only one who can draw during the game.

I read the article and I was shocked that they can talk! But still it did sound a wee bit PR.

Premier is more popular than competitive now because of the map-separate ranks. I don't know a single person in my 167 steam friends who likes this or feels like they want to bother with it.

if we got basalt as a competitive map i would be forever grateful, i absolutely loved when that map was in rotation during operation riptide

I really enjoyed your video. It's well put, straight to the point and I enjoyed ur personal input (obviously as the host of this channel that I watch) I don't really play Counter Strike anymore and I solely keep up to date with your content. :) Now... was this comment written by a bot? ;)

I know of several people that got game banned due to high sensitivity and it's unfortunate that those bans haven't been lifted and the problem hasn't been resolved so soon after the release of the game, especially with the frequent updates.

im not a fan of premier at all, but thats the only way I can play against people around my rank and not 6 or 7 times stronger than me..

i swear i never get notis for ur videos on my phone and yes i have subscribed with notis on

If the "popular" gamemodes are the only ones coming back let us take a moment to remember all of the sick super casual and interesting gamemodes introduced in Operation Hydra (2017), stab stab zap, trigger discipline and flying scoutman was some of the most goofy fun I've had with counter strike's core mechanics. Sucks they are probably not coming back!

The fact that so little is said about the worst and most obvious problem of sub tick and servers is mad. It's literally the worst issue atm and by far the most gameplay imparing, the issue isn't animations not being synced, it's the fact that two players have drastically different experiences of the same interaction every single game, unless u get 0 ping vs 0 ping interactions you may never experience what the game is supposed to feel like.

For devs of a game so community driven in all aspects, they should straight up communicate more, or at least let us know things they're aware of, roadmaps, etc. The anit-cheat stuff needs attention, and the only answer is what valorant did - intrusive anti-cheat. No matter how much they are against it, its simply necessary. Its not enough to ban a cheater months later or if at all, it has to be instant. There are entire industries of developing and selling cheats to the masses and if you google around, CS2 is the most popular there. Valve's current system is not capable. I also thought them dismissing sub-tick issues as animation sync issues is not accurate. There are so many examples of being killed behind cover, killing people when shooting behind them. Something is very wrong. They want to do everything in their power to avoid 128 tick for the server costs. Also when you COMPLETELY REPLACE a previous game, its not acceptable to not have feature parity with the last one. They could have easily kept CSGO up and freezed the economy there, only managing CS2, so at least you could still play the old one, at least until they got everything sorted and replicated. Valve gets so many passes but they are not perfect. Their lack of communication and straight up ignoring certain things like anti-cheat and sub-tick stuff is very bad for such a game influenced so greatly by the community. All their money and success is owed to the community and modders for creating CS in the first place, making skins a thing across all fps games through old stuff like game banana mods, and all the community maps that prop the game up. More open communication needs to happen.

Hey Philip, could you do a video about the audio options that were introduced with CS2's launch? (L/R Isolation and EQ settings)

Exciting times!

No wonder they don't wanna touch TF2 with a 10 foot pole after all the broken promises they should never have given us in the first place.

I started CS2 yesterday after 1000 hours in CSGO. Really surprised about the anger a lot of people are sharing so far. Felt that apart from recoil and movement it's a the same game for the better.

While I get that the slow rollout has been rough for some people, the slow meticulous maintenance and changing of CS’s gameplay has been the core of what makes it work so well for me and so many others. Competitive games almost always suffer from devs who function on quick knee jerk reactions that are made due to the internet being angry at an issue. Often I find these quick reactions just lead to more issues, and more complaining, and more changes. It’s a negative feedback loop. Valve taking their time and being smart about the changes they make, should work out for them in the long run. I’m looking forward to the future of this game. Plus new weapons is extremely exciting!

I'm worried that the limited weapon selection might discourage variety or make it harder to have fun with certain memes (strat roulette needs more planning now). Experimenting with a new weapon is already hard in competitive, and not everyone wants to hop into a casual/training map immediately after a comp to see if an idea would work, hell some strats are so specific they only work one or two round a match but can make all the difference. Valve gave enough of their weapons niche uses as is, it would be nice to see those niche uses be preserved.

With subtick 64 and 128 tick values are so indistinguishable they had to lock it to 64, so no one can check on his own - makes sense, right?

No one who has commented had watched the full video yet.

Phillip, the thumbnail on this video is truly upsetting. Great work

The limited weapon availability from the new buy menu is interesting, but I wish they'd make it only for premier and let us have access to everything in other game modes.

what an insane statement.

cs2, day 50 or so, still no mention of cache... i dont know how long i can go on

How many times has Philip said Valve in this video? Edit: I would love the introduction of a "Map Test Queue", that works like Competitive (except if the map is intended to have different rules, so mapper should be able to select out of a given number of pre-conig gamemodes), uses your Matchmaking Rank to match you against equally good/bad players and then you get a random map. Or out of a selected pool that changes every month. I know it would fraction the player base once again. But it would be such a benefit, I believe.

I find it so funny how map opinions change so much between players. That is a great sign that the game is healthy tbh, something for everyone

They disabled demos in CS2 because they didn't want to pay for more server capacity... This is Valve. How many thousands of dollars have we paid for skins and games? I am pretty annoyed by it.

12:50 best transition

That thumbnail will give me nightmares for months

The nft is just the token. If valve is gone then so are the bits that the nft is the token to. The skin jpeg isn't the token. The nft is the reciept that prove that the completely fungible jpeg belongs to the wallet that the token is owned by.

I would love to see a DMR (semi-automatic rifle) in the game. No, not the SCAR or G3, I'm talking about a simple rifle, without a scope. One that would replace the galil and famas, maybe.

i like to say that lake map is the dust 2 of casuals, it has good rock placements, great scanning if you know what to do and some harder spots that require a grenade, its IMO a magnum opus of wingman and its sad that it wasnt a N.o 1 fought

I can never forget when the R8 came out. No one bothered buying AKs, M4s or AWPs. It was literally the wild west.

I find it hilarious that Valve would rather talk to a gaming outlet instead of devblogging to the community like every other normal developer(Riot, Ubisoft..). Anything but talking directly to the community lmao

1.6 will remain the best cs ever made.

I wonder if making ranks per-map is so new maps could be introduced to the ranked pool without making players worry about sandbagging themselves by having to learn a new map

I still remember the day when I first played CS source and played all those surf maps, that was a very long time ago.

They can talk all they like. They released and are barely fixing a completely broken and inferior version of their game, and to me it's too late to play catch up. It's a fresh coat of paint slapped on all the old flaws with several new ones added. It's probably a solid year off being playable and that's only if they can do something, _anything,_ about the cheating.

i've just played cs2 last week after months of not playing csgo. so far its been great, i don't encounter game breaking bugs, much less a noticeable bug. i also feel like i'm better at the game bc i've been having lots of one deags unlike in csgo.

I thought the title was "Valve actually speaks about TF2" at first, and then I became a little sad that that wasn't the title. Good video though. I'm glad Valve seems to be wanting to communicate regularly with the CS audience and I hope that continues, even though I don't play any CS games.

This entire interview is just: PR ANSWER #1, PR ANSWER #2 etc etc. We almost get no information from this. And I think the fact that "Premier mode is the most sucessful mode" is so weird. We literally don't have anything else to play??? I still respect them for actually doing an interview but man, this interview is literally the fridge.gif

Balls

What about the thousands of community maps and game modes that just got deleted? How are we supposed to play those now? Surely leaving CSGO playable, at least just for the community maps, couldn't have been that hard.