Counter-Strike: Global offensive players know the sinking feeling when a teammate gets disconnected, and since CS:GO is a serious game, players are locked into matches and defectors are punished with increasingly lengthy bans. That player is then replaced by a bot. Bots have terrible AI, but they can be hijacked by dead players on the team.

Players have long demanded various adjustments to bots, but the latest CS:GO has a surprise: bots have been completely removed from classic matchup (5vs5) and wingman (2vs2) modes.

While vocal elements of the CS:GO community are more or less outraged by this change, it is worth considering what Valve is trying to solve here. My guess is that it is a common practice for poison teams to kick underachieving players in order to win bots, with the reasoning being that a team's chances are better if one of the better players has multiple lives. I have been kicked by my own team in several competitive matches and have seen the same thing happen to other players countless times.

This behavior is definitely a problem for CS:GO, but since it has been an issue for years, one might ask, "Why make this change now? The answer seems to lie in Riot's Valorant, from which Valve pays close attention and borrows certain ideas. This CS:GO update does not include an element of cash, which should be some sort of compensation, so it is like throwing out the BOTTY with the bath water.

We're also saying goodbye to one of CS:GO's rituals. When a team got a bot, the same thing almost always happened: spam the 'hold this position' command somewhere in the spawn, the bot Eugene would spend a minute or two guarding the wall, and then the first dead team member would take it over. Yes, it wasn't perfect, but having one player essentially have two lives is a better solution than simply going 4vs5. Whether this change will have the desired effect on player behavior remains to be seen.

Other changes include an update to the weapon ping system, which fixes a minor problem with weapon shadows allowing enemies to see through walls to pick up guns. There are also a number of minor fixes and a major environment change to map Engage; I never liked the competitive bots in CS:GO, especially when they were YOLOing at the enemy team with their SMGs, but in a weird way I will miss those idiots.