(Copyright: Michal Konkol, ESL FACEIT Group)
Welcome to the Refrag CS2 News Round-Up! Every Monday, we plan to bring you a recap of the latest news around the Counter-Strike 2 scene.
IEM Cologne 2024 concludes, Team Vitality win 4 map thriller
Team Vitality has firmly placed themselves atop the throne in the cathedral of Counter-Strike.
IEM Cologne always seems to deliver, with close matches and great storylines; this year’s tournament was no different. Viewership peaked at a count of 1.05 million, making it the third-highest non-Major peak in CS history. It joins the elite company of all-time great tournaments like 2022’s Katowice and Cologne, and for good reason. The level of play has never been higher, and the storylines were as compelling as they’ve ever been.
SAW delivered an excellent Cinderella run, making it all the way to the semi-finals, beating G2, The MongolZ, and FaZe along the way. The aforementioned G2 looked revitalized by their new roster additions, while FaZe continued their streak of disappointing finishes. Liquid looked to have turned a corner with their new lineup, but just couldn’t get over the line versus karrigan and co. in the group stage. NA representatives Complexity couldn’t find their footing enough to make the stage this time around either, falling early on to MOUZ and Liquid.
One thing is for sure: this tournament proves once more that there’s a great deal of parity between the teams in the top 10. The world number 1 team, NAVI, wasn’t truly tested until the likes of Vitality met them in the final. With the Golden Hornets faithful behind them, Team Vitality won 3 very close maps, 2 of which went to overtime. The clinching map victory almost got away from them, however. After going up 10-2 on the T side of Inferno, NAVI began mounting a comeback, stringing 6 straight rounds together. Despite rough maps from Spinx and mezii, ZywOo and apEX dragged Vitality kicking and screaming across the finish line, earning them their first trophy of 2024.
Valve pushes small updates, including axing usage of “Snap Tap”
On August 14th, Valve released an update for CS2 that was relatively small in size. Patch notes included an update to more up-to-date versions of Mills and Pool Day, alongside some smaller bug fixes.
Also included in this update were tweaks to the tagging system. In an effort to reduce instances of players teleporting when taking damage, Valve has delayed the tagging effect slightly, but reduced the overall effect slightly. This should hopefully fix player reports of dying behind cover.
While it wasn’t explicitly mentioned in the patch notes, a keen-eyed community member found new references to Razer’s “Snap Tap” technology within the game files. If you want to know more about Snap Tap and what it does, we have a blog post on that here.
Valve followed this update with another on August 19th, where they effectively banned the use of Snap Tap, Rappy Snappy, or any type of SOCD technology.
With this update, Valve has fully disabled the use of any binds that have multiple functions. This includes actions like jump-throws and null binds. In addition, Valve has said that the use of hardware-based SOCD will cause the player using them to be kicked from their match.
This caused quite a stir in the community, with many pros and personalities chiming in.
One part of the update that was overlooked by many community members was the inclusion of a note that initial testing of VacNet 3.0, which is Valve’s much anticipated anti-cheat solution for the rampant cheating problem in integrated matchmaking modes.
Perfect World announces groups for Europe RMR Closed Qualifier, dates for roster lock
The upcoming Major cycle is just around the corner.
Perfect World has announced the groups for the EU RMR Closed Qualifier, along with dates for roster lock. The Closed Qualifier stage of this major cycle will feature two 16-team groups playing in a Swiss system. The top 8 in the group advance to the RMR, and seeding is decided by Valve’s ranking, which updates on October 15th.
Dates for roster lock were also announced, with the core of your roster required to be finalized by September 7th. Substitutions can be changed up until September 22nd, however.
