A new CS:GO patch dropped on March 6 that featured new improvements that will make streaming the game much less of a risk for prominent figures in the scene.
Professional CS:GO players and streamers like Marcelo ‘coldzera’ David, Warowl and more, have been routinely targeted by trolls who intentionally display obscene or offensive imagery for the purposes of deterring a broadcast.
It looks like Valve is starting to be more attentive to their streaming community by giving broadcasters features that will essentially censor out unwanted information from other players, much like the Streamer Mode that was popularized by Fortnite.
Valve FINALLY adds the ability to block avatars in CS:GO. I've been asking for this for YEARS. This is not just helpful for Streamers like myself, but also people who want to game around family, etc.
— War Owl (@TheWarOwl) March 7, 2019
The latest CS:GO update implemented new tools that let players take control of the player icons on their screen, communication between people in a server and more.
CS:GO players have come to find that an opposing team, especially if they suspect someone is streaming, will spam the chat with offensive terms. The new patch will take care of the problem by allowing users to completely mute the enemy team.
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Players like Coldzera could come back to streaming without the fear of being locked in a game with trolls. Previously, a streamer would be forced to play 30-50 minute matches with people more concerned with getting them banned than playing the game.
Similarly, the update will let users change the names of players that aren’t on their friends list. Since Steam names can be changed on a whim, this finally gives players control to prevent bannable words or terms pop up on their screens.
Valve’s push to combat trolls in CS:GO will go a long way to finally letting top-tier CS:GO streamers broadcast without needing to worry about facing a possible ban. You can read the full patch notes below.
GRAPHICS
- Added an optional -d3d9ex command line switch to reduce CPU memory use by about 40%. If you encounter graphics problems with this feature, please send an email to CSGOTeamFeedback@valvesoftware.com with the subject “D3D9EX”.
COMMUNICATION OPTIONS
- Added communication options in Game Settings which allow the following:
- Mute enemy team
- Block communication from everyone except players you are friends with or players in your matchmaking party
- Hide avatar images
- Change names of players not on your friends list to something neutral
MISC
- Katowice 2019 comes to a close: Champions and Legends have been engraved on the trophies, and the Katowice 2019 graffiti can no longer be applied in game.
- Increased the voting time on official servers before transitioning to the next map.
- Fixed a scoreboard case where a player’s rank icons sometimes didn’t get removed when the player was replaced with a bot.
Rumor has it:
- Here is the in-game Champion trophy as well as the Quarter-/Semi-/Finalist trophy with some new names as well as some familiar names
- There are a couple of cosmetic issues however, the first one being that the IEM Katowice 2019 ring is partially cut off due to a vtf spacing error. The second issue is that all in-game major trophies’ descriptions now obscure the Katowice 2019 ring
- One small unmentioned fix about the in-game Quarterfinalist/Semifinalist/Finalist and Champion trophies did happen, when inspecting them, you can now spin them around all the way (previously immediately after the switch from legacy Scaleform to Panorama, you could only spin it 30 degrees either way)
- Though your IEM Katowice 2019 graffiti can no longer be used, you can still buy stickers and capsules…at least for now. The next time the GC is restarted however, that probably won’t be the case anymore, so consider this your very last chance to stock up on some dirt cheap stickers
- Other than the above things in the notes, there’s also some localization file updates which are made possible in part by contributions from Translators Like You – Thank You: https://github.com/SteamDataba… necessarily directly related to this update, but remember when Danger Zone was released that Valve appeared to be using Google’s Cloud Platform to host some Steam Datagram system infrastructure in Helsinki and Sao Paulo? Recent Steam Datagram system configuration changes (which have also been locally synced) indicate that Valve has given up on that project at least for right now
- Size is ~25 MB
