New CSGO ping system reacts to enemy models, acts as wallhack

While Counter-Strike: Global Offensive’s Broken Fang operation may have brought the game in line with other shooters with its addition of contextual pings, developers probably didn’t mean for them to act like this.

Na`Vi Youth player Ilya  “m0NSEY” Osipov discovered that CSGO’s new ping system gives away enemies that walk over it while live on stream during the holidays. A clip from m0NSEY’s stream shows that player pings are affected by enemies that walk over them, causing the on-screen marker to lift off the ground and as high as a player’s head.

The trick might have something to do with recent Valve fixes that nixed the ability for players to use the pings to line up and prefire certain angles. Before the developers pushed a patch on December 21, CSGO’s in-game communication pings would only disappear after a certain number of seconds regardless of where a player looked. Now, players have to have their crosshair within a certain screen distance of the marker if they want to keep it on their screen. Unfortunately, Valve’s fix may have spawned another bug with the new ping wheels that could allow players to abuse CSGO’s latest feature upgrade.

New CSGO ping bug could be caused by previous fixes

As seen in the clip, m0NSEY's marker seems to follow the enemy model's outline as it bounces from the T’s shoulders to its head before returning to ground level. This strange bug may have been caused by CSGO's December 21 patch, as making the ping aware of a player’s sightlines may have caused it to become aware of enemy models as well. Luckily, there aren’t any high-stakes competitions scheduled until January and this should be a quick fix for CSGO’s development team.

Valve expanded Counter-Strike’s communication system when it released the game’s 10th operation. Players can choose from 50 ping options and assign them to one of three chat wheels. The wheels are located under CSGO’s “settings” tab, but players don’t have to search all over to find the options. The game’s latest patch also came with a new search function for game settings.

It's been a rough start for CSGO's new ping communication system, but Valve has already shown that it plans on supporting the feature through its quick additions and improvements since Broken Fang's realease. The ping system originally wasn’t contextual, meaning that players couldn’t alert their teammates to a weapon upgrade or dropped bomb unless they had bound a certain ping to a chat wheel. But Valve quickly patched that function in. Players can now ping anything under their crosshair and send a notification to their teammates.

In the meantime, players will just have to dodge invisible enemy pings or risk being revealed by the game's built-in, but clearly accidental, wallhacks.

How to check your ping in CSGO?

Enable CSGO's console in a player's game settings allows them to press the tilde key to open the console and type in "net_graph 1" without the quotation marks to see their current CSGO ping. While it might not be directly related to the game's new communications system, players want to make sure that they're ready for CSGO's intense competition, especially in Broken Fang's Premier queue.

Checking their ping is just one way that CSGO players can use the netgraph. We break down CSGO loss, choke, and customizing CSGO's netgraph in WIN.GG's complete netgraph guide, available right here.