New players to the Competitive playlist will first have to win 10 games before they get ranked. This will place them in one of the ranks listed above, and many will most likely skip the first couple of low ra

Counter-Strike players have often found creative means of using the game's community map aspect with some CS:GO players recreating popular locations from franchises like The Witcher . Now, a Finnish newspaper called Helsingin Sanomat is using the same feature to share details about the war in Ukraine among Russian gamers owing to the title's popularity within the community. A custom-made map dubbed "de_voyna," a fictionalized Slavic city, was released today that aims to echo some of the cities that have been destroyed over the course of the war. More interestingly, the map contains images and voice recordings captured by the newspaper's journalists on the ground situation, all of which players can interact with in-g

In order to further contain CS:GO 's French marketplace, perhaps to avoid market manipulation through the use of X-Ray Scanners, Valve is making one additional change. Loot boxes can no longer be purchased from the Steam Community Market in France. All CS:GO players in the country will have to earn their own loot boxes. Though, naturally, Valve will still allow those players to sell their loot boxes to those in other countr

Unfortunately, progress on Classic Offensive's Steam release has reached a complete standstill . To explain the situation, the team behind the CS:GO mod recently posted a statement on Twitter, revealing that despite years of effort and compliance with Valve's legal guidelines over the usage of the Counter-Strike IP, Classic Offensive never saw the light of day on Steam. Moreover, the team's communication with Valve apparently ceased in late 2020, and the situation escalated when Classic Offensive was submitted for a build review on October 6, 2024. After weeks of silence, the team received an automated message from Valve declaring that the Steamworks app for Classic Offensive had been retired without explanat

In any case, even though the Finnish newspaper's de_voyna map was launched in line with World Press Freedom Day to reach the millions of Russians playing Counter-Strike 2 Ranking Guide|Https://Counterstrike2Zone.Com/ , it's worth noting that Valve wasn't consulted prior to the community-made map going online. So it will be interesting to see how long the downloadable map will remain online, should the company take any act

Players will not be able to know how many competitive matches it will take before seeing a rank change, and it is possible to continue staying within a rank if performance is steady and does not change. However, players who take an extended break from playing ranked matches will have their rank suspended until they win a specific number of matches to be placed ag

As if that isn't frustrating enough, Valve has apparently "preloaded" the X-Ray Scanner with an item already. Meaning that players will have to purchase this item, regardless of whether they want it, in order to use the X-Ray Scanner on a loot box. The X-Ray Scanner may appear to be beneficial to players, but ultimately is just another effort at encouraging players to begin purchasing microtransactions . There's little reason to believe it's significantly beneficial over

Twitch has also recently made waves for a spate of content bans stemming from copyright violations without clear citations , leading a number of viewers to cry foul. S1mple's case seems more cut and dry, and the streaming platform seems to take hate speech violations on high-profile streams seriou

Not only did scriptKid fool thousands of Counter-Strike cheaters into downloading and becoming victim to his script, their most embarrassing moments have been made available to watch. By including a script that sent the replay footage of every cheater mishap directly to him, scriptKid created a magnificent video, including the funniest trolling mome

However, this isn't the first time a Valve product or service was indirectly involved in the war efforts. It was recently reported that the Ukrainian military is using the Steam Deck to remotely control turrets . Here, the Steam Deck runs a custom UI that allows the operator to be up to 500 meters (1,640 feet) away from the turret. The custom version is reportedly capable of installing any anti-personnel or anti-tank weapon as w

It's currently unclear why Valve moved forward with these changes in France, in particular. So far France has not enacted any new regulations to account for loot boxes in video games, though French courts did recently rule that Steam has to allow users to resell their digital games . In 2018, the French online gambling regulatory body even assessed that loot boxes were not gambling under the country's current regulation. Perhaps Valve is using France as a testing bed or perhaps the decision is intended to shift discourse within the country or Europe. Either way, Valve certainly appears to be taking steps to protect the profits it receives from loot boxes amid the growing international controve