Week 2 of the operation has begun! You’ll still be able to do week 1 stuff but can earn
up to 6 more stars from doing some of the 6 new missions. None of these are required-
you can max out your earned stars from the 2 ‘3 star missions’, or can avoid them
by doing all of the others instead. It’s sad there aren’t any new coop missions like
week 1’s Virus Outbreak. I guess like previous operations, there will only be a few of these
spread out across the duration of the event. A lot of you complained about performance
issues, which sadly(?) I didn’t have. But if you did, see if it’s been solved with
this update, now that Valve has suspended several UI videos while in-game, which I assume
were running in the background before, noticeably slowing down less powerful systems.
Whereas before you could only deposit and retrieve items from storage containers one
at a time, you can now do multiple at once, speeding the process up significantly. You’ll
still have to watch it deposit each item individually, but there’s something quite satisfying about
just sitting there while it does all of the work for you.
With the HALO collection coming to Steam, it’s bizarre but understandable to see a
new HALO sticker capsule for the game, all of the designs for which you can see here.
One of these stands out as being far more desirable than the others. MISTER CHIEF is
a character who appeared in the Bungie Weekly Updates as far back as 2004, and has since
become something of a dank meme. I’m sure he will become a must-have design for true
fans of the game to sport on all of their weapons.
Also, if owners of the Master Chief Collection ‘accrue sufficient playtime in the game’,
they’ll get a HALO-themed music kit for CS:GO. I don’t know how much play-time is
required to get this. Just go play your games until you get a pleasant surprise!
And the community-made maps have been changed. FMPone has rolled out his visibility and readability
patch for Cache to help make the new character models to stand out better against the background.
Here are how a few of the spots around the map have changed so you can see how he’s
gone about improving visibility. It’s generally by making the walls have larger, lighter shaded
sections- you can see this most obviously on truck, which will make snipers stood here
looking into A stand out far better. A tree is missing in the distance at A which I think
is part of his on-going effort to optimise this map’s framerates.
And Studio has had its first big update. Parts of the map now have names which will help
people to learn callouts for it. Bombsite B has been squished, making it smaller and
providing fewer camping spots. Bombsite A has had some cover removed, and the bomb’s
radius has been upped from 500 to 600, since you could easily survive the bomb plast, even
from inside the site. Unfortunately, I didn’t see any changes when I tested it- so it could
be that the wingman config (which is still set to 500) takes priority.
You used to be able to stand in this corner but it’s been blocked up by a bush, which
also serves to obstruct visibility across middle. Movement has been improved by removing
plant-pots or even an entire car near T-spawn. And several community-reported bomb-stuck
spots and bugs have been fixed. I don’t think that any of us were expecting
a big change this week. That all came last week. And probably sometime in early December
while I’m away again. Have fun!