We all have habits in our Counter-Strike 2 training routines. Whether it’s your exact routine down to the minute, the number of bots you kill, or the particular areas of weakness that you target, your practice routine is as much a part of you as your playstyle. As with any competitive discipline, CS2 encompasses a skillset forged in the fires of well-honed practice. Of course, when you’re locked into the same training routine day after day, sometimes you can let some little things slip and develop some bad habits.

In this brief explainer, we’re going to take a look at how Refrag actively helps you to combat the development of bad habits by ensuring that your practice increases in difficulty in real time, alongside your performance in the practice server. Today, we’re going to take a look at Smart Mode.

Training Smart

When you’re in a workshop map, or any other form of Counter-Strike warmup, training to your heart’s content, have you ever felt that you might be losing focus? Perhaps you’ve realised that you’re overswinging certain angles, or taking a little too long to kill a bot that, if it were an enemy in a competitive game, would definitely have one-tapped you by now.

When you use Refrag, you will immediately notice a difference. In most training modes, Refrag will default to the “.smart” difficulty mode. Smart Mode is a constantly adapting setting, through which the bots you are fighting will increase in difficulty as your ELO increases. This mode is designed to actively track your success in whichever mode you’re currently using. Let’s take a look at an example.

Smart Mode In Practice

Let’s look at Prefire. In this mode, you train your angle management, clearing, crosshair placement, and swing precision. It is designed to tighten up your procedural clears, and minimise the risks you take in-game when attempting to clear common spots.

Oftentimes, when grinding Prefire, some Refrag users would fall into habits that would be exceptionally punishable in actual games. Wide swinging everything, fast adjustments to questionable crosshair placement, and weird movement decisions can feel like they’re effective, up to a point, in training, but would net you death after death in a Faceit game, for example. This is where .smart stepped in.

With Smart Mode, the bots on Prefire will punish you for these mistakes. Not only that, but as you increase in your ELO and get better at each arena, the bots will increase in tandem with you. Therefore, soon enough, you will be training at the absolute top of your skill ceiling. You will be forced to improve, not just to practice.

Training Against Yourself

If you are regularly using Smart Mode whilst training on your Refrag server, you will be reaching your skill ceiling in every compatible mode. This means that, sooner rather than later, you will not just be training against Refrag’s bots, but yourself. If you want to keep that Elo rising, and keep the difficulty of the bots in any given arena increasing, you will need to be refining your movements, decision making, crosshair placement, and time-to-kill. You will need to actively get better, rather than just stay in your comfort zone and skill bracket. The beauty of having a visible ELO after each arena is that you can track your progress, whether positive or negative, in real time. 

Let’s say you notice a decline in your ELO over a few rounds of practice. This means you have a visual indicator that something is going wrong in how you are approaching whichever situation you’re training in. This gives you a valuable prompt for self-reflection, and can help you to identify your weaknesses much faster than any other training platform out there. This, coupled with bots improving alongside you, means you are not just prompted to improve, but incentivized to.

So, the next time you’re grinding some Counter-Strike 2 practice in a Refrag server, remember to make sure you’re on Smart Mode, and start holding yourself to higher standards every single round.

Smart Mode FAQs

What is .smart mode? – .smart mode toggles on automatic difficulty adjustment in the mode you’ve chosen. Variables like bot reaction time and accuracy are changed depending on your performance.

How do I activate .smart mode? – .smart mode can be toggled by typing the .smart command in the in-game chat.

What does Refrag ELO mean? – Refrag ELO is a number rating given to players of Crossfire and Prefire. This number is calculated based on your performance in that specific mode.

Which Refrag Modes are compatible with .smart Mode? – Currently, all modes are compatible with .smart except for the following: Aimbotz, Pop, Momentum, Spray Novice and Bunnyhop.