Just when we thought there won't be many CS:GO updates to speak of for a while, Valve surprised us with one. It's not just a misc type of patch too. A major change to the competitive meta has been introduced with the death of bots. That's right, from now on bots won't be a part of Competitive Matchmaking and Wingman.
Valve are trying hard to prove one of our 2021 CS:GO predictions wrong very early in the year. The publisher updated the game just a week into 2021. And we're not talking cosmetics, but a real game-changer - the removal of bots from Competitive Matchmaking and Wingman.
Release Notes for today are up. Among other things, bots are no longer granted to teams in Competitive matches. Full notes are here: https://t.co/seG0oTAY1E
— CS:GO (@CSGO) January 8, 2021
CS:GO Update Patch Notes
The underlined patch note here is most definitely the bot thingy. Until this CS:GO update, if someone got kicked or left the match at his own will in these modes, he would be replaced by a bot. After this patch, he will be replaced by a big fat nothing.
That leads to some obvious and not so obvious consequences. Let's start with the obvious: the team left without a human teammate will be a man down for real. That was already kind of the case as CS:GO bots are braindead, but the perk of being able to take over the bot after you have died is no longer there. The not so obvious part of this is that kicking a mate now damages your chances of victory much more.
There are other things that go away with this update, like the bot not driving you mad cause he won't listen and always rushes mid, or your resident toxic kid dying just to come back in the bot's body and die again. That kind of stuff.
This change has immediately sparked intense discussions in the community. As usual with unanticipated changes like this, most initial reactions are negative. At first glance, this leans on the right side for us - the potential to limit toxic behavior is there and we all know that's something CS:GO is always in desperate need of.
The patch notes extend to much more than that, mostly fixes on Engage and Guard. There are a couple of filled gaps on Cache too.
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