Even though I have no interest in playing Counter-Strike 2, I find myself glued to the screen every time a poster by the name of @duduckCS sends out some new information. Unlike most Counter-Strike players I know who are invested in their rank and the rarity of their Steam inventory, Duduck spends his nights combing through Valve's maps, looking for holes in the world.

He's good at that, too: almost all of Duduck's feed consists of PSA-style videos depicting unusual ledges, vantage points, or even standing on a small terrain lip that Valve never intended for players to climb, surprising the enemy. Many of these ghost platforms can only be reached by jumping on top of a teammate's head and “boosting” it a few extra feet.

But my favorite by far is the “bomb stack” spot post he put together. Bomb-stack spots, as the name implies, are places or angles on the map where bombs cannot be thrown and retrieved; CS map borders are usually fortified with invisible collisions to prevent this from happening, but Dudak has a great deal of experience in putting boxed C4 explosives in tight crevices, under wooden pallets, in inaccessible He has a knack for finding holes in the atmosphere where he can throw his boxy C4 explosives into the back of a hard-to-access alley, a casual balcony prop, or an invisible platform in the sky above.

I love the ridiculousness inherent in the “bomb stuck” moment. You had the bomb, now you don't have the bomb and there is no way to get the bomb.

Most of these spots are so obscure that this is unlikely to happen spontaneously during a match, but in the hundreds of thousands of CS2 matches played every day, it probably happens more often than you can imagine. tossing C4 into the air, catching it, and accidentally throwing it under a car or kick it out of the field. At that point, the round is not unwinnable, but your team is suddenly under new pressure to kill everyone on the CT side or lose.

The potential loss of matchup integrity is why Valve is taking these small map mistakes so seriously; I heard from Duduck at DM that Valve has quietly fixed some of the clipping mistakes and stuck bomb spots he found. They've fixed them, and recently a handful of holes in Vertigo, Nuke, Ancient, and Anubis were sealed in a late June patch. duduck has made a habit of tagging Valve developers in his videos to raise awareness, and he told me that Valve is now coming to him. told him that they are now coming to him.

“Recently, I also received a DM from the official CS2 Twitter account asking for help reproducing a bug. But no patch has been applied yet.”

I was curious how Duduck, which has logged more than 10,000 hours on Counter-Strike since 2017, was conducting its geographical research. The answer was more complex than I had imagined: Duduck imports Counter-Strike 2 maps into the Source 2 Viewer, a community-built tool used to analyze Source 2 assets in detail. There, Duduck can literally see where the level designer has placed invisible walls, looking for potential gaps and over-spread shelves (called “clipping”).

“From there, you can spot clipping errors and try them out on private matches,” says Duduck. But there are spots and bugs that you can't find just by looking at clippings, and basically it takes a lot of experience to see how the CS2 player model interacts with the world and with clippings and how it can be exploited.”

Interestingly, Duduck did not put much effort into finding bugs in maps until Counter-Strike 2 surprise was released last year. He did not do the same during the CS:GO era. The major reworking of the CS:GO maps that accompanied the move to Source 2 brought new bugs and growing pains, because “CS:GO was really well polished and it wasn't that easy to find bugs.”

“It's something I enjoy doing in my spare time.

Helping to make CS2 a more stable and consistent experience for everyone is an appropriate use of my free time.