In a rare move for the company, Valve have come out and explicitly admitted that they screwed up with the weapon changes in Counter Strike: Global Offensive with the latest patch. They also confirmed that they would be rolling the changes back to how things used to be pre-patch.
“Because we think it’s valuable for players to have choices when they’re thinking about how to engage an opponent, we looked at ways to make tapping/bursting a bit more appealing,” Valve said, noting that “spraying” is generally the most popular way of firing a rifle. “The hope was that by encouraging more deliberate firing, we would add something skillful that players could use to their advantage.”
This was probably why Valve increased the recovery time for the AK-47, M4A4, and M41A-S. But this didn’t work out.
“Unfortunately, our implementation failed in a few ways,” Valve explained. “For one thing, increasing inaccuracy while spraying also comes with reduced accuracy for all forms of firing. Proportionally, spraying was the most impacted, but we underestimated the impact that the change would have on players who were already firing in shorter bursts.
“As it turns out, the adjustments didn’t really achieve the goal either–our rifle data shows that players in all skill groups are still spraying more than tapping or bursting.”
Valve admitted that they changed too much too quickly- so for now, they’re reverting to how things used to be before.
“We failed to anticipate the reaction of the community to changes in such heavy-use weapons, and we clearly need to re-evaluate our process for making and communicating about changes in that space,” Valve said. “We still think there’s value in trying to find a better balance for pistols and more skillful ways to use rifles, so we hope to tackle rifles and pistols again in the future.”
Counter Strike: Global Offensive is the most popular multiplayer shooter in the world right now. The newest iteration of the classic shooter had a rocky launch, but Valve managed to turn it around with persistent post launch support. Right now, it is the second most popular game on Steam, behind only DOTA 2, which, unlike this game, is free to play.