Valve Corporation released another update for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. The development team recalibrated the rating system and updated Ember, the battle royale map. CS.MONEY Blog dives deeper into the changelog.
Changes on Ember and no more hints
You can find several cannons on Ember. Actual cannons, with cannonballs and gun carriage. Moreover, these cannons are interactive. You can fire a shot from that and deal damage. In this patch, cannons received several buffs.
- Cannons can now be aimed upwards, and is now 2x faster
- Now have 3 firing speeds (change with mouse2)
- Reduced inaccuracy multiplier
- Killfeed now shows weapon icon
- Produce a beefy screen shake and more particle effects
- Base model now also rotates
- Added damage falloff to cannonballs after their initial collision
- Fixed being able to bumpmine away from cannon and keep control
- Fixed cannons continuing to turn when no longer in use
Developers made several changes to the hint system. The community often used a trick with a C4 defusing hint as a tool to discover c4 in the smokes. This won’t work in a competitive mode anymore, but it still works anywhere else.
Recalibration of matchmaking system
Besides updates to Ember, the development team also changed the matchmaking algorithm. These changes were sufficient enough to require a rank reset. To learn your new rank, you must win one calibrating match.
The developers warn that most players will face the rank change, but some may find themselves already in the right place.. That is a fundamental change. Almost every region except Europe struggled to a different degree from imbalanced ranking distribution.
If we look at a normal distribution, the most common rank among the players should be either Gold Nova 3 or Gold Nova Master. According to Leetify such distribution can be spotted only in Europe and Asia, where every tenth player is a Gold Nova Master. All over regions have skewed distribution!
Practically that meant that the quality of matches could suffer. For example, in North America, there is an anomaly in the “silver” range. That means that many players were wrongly grouped together, and the matchmaking system could make more mistakes. Because of such anomalies, some of the matches could be one-sided, with one of the “fair Silver 2” players having a KDA of 5+.
Valve doesn’t open their matchmaking algorithms. That’s why we can’t currently judge how drastic the changes are. But the developers mentioned in a separate blog post: “Typically when we ship changes to CS: GO’s matchmaking system, the adjustments are small enough that we don’t include them in our release notes. However, today’s update affects all CS:GO players so it requires some explanation.”
In the nearest future, we will learn about how this update changed the situation, but it is still worth it to jump into the game and play a recalibration.
