No more rollbacks, Valve

The CS:GO developers at Valve have had a rough week or so. Two most significant parts of their recent gameplay-changing update, which opened the flood gates of backlash from  the community and professional players, were either reverted or severely edited, to everyone's sigh of relief.

Most of you likely already know Valve's approach to community and pro player feedback. But for those who do not - make no mistake, the two latest updates, which firstly nerfed the insanely overpowered R8 Revolver and secondly reverted all widely unpopular changes made to the AK-47, M4A1-S and M4A4, were one of (if not the) company's first acknowledgements of taking community and pro feedback into consideration after more than three years of developing the game.

Now that we've confirmed Valve does listen and react, albeit in the worst circumstances only, it's time for them to listen some more so that events such as these don't happen in the future again, and to ensure that the future of the game is also in the community's hands.

Change is good - well, at least it can be

We naturally don't want the community, or professionals for that matter, to have a definitive say in everything, but it would be nice to know that our voices are heard and responded to, if need be.

Why shouldn't the community and professional players have a definitive say, you ask? Well, that's easy, we've seen many overreact to change directly after a significant update. For example, when the silenced counterpart to M4A4 was released back in mid-2013, a storm of concern surrounded social media and forums about the weapon's clip size and number of extra magazines.

We all know how it turned out in the end - it only took a few months before we saw more than three out of five players of basically every top10 team use the M4A1-S, when they realized how much the pros outweighed the cons.

To put it simply, people are afraid of the unknown and generally don't like big changes, whether it be in their lives or on the virtual field. But as we've confirmed thus far, change can be good and most of it, at least the pure root of it, should definitely stay in Valve's hands. Otherwise the game would stagnate in evolution and we would rarely see bigger gameplay updates come to light.

How can Valve listen better?

Now this is an evergreen-type topic. How can Valve ensure they don't shoot themselves in the foot (With a Revolver. The OP one. The one that dealt about 90 damage.) like that again? How can we ensure they have things to listen to, with proper data flowing both inside and outside of the game?

There are a few possibilities. Obviously, Valve have their own forums for feedback, there are other forums such as Reddit, but we've learned that they rarely react to it, either because the presentation is jibberish or the ideas given aren't in line with their thinking or for any other reason.

Since that does not seem to be working, likely because the feedback is somewhat raw and unfiltered, let's delve deeper into other ideas, which should be feasible for Valve to implement:

By hiring experts to give input on updates

One of the possiblities to make things much easier for the developers would be to hire experts to give them input on ideas and specific updates. The important thing is, these experts would obviously need to have no ties to organizations that support teams or teams themselves. It would have to be a selection of people like analysts, casters, journalists, former professional players etc.

Why? Because we wouldn't want professional players and teams to have an edge over the competition by having an extra ear listening to them but not others. There was already quite an amount of backlash going NiP's way, who have reportedly had much more contact with the developers than anyone else, at least in the beginnings of CS:GO.

Not only could these experts give input on Valve's ideas and updates, they could give their own ideas and suggest changes themselves. Ideally, they'd also get some kind of a beta access, where the new updates would be in place, to properly test things out and see how certain changes work within the game itself, not just on a theoretical level.

Many experts, including Tomi "⁠lurppis⁠" Kovanen, Duncan "Thorin" Shields and Henry "⁠HenryG⁠" Greer, who touched on the subject a little more in-depth in a massive interview that is coming out next week, seem to like the idea and some would be open to help Valve out this way.

Shields even published an edition of Thorin's Thoughts back in August called "Counter-Strike Needs an IceFrog", and these days those words have more merit than ever before. There needs to be someone, or a group of people, who makes sure Counter-Strike stays being Counter-Strike so that the legacy that has been kept alive for 15 years can live on.

By creating a Public Beta Environment (PBE)

Another possibility would be a Public Beta Environment (PBE) for a wider array of players. If you aren't familiar with the technicalities, imagine it as another version of the game, where players could playtest unreleased updates and give feedback on forums specifically created for this environment.

We obviously wouldn't want everyone to have access to that, as the sample size would be huge, and players who aren't too familiar with the game aren't capable enough to pinpoint certain problems within the game.

Let's say everyone who subscribes for the beta, meaning everyone who wants to provide feedback, has over 2000 hours total and a certain amount of hours over the last month (to only have active players there), will gain access to the environment. We should probably include rank limits in there as well, to have a certain standard of skill and knowledge within the PBE. Plus the experts that I mentioned above to have a little more depth.

Those players would get to playtest changes that are in the works in a separate version of the game for a period of time, which would depend on the volume and importance of the changes. During this period, PBE players would provide feedback on the forums and Valve would fix discovered bugs and adjust things that aren't working as intended, are disrupting to the game, are way too powerful or underpowered.

That way, Valve would get a cleaner, filtered feedback from people that are capable enough to provide it. They could also use their features better to analyze whether the changes made worked as they should have, all before the update itself is rolled out to the official version.

Thanks to all this, competitive players wouldn't have to deal with gamebreaking bugs, overpowered weapons and disruptive features being thrown into a competitive environment, like official matches.

A similar system already works in other games, specifically in League of Legends. Very rarely do you see a game-breaking bug or ultra-overpowered champions enter the official version of the game, and I'm sure a lot of that can be accounted to the PBE. 

I'm also sure Valve would benefit greatly from a PBE of their own, as the team behind CS:GO development is very small compared to other e-sports titles and it's understandable they can't catch everything on their own. Question is, will they listen again?

Which do you think would be the better course of action? Would you like to have access to a Public Beta Environment and give proper feedback to Valve? Let us know in the comments below.

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