(GotFrag) - The latest update from Valve has the competitive CS community in a frenzy. Cries of "CS is dead", "I'll never play again" and "PLEASE ROLL IT BACK" are being heard community wide. It would seem that Valve has no intention of rolling the update back and consider the matter closed.

It appears in an attempt to fix what many consider a bug, and has been a problem in some well known competitions over the last couple of years; silent crouch hopping, sound has been given to any jump motion. This would make a significant change to established competitive gameplay as many players and teams utilize the secrecy of silence during gameplay.

The problem lies within these few words in the official announcement of the update...

April 20, 2009, 4:06 pm - Valve - Product Update
Updates to Counter-Strike and Condition Zero have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The specific changes include:
Counter-Strike and Condition Zero
Prevent Russian Walking exploit

GotFrag spoke with a few well known pro players, managers and community members about the update and what it means for competitive Counter Strike.



James "Jame^s" O'Conner
Pro Player

"If adding the jumping noise was the only way to fix crouch hopping then I'm OK with it. Obviously they need to fix the crashing sound loop bug. But if they can do away with the noise when you jump and the noise when you go up ladders slowly and still keep the crouch hopping fix then I think valve would be foolish to not remove the additional sound triggers."




Alex Garfield
Owner/Manager Team EG

"I think that any potential positives that have come via fixing the exploit (if you're even of the opinion that it needed to be fixed in the first place) have been easily outweighed by the bugginess that came along with the "fix." We now have movement sounds being made and heard in situations that are completely absurd from a competitive standpoint."





Tomi "lurppis" Kovanen
Pro Player

"I think despite making the game slower, removing duckhopping is a good thing because in the long run it'll make CS less random especially at LANs where you almost never had to walk for the last year. The jump sound is a little annoying and will take time to get used to, but I don't think it's as big deal as people make it out to be; everyone will just adapt anyways. The only real problem with the update is the crashes, which is going to definitely cause some problems in the CEVO playoffs, as I doubt Valve will fix that in time."







Bobby "Weenus" Hicks
eSports Journalist

"It seems strange for Valve to come and patch something out of the blue like this, when it really wasn't a game breaking issue to Counter-Strike as a whole. The change constricts the competitive game-play massively, and strategies will have to be re-worked if not completely scrapped as a whole now."

"Looking at the overall picture though, people are likely to get over it and move on. The community has moved past much bigger changes multiple times in the past. The community may forget the older days before the slowdown after jumping which was brought in to combat bunny hopping (in-effectively) and it's not something they just take as part of Counter-Strike, and the loss of silent jumping/boosting will likely have a similar history."

"I don't believe it's all bad though. Every great era of Counter-Strike had a huge, game changing event that really spurred it's evolution. A great example of this was the update to the money system that had completely changed the pacing of competitive Counter-Strike. Hopefully this gameplay change will be used to help redefine Counter-Strike yet again, and shakeup the old faithful strategies and styles that teams have been leaning on for so long, in order to bring on yet another new evolution of the competition and gameplay styles."



What do YOU think?

Do the changes spell out a new phase of counter-strike gameplay history? Or are these claims merely a product of hype coming in the immediate wake of the announcements?

What do you see becoming of competitive CS as a result of the update?