New CSGO ping bug lets you find enemies around corners

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has another ping bug to worry about.

Just a week after rediscovering CSGO’s crouchwalk bug, a Reddit user uncovered another bug with Valve’s first person shooter. This time it had to do with the game’s ping feature added with Operation Broken Fang.

CSGO’s player pings are incredibly useful, but they’ve also had several different issues since their release. The latest one to appear is making enemy players get tagged by player pings around corners, a problem that can have both competitive and casual consequences. Players could be banned through Overwatch if they use it since demos don’t record player pings, and pro players might be tempted to use it in CSGO’s million-dollar touranments. 

CSGO’s latest ping bug shows players around corners

It initially seemed like CSGO’s latest issue was an unintended bug with the system itself. Instead, it turns out that these renegade pings were just doing what Valve had coded them to do.  

CSGO’s pings don’t look for a player’s hitbox to determine whether they’ve been activated on a player. Instead, they use a model’s “bounding box” to decide if a ping should appear near an enemy. The bounding box extends in a rectangle around CSGO’s entities and players and denotes how much space the model takes up. This is mostly used for collision detection, traditionally preventing two boxes from intersecting to prevent objects from clipping through each other.

Since a bounding box is supposed to be larger than the player or model it contains, the bounding box around CSGO’s players is larger than the model by design. Unfortunately, that box doesn’t fully fit behind some of CSGO’s shallow corners that are commonly used. The nook along the right side around banana for the T side will obscure the player’s model and hitbox so they aren’t seen, but part of the bounding box will poke out. If the player pings the bounding box, it will identify them even if they are not actually visible.

Valve will have to figure out a way for player pings to check itself against hitboxes instead of the box, similar to how bullets draw an imaginary line between a player and their target to check for successful hits. Until then, fans will have to sit tight and avoid the shallow corners seen in the post.