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Tag: Counter Strike
[NM] How Counter Strike: GO Keeps Its Battle Royale Poppin’ Fresh
Counter Strike: Global Offensive recently went free to play, adding in its own Battle Royale mode in the form of The Danger Zone. Danger Zone is a bit different from your normal battle royale jazz, chiefly being that it’s a faster game with up to 16 participants in each fight on a smaller map (18 in teams). The mode initially leaked more than two and a half years ago when files referring to a survival game mode were discovered in the base game.
That said, I wanted to discuss some of the features that separate CS: GO from the crowd.
1. The PDA
The PDA is your best friend in Danger Zone, it’s an upgradeable device that tells you where you are, where you should probably be going, and generally where other players are located. The map is divided into hexagonal slices which at the start of each round serve as locations you’ll pick a spot to land in. You can order weapons with money found throughout the map and have it delivered to you by drone. Fun tip: You can drop your PDA on the ground and the drone will drop whatever you purchased on top of it rather than you. If you think someone might follow your drone, you can set up an ambush.
Which brings me to upgrades: You can buy upgrades that allow you to track other player’s drones, as well as an upgrade to see which zones are about to become unsafe as well as an upgrade that makes enemy positions more specific. These upgrades can rarely be found in the wild.
2. Buying Weapons
Danger Zone just wouldn’t be a proper Counter Strike mode without the ability to buy equipment and thankfully Valve haven’t overlooked that feature. You can buy some pretty rudimentary weapons from the shop with your hard-stored dollars, including weapons, armor, ammo, grenades, and upgrades for your PDA. Money is found strewn about the level and if you manage to kill someone you get to watch as their body explodes into a pile of cash.
Weapons and equipment can be found throughout the level, however guns tend to be far less available and with very low ammunition sources than finding cash and hunkering down and ordering through express Amazon Prime delivery. You can also choose to be even more of a jerk and shoot down someone else’s drone to grab whatever they are delivering, or just keep your eye on the sky and follow them to their destination, pop the guy in the head once they come out to claim the delivery.
3. The Explosives
One item you’re bound to come across while playing Danger Zone are grenades, and plenty of them. Other battle royale games have grenades as well, but those who play Counter Strike will be familiar with how grenades in this game can save your life when properly used in a pinch. Among the items available to you is the distraction grenade, an explosive that simulates gunfire wherever it is tossed. The molotov cocktail is great for creating a buffer between you and someone else, or for flooding a room if you know someone is hiding inside of it.
But here’s where CS: Go gets even fancier. While PUBG and its many clones might also have grenades, molotov cocktails, and smoke grenades, CS: GO has breaching charges, remote activated bombs that can be used to cover your ass or more likely to catch someone by surprise as they walk into a room.
4. HVT and Hostages
High Value Targets, or HVTs, are a great addition to The Danger Zone. The gist of the feature is that a random player becomes your target and if you manage to kill them the game will give you an additional $500. One benefit of this system is that you are constantly aware of where that person is on the map, letting you set up an ambush or avoid them if you aren’t properly armed up yet.
Hostages meanwhile are a holdover from the standard Counter Strike game types, and don’t really need any explanation as to why they’re there or who is holding them hostage. Picking up a hostage will slow your movements and obscure part of your screen, but if you manage to safely get them over to one of two extraction points on either side of the map, you’ll net a cool $500. Given the length of time this will take compared to the relatively short length of each round, you’re going to have to dedicate most of your time to this activity.
5. In Conclusion
Given how overloaded the battle royale scene is becoming with cheap knockoffs, it’s good to see not just Valve putting out a big update but also leaving an interesting spin on the genre that makes The Danger Zone worth playing.
Counter Strike Co-Creator Arrested For Sexual Exploitation of Child
Seattle police this week arrested Jess A. Cliffe, co-creator of the video game Counter Strike, and are planning on charging him with sexual exploitation of a child. Valve has released a statement to Kotaku that Cliffe has been suspended until more details are made known.
“We are still learning details of what actually happened. Reports suggest he has been arrested for a felony offense. As such we have suspended his employment until we know more.”
(Source: Kotaku)
Valve Drops 40,000 Accounts In Mass Ban
It may not surprise you to learn that Valve bans thousands of Steam accounts every day for cheating, between two to four thousand VAC bans and just as many game bans on a daily basis. A website that tracks and estimates inventory value determined that a total of $7,387 in items were taken out of the market along with the banned accounts. This makes for the highest ban day in Steam history, by a long shot.
In case you were wondering about timing, the bans were laid down right after the end of the latest Steam summer sale. VAC bans will extend to all accounts that share the same phone number and will ban that phone number from being reused for three months. In addition, players will be unable to move items from VAC banned accounts, meaning those expensive weapon skins are now permanently stuck to a tainted account.
(Source: VAC Database)
Steam Sales: Counter Strike Is Not Giftable This Year
The Steam Summer Sale is upon us, and that means one thing: people stockpiling on cheap copies of Counter Strike: Global Offensive in order to dole them out to burner accounts to use for hacking/griefing purposes once the sale is done. Why would someone spend a ton of money just to cheat in Counter Strike? Your guess is as good as ours.
Unfortunately, prospective cheaters will need to do this the hard way as Valve has disabled gifting for all copies of the game bought during the summer sale. Valve hasn’t explicitly stated this, but their official explanation doesn’t make a whole lot of sense:
CS:GO will not be giftable during the sale. Our goal with sales is to grow the community and historically, during sales, the new users that stick around are mainly the ones that purchase copies for themselves.
Given the recent controversies surrounding key resellers, it seems more likely that the changes are really to prevent a combination of bulk buyers and cheaters.
(Source: Reddit)
Less Massive: Valve Bans CSGO Servers That Falsify Inventories
Valve has issued a warning to server owners in Counter Strike: Global Offensive that modifications that falsify player inventories are not allowed and must be removed before “further action is taken.” Since Valve’s games are heavily modifiable, players in the community quickly figured out methods to alter servers in order to provide players with weapon skins, items, and other goodies normally only accessible through random drops, lockboxes, and through the paid campaign modes.
- Allowing players to claim temporary ownership of CS:GO items that are not in their inventory (Weapon skins, knives, etc.).
- Providing a falsified competitive skill group and/or profile rank status or scoreboard coin (e.g., Operation Challenge Coins).
- Interfering with systems that allow players to correctly access their own CS:GO inventories, items, or profile.
[To clarify: it is also not acceptable to provide players with custom models and/or weapon skins that do not exist in the CS:GO ecosystem]
The blog post warns that further action will be taken to servers that do not comply with these rules.
We will continue to monitor the players experience on community servers, and may reevaluate if further actions need to be taken to ensure that server operators comply with the request above.
A few servers are already reporting bans via their Game Server Login Token with lengths of two decades. For the unaware, Counter Strike requires game servers to register a GSLT via a persistent account in order to accept players that aren’t on the same network. A new Steam account with a new qualifying phone number is required to open a new GSLT account.
(Source: Counter Strike: GO)
MMO Fallout 