A new Counter-Strike: Global Offensive patch has just dropped, but away from its standard bug fixes and map tweaks, there’s one change that’s got the community talking – the decision to remove bots from competitive and Wingman games.
Traditionally if a player left or was kicked from a game, they would be replaced with a bot. These bots, if you could stop them from rushing B with their freshly purchased Negev, could be controlled by a player upon their death. This led to some four-man stacks kicking their solo queue teammates to take full control of the game.
This will no longer be the case anymore, though. Valve has decided to remove bots altogether in competitive modes (unless the entire team leaves the match) and while it should help curb toxicity online, it’s left a pretty sour taste in the mouths of many fans grinding the CS:GO ranks.
Bots offer teams a fighting a chance when their teammates lose connection for a round or two. Under this new system, teams will automatically be at a disadvantage – something many have taken to social media to complain about.
WHY REMOVE BOTS? WTF?!
— Anomaly (@anomalyxd) January 8, 2021
“If someone on your team leaves, it’s instantly GG,” YouTuber ‘Anomaly’ says. “Today me and Linda got disconnected from a game because of internet drop. Me [sic] managed to reconnect and while we were gone our team DIDN’T do horribly because they had two bots. With this new update they would have 100% lost all the rounds we were gone.”
Valve also decided to remove weapon pings in competitive matches, a change which has also been widely condemned by the community.
You can read the full patch notes here.