Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, or better known as CSGO, has just received a new update that has some minor changes to the game along with some questionable map changes.
Valve has seemingly decided that the map Cobblestone is not fit for competitive play and has removed it altogether from its competitive matchmaking lineup. In its place, Vertigo has been added to competitive matchmaking. The map itself, Vertigo, also receives some updates. Minor gameplay changes have been made, nothing major.
Changes have also been made for casual players. Overpass and Nuke have been moved into the Defusal Delta Group while Cobblestone and Vertigo have been moved into the Defusal Stigma Group. Nuke and Overpass are now considered active duty maps. This means they are to be used at any major valve tournament as they are in the current competition map pool.
This is quite the move by Valve as pretty much no competitive player would prefer to play Cobblestone over Vertigo. Perhaps they want to make changes to Vertigo and make it a viable map. Maybe they are planning to do a cobblestone remake like with other maps in the past. Before, Vertigo was mostly used by players who just wanted to de-rank themselves down the ranks to achieve what is known as ‘smurfing’. They then could play against lower ranked players even though they were players of higher ranks themselves.
Some minor bug fixes and gameplay changes have also been made including a fix for a launch option that they introduced with the 3/6/2019 update. The fix is for Intel iGPU users who got a black screen upon launch when using the launch option. Overall, the launch option has been getting positive feedback from users as some are reporting improved framerates while others are experiencing faster Alt-Tab times. I personally noticed a minor increase in FPS and instant Alt-Tab timings. This was a great addition from Valve. But, it’s fair to say that the same statement does not stand for today’s update.