Broken Fang Guardian bug give players $1,000 when they die

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive’s last big patch introduced a bonus for players stuck in a game after a teammate quits. It was meant to give players a chance to win after developers removed bots from the game’s competitive mode, but it looks like Valve forgot to turn part of this update off when it came to the Guardian mode.

CSGO’s config files can be weird, as shown by the latest mixup involving the game’s $1,000 leaver bonus. While the bonus was only supposed to get handed out to players in the game’s player versus player modes, it turns out that everyone is getting bonus money in Operation Broken Fang’s Guardian modes. And all they have to do is die.

Broken Fang Guardian missions give players $1,000 per death

It starts in the game’s config files, where Valve originally named the bonus command “cash_team_loser_bonus_shorthanded.” Valve changed the name to “cash_team_bonus_shorthanded” in a later patch, maybe thinking “loser” was a little harsh to call the team who had a player leave on them.  But while they changed the command’s name in CSGO’s main file and the config files for competitive, casual, and wingman, someone forgot to change it for Guardian. Oops.

It’s an easy loophole to take advantage of. Players are awarded an extra $1,000 each round they die to bots in Operation Broken Fang’s Guardian missions. The cooperative missions usually ask players to complete objectives in certain areas or with certain weapons, ending when users finish the mission or both die. If players fail to beat the bots, they start over. So taking advantage of the mixup is as simple as dying. On respawn, players will have enough money to grab a Desert Eagle and a decoy.

It’s all thanks to a single line in CSGO’s commands used to set a map. The commands are just like console commands for crosshairs and viewmodels, but these tell CSGO how to set up its game modes, so they can have a big impact. So while the new was changed to the shorthanded bonus, nobody told the Guardian config.

Several players said that they didn’t even realize that they were getting the bonus until their coop partner said something, so it may not make a huge difference. Plus, CSGO’s bots have gotten much harder since Shattered Web. So while it’s not necessarily recommended for players to intentionally use the broken config to their advantage, there’s not much they can do about it if they die.

Now is a great time to go back and knock out some of Broken Fang’s harder cooperative Guardian missions thanks to this bonus.  Until Valve fixes the mode’s setup files, players will probably get the bonus by accident anyway.