CS:GO pre-order beta now live

The Counter-Strike: Global Offensive pre-order beta phase has now kicked in, meaning everyone who made a pre-order of the game will be able to enjoy seven days of the beta.

Expected to open earlier today, the CS:GO devs announced via twitter that they were testing performance updates based on feedback from this past weekend, which supposedly pushed back the release by a few hours.

The pre-order beta has now been set live, which includes the following change log:

Gameplay:

• Addressed recently reported performance issues.

• Living players can now hear the dead spectators in Casual game mode.

Effects:

• Improved muzzle flash dynamic light performace and optimized bullet hit impacts effects

UI:

• Added options to select the position of the steam toast notification.

• Fixed an issue with the Scoreboard where it was not showing a Tie or Loss properly.

• Fixed an issue where players were not getting updated in the Mini-Scoreboard.

• The Money HUD element now flashes more when it increases.

• The Scoreboard now allows you to view a player's profile.

• Updated the Alerts and Win panel spacing to match each other better.

• Updated the Win panel to be overall smaller and streamlined in all the states for modes.

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed an issue in the HUD player count where players who left or changed state quickly were not getting updated in the scoreboard as such.

• Updated the Play With Friends screen to enable the private/public toggle.

• Boot invites should now be accepted after the game loads from an invite click in steam message.

• Fixed description text for the Achievement: “Awardist”.

• Fixed server crash caused by taking environment (falling) damage while defusing.

• Fix for firing delay after weapon switching during a reload.

• Fix for cash awards not be applied properly for grenade kills.

Matchmaking:

• By default the input device is locked to keyboard and mouse.

Community Support:

• Fixed a bug where custom server map lists wouldn't populate if CT models weren’t specified. Server now sends information about slots, models, arms and maplist before serverinfo so that correct models could be loaded.

• When hashing the community server response we take into account game mode/type/numslots so that we rebuild extended kv when mode changes, but the map remains the same.

• Added commandline argument "-maxplayers_override" that, if exists, trumps any “maxplayers” values read from gamemodes files.

• Added -gamemodes_serverfile command line parameter that allows specifying a file other than the default gamemodes_server.txt

• Network stringtables will not be using dictionaries on community servers even if convar is enabled. This allows clients to actually download map since resources are referenced by strings and the client will not have the dictionary until they have the map.

• Client will defer .bsp file preload until after required resources are available. For the case of a missing map, this allows the client to reach signon state "new" and kick off downloader thread while retaining their spot on the server. This allows community servers to essentially run 3rd party maps that clients will download when played.

The pre-order discount is still running. It will grant you 10% and the ability to play the beta until final game is released on August 21.