The Main Guns In Counter-Strike Just Got A Big Change

As popular as Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has become, there are many, many complaints to be made. And one of the longest running issues has been the accuracy of the weapons — namely that the penalty for spraying like a madman wasn’t severe enough to encourage players to more carefully control their rifle fire.

Valve’s tried to correct that today, and they’re focusing on three of the game’s most important guns.

It’s all about something called the “accuracy recovery rate”. According to Valve, it’s a value that “determines how quickly the accuracy of a weapon returns to its baseline value after firing”.

Put another way, every weapon has a certain amount of time before it settles. Fire before that time and your bullets might as well go to Timbuktu.

Valve, mind you, has tried to fix this sort of thing before. At the end of last year the developer was forced to reverse the changes, especially since they were rolled into the hilariously broken introduction of the R8 Revolver.

The whole aim is to make tapping and bursting more rewarding, without reducing the overall accuracy of the weapons or punishing players too much. Here’s two graphs from the Counter-Strike blog showing the difference in accuracy when an AK-47 is being tapped, and when it’s going hell for leather:

What these graphs are trying to say is that tapping rifles should be more accurate overall, from the second bullet to the 10th. Bursting an AK-47 for 5 bullets will also be more accurate than before.

But as always seems to be the case, Valve’s intended changes have had a few side effects. Oddly, the AK-47, M4A1 or its silenced variant is now more accurate in mid-air, provided you’re not spraying your gun once you start firing. The patch has also introduced a bug where reloading doesn’t reset the recoil of your weapon, although a Valve dev indicated that could be changed soon enough.

Players have figured out a workaround already, though. If you fire a single bullet, the game automatically triggers the timer that causes the recoil on your weapon to decay. So if you want your gun to function as normal, you’ll effectively be playing with 29 bullets every magazine until 30. The changes mean you shouldn’t really be spraying a whole magazine anyway.

Either way, Valve should have that snafu fixed up soon. For those who have tried out the new patch, what do you think? Let us know in the comments.