Counter-Strike 2’s March 30 patch might’ve caused more controversy than intended, with fans now imploring Valve to revert the update’s changes to “desynchronized” shooting seeds. Bullets in CS2 were previously far closer to their tracers, but have now reverted to the way they were before—and players aren’t happy.
In the late March update, Valve restored the shooting seeds setting to something closer to CS:GO’s style, but some players had already grown fond of the CS2 adjustment.
Now, CS2 players are rallying together to sign a ‘petition’ created in an April 3 Reddit post which demands Valve return the shooting seeds to their early state.
The reason behind Valve’s change was simple: the devs were worried cheeky cheaters could take advantage of the new CS2 setting. However, players claiming the feature doesn’t actually greatly impact a cheater’s experience. In fact, other gamers claimed only newer players will be heavily affected by the change, and quite negatively too—it will make it impossible for them to get a grasp of where their bullets are going.
As it turns out though, Valve may actually have a reason for the spray setting reversion; the patch works to combat cheats like the video shown below.
The desynchronized shooting seeds ensure CS players wouldn’t be able to use “spread cheats” which destroyed players while being entirely undetectable to anyone watching. Valve integrated this anti-cheat to ensure players couldn’t manipulate the weapon spread of their weapon sprays, and it seemed to work incredibly well.
Since CS2 is still in beta form, odds are we’ll see countless settings and anti-cheats being chopped and changed to determine what works best. There have been several reports of cheating so far in the beta, with some even being a part of the game’s console commands.
Hopefully, Valve can ensure early CS2 cheating fizzles out as much as possible and players won’t have to question any of their changes to their anti-cheat.