Valve has fixed CS:GO’s meta-breaking radar bind exploit

An exploit that threatened to undermine Counter-Strike: Global Offensive’s competitive meta ahead of its next major tournament has been fixed. The change was announced in an update set live last night.

The exploit affected smoke grenades, which are a major part of the Counter-Strike meta at every level of the game, cutting off important lines of sight and providing temporary hiding places. If a player is in smoke, they can’t see anything, but until it fades, they can’t be seen, either.

The exploit, however, allowed players to determine where enemies were standing based on the game’s mini-map (or radar), even if they should be hidden within or behind smoke. Before the fix, players realised that rapidly changing the scale of the radar caused icons to appear even if the corresponding character models couldn’t actually be seen on-screen. That allowed top-level players to pick out players who they shouldn’t be able to see. You can get some idea of what that looks like in the clip embedded further down this article, although there’s no guarantee that the player in question, Gla1ve, is using the radar bind strategy.

Understandably, on the eve of a tournament, that caused some controversy within the community, which was rapidly trying to come up with a solution to the problem. Thankfully, Valve has stepped in, issuing a new update that “fixed the ‘radar spotting enemies through smoke’ mechanic to behave the same regardless of the game server tickrate, and to not reveal enemies on the opposite side of the smoke until the smoke effect dissipates.”

Pro players had spent much of the last few days attempting rectify the situation themselves. MIBR player Taco tweeted to suggest that the radar bind should be banned from the tournament outright, while former player Spunj suggests removing enemies from the radar in order to put the focus on in-game communication. In a bold suggestion, Ninjas in Pyjamas’ Lekr0 suggests a “gentleman’s agreement” to not use smokes at all during the tournament, but many are suggesting that this new discovery is simply part of the meta, and that the teams who adapt to it are the ones who deserve to succeed.

You can check out the tournament on Twitch. It’ll begins later today, and will run until Sunday, March 3.