Hey all,

We have packed quite a few new improvements for the Counter-Strike community this week. This time it’s core improvements to the feedback we’ve lately received from you — from abusive booster accounts to improved experience for both Free and Premium users.

TL;DR

Team composition now taken into account avoiding stack vs. solos.

Premium queue now checks parties for skill variances preventing low skilled players to party with high skilled players.

now checks parties for skill variances preventing low skilled players to party with high skilled players. Free queue in CS:GO Europe now selects optimized location based on historical ping and availability.

Molotov damage on Premium queues.

No More Stack vs. Solo

We’ve improved the matching algorithms to take stacking balancing into account. This means that we will try to match parties with similar compositions and avoid solos to play against a full premade teams.

As an example, if a premade team joins the queue they will not be matched against five solos unless they have been in the queue for over ten minutes, which in most queues is unlikely. Even in this case combinations for them to play against parties of 4+1 or 3+2 will be prioritizied, which means that solos vs premade will now be extremely unlikely and limited to occasions in which finding a match is better than waiting much longer.

On top of improving the experience of solos by “protecting” them from stacking, we believe that this change will improve the overall match quality by assuring that the players you will be playing against have a similar team composition to yours (i.e. if you are in a party of 3 you will most probably be matched against a party of 3).

With this change, we are now changing the European queues to allow teams to search for matches again and we’re discontinuing the “Teams” queue.

No More Lvl 1 & 10 Parties in Premium Queues

We are now preventing parties with large Elo variance from queueing together which will no longer allow scenarios where level 1 players are playing with level 10’s.

We’ve seen the feedback from you and observed abusive behavior with it. We hope that this change will lead to more balanced matches.

We’re starting with the Premium queues first to gather data and analyse the change.

Location selection in CS:GO Free EU queues

We’ve seen feedback where people hate and dodge matches due to poor server selections which favor the captain and cause longer waiting times unnecessarily.

Today we’re automating the server location based on the average preferred ping by all users and availability of the location on the platform for free queues.

We’re making this change take effect on the European Free CS:GO queue to start with. Our Premium queues will continue to allow location voting as the level of competitiveness is higher and we believe that organizing yourself as a team through the veto phase is a part of that experience.

We hope that these changes will lead to less waiting time between matches and more balanced ping among players.

Molotov damage on Premium queues

There’s been quite a big debate around molotov damage being disabled on FACEIT. While the intention to disable Friendly Fire is to prevent abuse and griefing, we understand that disabling molotov damage causes the meta to change for the worse where players just push through molotovs as if they were nothing.

That’s why we’re now testing to enable molotov damage on the Premium queues and gather feedback from you.