The spray control problem in CS2

Counter-Strike 2 was supposed to be launched last Summer. But as the months went by, it became increasingly clear that Valve’s announcement was a bit too optimistic. The game still needs a lot of work to be ready not just for the Counter-Strike community in general but for professional tournaments as well.

Among the problems that have been signaled by different players, the clunky movements and the spray control of multiple guns are still an issue.

Why spray control is so important

One of the key skills that good players learn in CS is spray control. When you shoot with a gun, after the first few bullets your crosshair no longer reflects the reality of where your bullets go.

You might think that you’re shooting at a given point, but in fact you’re shooting all over the place. The experiment is easy to do. Just buy an AK-47 or an M4A4, aim at a wall and shoot until you have no more bullets left in the magazine.

You will notice a pattern on the wall. That pattern is your gun’s typical spray pattern. To compensate for it, you will need to pull the mouse in a certain pattern. This allows you to keep shooting with decent accuracy.

In CS:GO, this works really well and after more than 10 years, professional players have developed a very strong sense of how the gun needs to be controlled in each scenario for optimal results.

Wanna do stream TODAY, what should we PLAY?

— Sasha (@s1mpleO) September 1, 2023

But now that CS2 is about to be launched, some of the hard-earned skills are no longer working in the same way and need to be relearned. The only issue is that muscle memory is hard to undo. It takes quite a long time to forget a pattern you’ve exercised over thousands of hours and learn to use a completely different one.

Another issue is that in some cases, players have reported obvious bugs in how the guns shoot. Even with perfect spray control, the bullets don’t hit their intended target and seem to disappear into thin air.

There have been multiple clips posted on YouTube, with players like Aleksandr “s1mple” Kostyliev and Jacky “Stewie2K” Yip missing 10 bullets in a row in very basic situations where their gun control looked perfectly fine.

We’ll have to see what the next few weeks will bring, but at this point is clear that CS2 still needs at least until the end of the year to be launched.

Header: Valve