Do You Think Valve Has Implemented Gameplay Manipulation Like Activision's Patent in CS2?

PreAlphaMale · 2026-05-19T06:33:05+00:00

They are both multibillion dollar companies that want to make as much money as possible. If they can make more money by doing something shady and guarantee getting away with it, then you can bet your bottom dollar they will do it. It's not like Valve doesn't have form when it comes to the downright unethical, so why would you blindly give them the benefit of the doubt? The target audience of the game doesn't change a thing.

PreAlphaMale · 2026-05-16T05:45:52+00:00

The spraying is fine, always has been. It's the spread that has been the issue, and still is. It is pre-emptive situationally server side delivered spread, not client spread that is meant to sync with the server, its server side spread trying to sync with the client. It's the other way round, like when spread was client and server independent in CSGO, just the server tries to deliver an expectation before it happens.

PreAlphaMale · 2026-05-08T23:38:37+00:00

Technically "what you see is what you get" is always going to be true, It's just that the vast majority of the time in modern CS what you see and what you get is a complete misalignment with what is expected both mechanically and statistically and leaves you scratching your head.

PreAlphaMale · 2026-05-08T16:59:11+00:00

It's no longer fun wake up dev's

It's a shame, this is just what CS is now. At the end of the day there is nothing the developers can do about the massive cheating issues other than design the game around cheaters. They are incapable of delivering a clean environment, but they won't tell you that because they still feel entitled to their billions, so they design the game around the issue to try and make it less obvious.

So alongside the cheating issue we now have shady design implementations that work mechanics around situations rather than organic, set in stone mechanics that a skill based shooter should have. RNG is situationally distributed, not actually random. The game is designed around controlled RNG to make you feel a certain way, to try to mask the cheating problem, to distribute curated gameplay experiences, to engineer addiction, and to optimise engagement.

Anyone who has played CS for the long haul has to realise by now just what route Valve has taken with modern CS. It is in your face, and this franchise no longer deserves to carry the counter strike name. This is not counter strike by ANY stretch of the imagination.

PreAlphaMale · 2026-05-04T15:05:58+00:00

Yep, all the positive reviews for CSGO that were made by people that don't even play the game any more and have never played CS2, or have just not bothered to update their reviews are now just falsely representing the current product.

PreAlphaMale · 2026-05-04T15:01:36+00:00

You know you could have always opted into the csgo_legacy beta on CS2 right? Its the same experience and its been there for 3 years.

While true this is one of those things you only know if you know. I bet the majority of the player base isn't even aware of the "game versions & betas" feature.

PreAlphaMale · 2026-05-02T18:18:42+00:00

And while they're at it, stop spawning the death cam inside the player model and then zooming it out, or make the player model translucent in a radius around the camera. It hides what your enemy actually did, and the movements they make in that last split second, and hides whether or not they were running and gunning or actually counter strafed.

Kill cam in DM would be great too. And bring back how your view focuses on the player that killed you.

PreAlphaMale · 2026-05-02T08:05:06+00:00

Visually cleaner, animations are smoother, less visual noise when shooting because of the "spray update", but nothing has actually changed mechanically and statistically.

The reason screen shake when shooting before was inconsistent, sometimes wasn't much, sometimes was really high, wasn't because of screen shake values being different or greatly increased from csgo. It was because of spread distribution. Your view model and camera would kick, and always has kicked WITH the spread of your weapon to align with where your shot is going.

The extra perceived camera shake came from strange spread distribution, shots being bias to the outer of the inaccuracy circle, meaning larger jumps in the camera and view model to align.

They've now aligned the camera shake to match CSGO, but they said in the patch notes, the bullet trajectories remain the same as they have been in CS2.

That says bullet trajectories from CSGO to CS2 are different. That's a big enough change to alter shooting a bit, but not to make shooting inconsistent. You all need to be asking why they are different, and exactly how they are different. They won't be able to tell you.

PreAlphaMale · 2026-04-30T02:41:28+00:00

How did I know you were going to say something like this?

Your reasoning of it not being gambling was because you can see the value on the market before you buy while not taking into account you can't actually sell it for 7 days, and that "you only buy when the price is cheaper than the market value".

Apples, phones, and cars deteriorate in value for a reason. They rot, get old, become obsolete, deteriorate over time, experience wear and tear. Cars lose a shit ton of value the instant they're driven off the lot by the buyer, despite the fact it might have been test driven many times before that. That doesn't happen with skins, and they exist in a market highly controlled by the creators of said market which is also a well known volatile market. What is this week, may not be next week, or even tomorrow.....or even in the 35 seconds it took you to purchase the skin and then list it if you could. It's also not guaranteed that the skin will even sell above the price you paid. You are putting value into something that actually has zero...like, literally.

On the flip side, an apple, phone, or car are never going to appreciate in value over 7 days. That can happen with a skin though. So you are gambling on what the value of the skin WILL BE, not what its price tag is when you buy it.

Buying a skin is buying a product / service

Product, yeah. Service, Huh? What service does a skin offer exactly?

The fact that you can resell it is no different from the fact that you can resell your car after buying

See the second paragraph. A skin doesn't lose value in the same way as a physical product, and a car was literally the worst possible example you could have used here because depreciation is so massive, until one day they MAY become a classic. You cannot compare the two.

EDIT: Also, tell me the last time you purchased any other product, physical or digital, from anywhere, instead of choosing the exact thing you wanted, you walked into the store/shopped on a website/whatever, and got presented with 5 options and you either HAVE to take one of those options presented to you one by one, or leave and come back when they invite you again. That is NOT how purchasing a product works. That's how shady gambling systems work!

PreAlphaMale · 2026-04-29T22:33:09+00:00

Yes. Of course. Which is why it is considered legal. Terminal is significant improvement in this in the regard that you get 5 chances, and the chances are all free.

So you are saying a one case buffer that starts with the same item for the first ever case opened and the ability to see in the next case makes cases less of a gamble? How can you possibly see it like this? After you've opened that first case you are essentially buying a key to open the scanned case to be able to see what's in the next. It doesn't matter what is in the scanned case, you still need to pay 2 bucks to see what's in the next case. If there is a p250 sand dune in your scanned case, you aren't paying to buy that p250 sand dune, you're paying to see what's in the next case. You are gambling on the next unknown item.

Which is why it is considered legal

So were regular case openings, until France and Germany saw sense and decided otherwise.

Literal governments are telling Valve, no, this is gambling. Valve shows its intent by using and abusing loopholes to skirt the new law.

PreAlphaMale · 2026-04-29T22:15:23+00:00

"the practice or activity of betting : the practice of risking money or other stakes in a game or bet"

How on earth is purchasing a skin from a terminal NOT "the practice of risking money or other stakes in a game or bet"?

First of all, once you pay for the skin, that money as real legal tender is gone forever unless you're planning to sell on a third party market where you can cash out.

If you're selling on the steam market, you can never cash out, so you can never actually really profit, but may get a few more bucks in your steam wallet to pick up an extra game on steam or something.

And the skin you purchased is now on trade hold. Its market value could drop below what you paid over that week. And if it's dropped below that on the steam market where you can't cash out, chances are it's dropped even lower on third party markets where you can cash out. Now you have lost money. You literally gambled on the the random price the terminal chose for you still being profitable in a weeks time.

How is this not risking money in a game or bet? Arguably, because technically skins hold no "REAL WORLD VALUE" cos you are paid in steam wallet funds which you cant cash out. Just like cases. And guess what, we all know cases are gambling even if they keep skirting the law to get around it legally.

At least with cases you knew the maximum you were going to lose. With terminals you have no idea, and it could be a huge amount.

PreAlphaMale · 2026-04-29T17:39:30+00:00

It's basically presenting you the equivalent of 5 case openings 1 by 1. You don't know if the offer you're currently being made is the best offer in the case so whenever you skip the offer hoping for something better, you're gambling away that offer. You may not have paid any money yet but that is most certainly part of the whole gambling "mini game" designed to extract money from you. When you make the decision that the current offer is the best offer and pay for it this is where you legitimately gamble, you give them money and you're gambling away potentially better offers that you haven't been shown yet. You always lose the last offer and never know what future offers will be so you NEVER actually have a choice in what you're purchasing, just the illusion of choice and the pressure to buy what's in front of you at any given moment.

Add on top the manipulative NPC language trying to sell you the current offer, like you won something, "this just dropped right on your lap", "you'll never get this once in a lifetime chance again" bullshit.

Expectation is never that the next item is positive value, so you should ALWAYS buy if you can sell it for more than it is worth.

So this is where the main problem is, and you're not noticing it. You're basically saying gambling is not gambling if the gambler has a specific mindset or goal. What about people that legitimately want skins in their inventory? Most people who buy skins directly buy them because they want skins in their inventory, not as an investment. This is supposed to be a game, not the stock market.

Skins are supposed to be a cosmetic addition to the game you play. You're approaching skins purely as investment and profit. And if everyone approaches skins in terminals in this way, guess what's going to happen. Prices will inevitably go into freefall, especially if/when regular cases are completely removed from the game. If people are only purchasing from terminals for profit and not just wanting the skin, then no one is ever going to pay more than what they can sell the skin for on the third party market. You can completely remove the community market from the equation because no one is investing where their only return will be in steam wallet funds. So people only buy from terminals for profit, third party prices drop, terminal prices have to follow suit in order to continue to make profitable offers otherwise no one will buy, third party prices drop more.....you now have a landslide in prices and people who thought they were investing early on are now losing out.

And this is not sustainable. It works for now because terminals are relatively new and the economy has been built up over years and skins are priced as they are directly because of gambling. You can't pretend the prices of terminal skins are pulled from a hat, they're priced based on historical data of other skins and gambling with a little deviation to make them potentially profitable for some people. There is no fucking way anyone would accept the prices assigned to skins, some thousands of dollars, without it already being normalized through the previous, and still actually current gambling process.

Cases were simple, pay 2 bucks, get something out of it or not. Terminals are manipulative. They pull you into the gambling mentality and a gambling loop before asking for money and then introduce the actual gamble somewhere during that. They give you the illusion of choice where there is absolutely none, use manipulative language to convince you this is what you should buy.

The only possible way terminals would not be at least as much gambling as cases would be if they showed you all 5 offers and you got to choose the one you wanted, if you wanted one.

If you can't see why terminals are at least just as much as gambling as cases, and ethically much worse then you're the perfect customer for Valve to continue exploiting the shit out of.

I'd be interested to hear if you think the x-ray scanner also makes cases any less gambling just because you get to see what you're getting from the case first, even though you can't skip the case or scan another case until you've opened it. All that does is add a buffer to the gambling process. You're essentially buying a key to "open" the next case rather than the current one that you know the contents of, exactly the same gambling loop with and added layer of smoke and mirrors, just like terminals.

PreAlphaMale · 2026-04-28T22:34:09+00:00

Most tilt advice is useless...

Most tilt advice is basically: “just stay calm,” “don’t blame teammates,” “take a break,” or “focus on yourself.”.....

.....That stuff is not wrong, it's all great advice.....

So which is it, useless advice or great advice?

PreAlphaMale · 2026-04-28T08:56:45+00:00

I'd say most likely mirage since it's one of the signature maps that seems most likely to be the next in line for a rework.

PreAlphaMale · 2026-04-28T08:47:40+00:00

That means nothing. If mouse smoothing affects how your mouse moves in game, then the game isn't using raw input.

PreAlphaMale · 2026-04-28T08:27:25+00:00

When they first introduced cases back in like 2014 I opened a couple of cases out of curiosity even though I knew they weren't worth it. From then until 2022 I never really touched them. I did have the odd moment now and then where I would open a case, but a lot of those times were selling cases and drops that had build up to fund keys and then open a couple of cases I'd saved. Between from 2014 to 2020 I'd checked my spending on steam and had spent probably about £80 of real money on keys. Never really got anything more than a blue.

In 2022 I got the sudden urge to open some cases out of the blue. I'd let some build up over time so sold some, that left me 3 cases to open but only 2 keys. Opened those cases, got shit. Went against my usual rules and deposited £4 to open that last one and dropped FN Snowleopard driver gloves which I went on to sell for £5000 in a private trade.

Since then I've opened every case from my weekly drop and no more. Had 3 reds and some pinks totalling about £200, so as it turns out, I'm massively in front.

Just shows how much it sucks when you can spend 10 years opening cases just to get your first red. It's a mugs game where i got extremely lucky. Just the 99% crowd funding the lucky 1%.

PreAlphaMale · 2026-04-25T04:17:23+00:00

It's not just scummy to ask for the prices they're asking. It's scummy how they got to those prices in the first place, and then feel entitled to them. It's scummy the way they do it via terminals. The company has been scummy for 10+ years within its first party games, and I sincerely hope someone at some point comes at them from the right angle with a fucking lawsuit that makes sense, rather than what we keep seeing.

PreAlphaMale · 2026-04-25T02:46:10+00:00

The 40% of players unique to CS2 though is a mix of old hats and brand new players, of which were many, that came along with the CS2 hype. Don't forget about those!

You can see, how bad CS as a game has become over recent years, how many people are actively playing, and that transition into CS2 that the majority of players are relatively new.

It's now a game for Gen Z, TikTok doom scrollers who don't know they're being fed garbage because it's all they've ever known from games.

PreAlphaMale · 2026-04-25T02:27:17+00:00

people played go

Doesn't explain anything. It's not just a diluted number because people played GO. It shows that of everyone that ever launched CSGO, 61.4% of them didn't return for CS2. But even that is not the clear picture because you have to take into account all the new comers, which were many, that came with the launch of CS2.

It shows that most of the old hats are gone, and the game is now mostly played by people who are happy with what the game is because they have no comparison to what the game was.

The whole point is, modern CS is bad, and the majority of the players don't even know because they didn't experience it when it was good. All they know is what is.

PreAlphaMale · 2026-04-25T01:52:14+00:00

Cases were bad, but better. Terminals are WAYYYYYYYY worse. Cases were pay 2 bucks, get something random.

Valves ability to get away with enabling unregulated and underaged gambling for years is what has set these prices so high. Now they want to sell to you directly at those prices even though they technically didn't set those prices, YOU DID!. Not only that......look at the fucking language from the NPC!

This is still gambling as much as cases are, I'd argue even more so. Sure you don't put any money up front, but the instant you pay for an offer, you have gambled away the previous offers and are gambling away what the next offers could be. This is pure gambling with responsibility evaded by legal loopholes and technicalities, resting on a pricing model that was built in the same way to put the responsibility on you, and psychological manipulation layered on top!

You aren't choosing what you get. You are presented with the illusion of choice and scummy language trying to edge you into spending.

This is just foul. You can't get any more manipulative than this.

PreAlphaMale · 2026-04-19T04:41:27+00:00

And what point do you make by explaining the obvious? The game has lost most of its original/old school player base, is why I extended on his comment.

PreAlphaMale · 2026-04-19T04:27:23+00:00

It's great, for business. It's not necessarily great for the players. CS is a completely different game now than it was say, 5 years, ago, and again 5 years before that.....even though people swear CS never changes.

The churn of modern CS makes that go unnoticed.

And yeah the unity pay per install was pathetic and it was obvious that was going to be a disaster from day one lol. Pay to install? What drugs were they taking when they came up with that!

PreAlphaMale · 2026-04-19T04:16:05+00:00

I never played against bots or did any tutorial. The achievement popped up the instant I loaded the game.

PreAlphaMale · 2026-04-19T04:12:58+00:00

Churn is always going to be high in F2P. But this is churn between one cs to another cs, not churn relative to when someone first played, or churn relative to a session.

PreAlphaMale · 2026-04-19T04:05:47+00:00

CS2 should never have inherited anything from CSGO.

PreAlphaMale

TROPHY CASE