CS:GO is a game where the choice of gun is a keystone variable in coming out victorious. The wrong gun bought at the wrong time could cost someone a round, if not the whole game, which is why certain guns have been favored over others in certain situations in CS:GO. Given this, what would happen if Valve added new guns to the game? To some players who have been around the CS:GO scene for long enough, that thought will give them shivers as Valve tried to add a new gun to the game, the R8 Revolver, with fairly catastrophic results.

Image courtesy of the Counter Strike Blog

The CS:GO Winter Update of 2015 brought us the most godlike weapon in the game, one that struck fear into even the best of players, the R8 Revolver. At first, players were excited about it, having never had a new weapon in CS:GO apart from the changes from 1.6 to GO (MP5 to MP7, P228 to P250). Then it was revealed just how powerful the gun was: 115 damage to anywhere on the body, regardless of armor or not, which gave it the ability to one shot anyone. When paired with its pinpoint left-click accuracy, the R8 was nicknamed "The Pocket AWP" due to its immense amount of power. The gun was so broken, that in the then-upcoming ESL tournament, they opted to use a version of the game which did not include the R8 due its overpowered nature. The community then asked Valve to either nerf the gun or take it out of the game altogether. Some were afraid that if they nerfed the gun, they would render it useless. As a direct result of the community's outcry towards the R8, Valve did end up nerfing the gun only three days later by bringing the damage from 115 to 86 and making the trigger pull a bit longer at 0.4 seconds. With this nerf, followed a lower and lower percentage of players using the Revolver and switching back to the good ol' Deagle. This left people thinking whether or not Valve should further introduce new weapons into the game in the future.

As it stands right now, I do not believe any new weapons should be added to Counter Strike. The current weapons in CS:GO have very established roles in regards to where and when they should be used as well as their counters. Introducing new weapons would severely cripple current strategies for both pro teams and otherwise. If new weapons were added, other weapons would need to also be adjusted in order to make the new weapons viable. As one Reddit user said, "If they wouldn't adjust every other weapon, the new weapon would be either so underpowered or useless that it has no place in the game, or it would be exactly like another weapon. At that stage, why even bother adding another weapon". Some people have also compared the way other video games on the same popularity scale, such as Dota 2, include new characters in their updates yet CS:GO doesn't include new weapons. That is simply because of the vast different in styles of the two games. While Dota adds characters to keep variety, it only has one map you can play on, thus the necessity for character variety. On the other hand, CS:GO has a variety of maps which provide for new ways to use the same guns. Thus, Valve introduces new maps instead of new guns to keep the variety of the game.

Image courtesy of the Counter Strike Wikia

In conclusion, having any new weapons in CS:GO would wreck the delicate balance of its current weapons. If Valve were to add new weapons every time they wanted to spice things up it would become increasingly difficult to balance things out. Games that add a plethora of new weapons just so they look nice, such as CoD, render a lot of weapons useless as not every gun is filling a role and it just makes it seem like there is more to experience. A lot of people who have a lot of experience in the CS:GO scene have basically called the addition of the R8 a blatant attempt to pander to a casual audience like every shooter eventually turns to in an attempt to make some more money. Counter-Strike is good the way it currently is and any radical new additions would certainly upset the community.

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