Release Notes for 2/6/2024

ARMS RACE

• Added Arms Race to available game modes

• Added maps "Baggage" and "Shoots"

WEAPON FINISHES

• Introducing the Kilowatt Case, featuring 17 community-designed weapon finishes, and the Kukri Knife with original finishes as a rare special item

• Various bug fixes and tweaks

STICKERS

• The Ambush Sticker Capsule is now available for purchase

• Added support for flexible sticker placement. Stickers can now be placed at user-specified positions and rotation when applied to weapons

• All weapons now support up to five stickers

• Added a zoom feature during sticker placement to allow for higher precision sticker application

• Various bug fixes and tweaks

MUSIC KITS

• The NIGHTMODE Music Kit Box is now available for purchase in standard and StatTrak versions

ZEUS

• Made Zeus reusable in all game modes, after a 30 second recharge delay

• Added support for applying stickers and name tags to the Zeus

• Adjusted the Zeus first person model position

• Added Zeus kill icon to kill cards and post round damage report

SMOKE

• Smokes now cast shadows

• Rendering and animation have been improved

GAMEPLAY

• Added a "Refund All" button to the buy menu

• Added a setting to disable first person bullet tracers

• Silencers can now always be reattached regardless of whether detaching them is enabled or not

• Player pings are no longer blocked by invisible geometry

• Various adjustments to sub-tick shooting

• Fixed several cases where players could silently drop down vertical surfaces

• Improved smoothness of sliding along surfaces

• Fixed an issue where collisions between players were jittery

• To ensure loadouts are correct at the beginning of matches, loadout changes are no longer allowed while searching for Premier, Competitive, or Wingman

SOUND

• Added the option to select an audio input device for VOIP from the audio settings menu

• Added the option to change your microphone threshold (the minimum loudness before we start transmitting audio) from the audio options menu, as well as metering for your current mic loudness

• Added the option to listen to your own microphone from the audio settings menu to hear how you sound

• Replaced the M249 fire sound effect

• Replaced the Zeus charging, charge not available and charge ready states sound effects

• Further reduced occlusion effects

• Minor mix adjustments

• Fixed an issue where some player-centric sounds were being perceived as originating from slightly behind the player

NETWORKING

• Reduced peeker's advantage in many cases

• The amount of peeker's advantage in the steady state is reduced by 16ms

• Also reduced the frequency of situations that lead to very large peeker's advantage due to excessive command queue depth

• Added cl_ticktiming console command that prints a report breaking down the various sources of latency

• Added an option to buffer server updates and user commands by one or more packets. This can be used to smooth over stuttering due to packet loss, at the expense of increased latency

UI

• Added support for separate main menu and item inspect background map settings

• Added "Baggage" and "Warehouse" as options for the main menu and item inspect background maps

• In-game team-only chat will now be prefixed with the team (e.g., "[T]" or "[CT]")

• Added 'XP Overload' status which is awarded to players who have earned all of their normal XP during the week (11,166 XP) and reached reduced XP gain. XP Overload status is attached to players' names in scoreboard, main menu, death notices, etc. XP Overload status is awarded for a minimum of one week.