Valve removes weapon pings and bots in competitive CSGO update

While Counter-Strike: Global Offensive’s January 7 update may have been”small” in Valve’s words, the developer included a massive change to how CSGO’s classic competitive five-versus-five and two-versus-two wingman modes work in CSGO and fixed a major game bug. And some players are very angry about it.

Valve has decided to remove the replacement bots that spawn when a player disconnects from CSGO’s competitive and wingman modes. After the patch, bots will no longer spawn when players disconnect or leave a competitive match. Teammates will be left in a four-versus-five for the remainder of the match if a player fails to reconnect. 

Players upset over CSGO’s removed weapon pings, bots 

Players are not happy about it. Popular CSGO streamer Anomaly tweeted angrily that he wanted more control over the replacement bots, not for Valve to remove them from the game’s competitive and wingman modes entirely.

There were more changes shipped, but the biggest ones weren’t in the patch notes. CSGO developers fixed the game’s ping system that had been revealing enemy positions for weeks. Yet players aren’t happy about this change either. One user replied to the official CSGO Twitter account’s announcement to complain about what was in reality a smart change to a broken system.

CSGO’s contextual ping system no longer works on weapons in competitive matches, but it works perfectly everywhere else. The video below shows CSGO’s pings after the update. Weapons picked up by a friendly player disappear immediately. Valve’s fix means that a weapon ping remains where it was placed when enemy players pick up the weapon, patching the bug and maintaining the functionality for friendly players. 

Valve has fixed some issues with this update. It’s likely that pinged weapons in CSGO’s competitive mode are turned off until devs can make sure they’ve fixed the issue there. Everywhere else, CSGO’s pings still highlight guns just like they used to.

• Watch these CSGO player pings reveal enemy players through walls

Valve also fixed a bug reported on by WIN.gg where CSGO’s player pings could act like wallhacks, bouncing over enemy models if the player had the bad luck of walking past an enemy ping. It would reveal an enemy’s position to the pinger even if the they didn’t have line of sight.

• How Broken Fang’s giant new ping options work

Finally, small changes were also made to the maps Ancient, Engage, Guard, and Cache, improving performance and fixing spots in which the bomb could become stuck. For a “small update,” CSGO’s first real changes of 2021 have increased the game’s competitive integrity, eliminated the temptation for players to kick other players in favor of bots, and affected gameplay in the game’s competitive modes across the board.