asgaard

CS:GO competitive mode experiences

Sat, 03 Oct 15 15:14:43 +0000

I have played a lot of CS lately and recently decided to try competitive mode.

The first game was easy (we won 16-2), the second game bumped me up into playing with higher ranks and we comfortably won (16-9), and the third game bumped me up into playing with four double AK ranks on my team and we narrowly lost (16-14) with me being on about 1:1 K:D and middle of the scoreboard.

The first and second games were fine, but unlike the first two games, in the last we weren't winning comfortably and that brings out problems in less mature team-mates. Our top player was the very definition of 'toxic', and ironically we probably lost at least one round (and therefore the whole game) because he was distracting everyone ranting about how it wasn't his fault that he just got killed.

Overall it wasn't an enjoyable way to spend an hour.

I think the main problem is that games can last upwards of an hour and you get penalised if you leave early, so without knowing in advance who you are going to be playing with, there's a risk of locking yourself into an unenjoyable game for the next hour. If you only have time to play one competitive game every couple of days, this is far too much risk to make it a good use of time. You could alleviate this risk somewhat by having a shorter competitive mode which is first to 8 instead of first to 16 (which I think would be a lot better for older people anyway...).

So at the moment... no real desire to play more competitive.

CSGO Lounge has a 'No Winnings' problem

Sat, 05 Sep 15 20:34:21 +0000

CSGO Lounge is a website on which you can bet virtual items on the results of CS:GO games.

It has a major flaw in that you can win, but end up with no winnings. This has happened to me a few times and the forums are full of people complaining their (relatively large) bets won but returned no winnings.

CSGOL justifies this by saying the entire bet is zero sum, and as items can't be broken down into smaller units, they have to fit items to winnings as best as possible to the odds so there will be some 'rounding error' and some people will lose out by their winnings being undervalued according to the odds CSGOL gave when they made the bet.

I strongly suspect that this is a bit misleading and the main cause of the error is not the inability to break down the items, but the difficulty in solving the distribution problem accurately.

The problem of distributing winnings can be stated something like: Given that you have a set of items with individual value, and a set of people who each demand a total value, organise the item set into subsets such that every item belongs to exactly one subset, and each subset can be uniquely allocated to exactly one person.

This sounds like a harder version of the subset sum problem, which is already NP-complete. In layman's terms, this means that it's really hard to solve because it requires infeasible amounts of CPU power to do it. With few items you can use brute force algorithms to try all combinations and choose the best one, but as the number of items grows larger it will take thousands of years to run the fastest correct algorithm.

Therefore to get a solution reasonably quickly you use probabilistic algorithms that hopefully give you a decent solution in x% of cases.

Now, we don't know what algorithm CSGO Lounge uses, but we do know that the overall website is pretty amateurish. Making the website work well is pretty simple and any semi-professional software developer could do it. Solving the distribution problem is hard and requires much more specialised computer science/maths skills. It would be very surprising if they were bad at the easy part and good at the hard part.

More likely, their redistribution algorithm is bad and it can't give sensible results for the amount of volume the site gets. It's also worth noting that there appears to be no public audit trail for how the items are distributed, so we don't actually know that the bet really is zero-sum and that CSGOLounge really is allocating every item it receives.

Either way, the site is currently not fit for purpose and I strongly recommend against using it.

Fix your game, Valve.

Sun, 21 Sep 14 14:53:44 +0000

Update - possible workaround: Restart Steam before launching CS:GO. It doesn't always work, but the failure rate is more towards 50% than 100%.

At the moment Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is sporadically (un)playable due to server issues. I'd be willing to cut Valve some more slack on this were it not for the fact it's been broken for about the last 7 or 8 weeks.

What happens is you try to join a game, then spend about two minutes staring at your screen while nothing happens. If you open the console up, it's full of messages like

CSysSessionClient: Unable to get session information from host
CSysSessionClient: Cannot join lobby, response 5!

Then eventually we get the very helpful error message:

Failed to create session. Please check your connection and try again

Something's gone wrong, better blame the user!

If you are persistent enough you usually can get into a game, but there's a good chance it'll be empty.

Like I said, it's been like this for weeks. It's not just me, the CS:GO forums and subreddit are littered with complaints, although it may be 'localised' to Europe.

Valve (or at least, a Valve employee) eventually, after 5 or 6 weeks of continued problems, responded to this on an obscure mailing list:

Hi all,

The issue with sessions has been becoming a real problem with the growth of CS:GO user base. We are aware of the issue and are working on changing the core systems to scale better with the size of CS:GO community. Unfortunately this is not a quick rewrite, and there isn't an easy workaround that we can offer at the moment. We'll be sure to include a release note when the update resolving session issues is ready, but don't have an exact date to announce yet.

Thanks,
-Vitaliy

but this is a bit ridiculous. Scaling issues don't suddenly happen unless you have sudden unexpected growth (which CS hasn't); they are forseeable far in advance of becoming fatal problems. The idea that the matchmaking system is so complicated that it requires weeks/months of work to fix also seems questionable, and even if that were true, you could fix it in the short term by just throwing hardware resources at the problem.

If you're thinking of buying CS:GO, don't.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Impressons/Review

Sat, 03 Nov 12 23:04:47 +0000

I hesitate to call this a proper review as I'm only playing the free weekend on Steam, but nonetheless, here are my impressions.

I used to play Counter Strike back when it was beta and it took two hours to download a 16MB patch. From an .exe, because Steam didn't exist. I played it to death. I was pretty much bored of it by the time CS:Source came out; I had long since moved on to Tribes 2 and Day Of Defeat (not the heretical Source incarnation, which is rubbish). I used to play on the server of a clan called -=P@ntz=-. Their website's member list was called "Who's in my P@ntz?". There was a regular clan there called I Can't Believe We're Not Better. I remember (by the time we were getting a bit bored of CS) we once did a DoD 4v4 mini-tournament with all the server regulars. It was glorious. I have fond memories of CS, and many hundreds (thousands, most likely) of play hours.

Although it seems absurd in the age of endless Call of Battlefield sequels, CS was a innovative game that stood alone in its own genre at its release. It has since been copied and cloned into oblivion, but the notion of one-shot headshots, recoil and permanent (per round) death made CS considered unique, realistic and tactical at a time when online first person shooters meant deathmatches with railguns, rocket launchers and bunny hopping.

Anyway, cut to the present day: Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is a modern reboot of Counter-Strike and was released back in August. I'm not convinced it's strictly necessary considering that the original CS is still one of the most popular games on Steam and the whole franchise combined is far more popular than TF2. But we have it, so let's work with that. It is a modernisation - it comes with all the simplification you'd expect and dread. There's a quickplay option and the weapons buy-menu has been replaced by a bizarre wheel thing which I can only assume was dreamt up by somebody who has never played a game, or in fact used any form of computer, in their life. You can press F1 to auto-buy, which seems to give you either an AK47/M4 or an SMG if you can't afford an assault rifle. And I think kevlar and helmet has been removed in casual play. It all seems to work, but it's not an improvement.

There are lots of new weapons, which are confusing, while some of the classic ones make a reappearance. One of the big things that jumped out at me was how underwhelming the weapon models are; the iconic M4 is now pretty ugly, and a lot of the other models are visually indistinct. There's also music. Which is nice, except when you consider that CS rounds often end with a sneak-em-up where your ability to hear footsteps correlates positively with your life expectancy.

At its core, CS:GO is pretty much a carbon copy of previous games but with a slightly more modern slant. There are new game modes, which seem to be uninteresting additions, and the best part is the 'classic' mode.

It's business as usual, really; the core mechanics are all still there. It's still a game of whichever team successfully rushes to the best camping/ambush location will win by surprising and slaughtering the other team trying to do exactly the same thing. The gun mechanics still work such that crouching and burst fire discipline will have you fare far better than someone running around on full auto. The AWP is still game breaking, sadly.

Some of the classic maps we all loved are still here, including Aztec, Dust/Dust2, Inferno and Italy. There's more focus on the bomb maps than the hostage rescue, but that kind of makes sense given how many rounds used to devolve into watching counter terrorists wrestle with the imbeciles getting stuck in doors. Surprise map inclusions are de_nuke and de_vertigo. I don't think they made it into Source (officially).

But despite the negatives and the fact it's not very original, CS:GO's underlying game is pretty fun (we knew that already), and at £11.99 full price on Steam (currently £7.99, on sale this weekend), it's not really claiming to be an AAA title.

Verdict: Fun but nothing new. The fun, however, is honest, open and transparent. There are no Skinner boxes here. What you see is what you get.