With SlothSquadron’s Weapon Balance Mod V1.4 now out, (And hosted on the servers, in case you’re interested in giving it a go!) I reached out to him to ask a few questions to the weapon stat expert for CS:GO.
Of course I started with the most important: why ‘SlothSquadron’? He said that he got his name from when he used to play Blazing Angels with his Dad on the Wii. One game they were using a terrible, slow plane, which they nicknamed ‘SlothSquadron’.
He’s also considering starting up his own Youtube channel so that he can reach a larger audience. He wants to cover topics such as the evolution of certain weapons and gameplay mechanics since the dawn of Counter Strike’s history. And may be doing simple weapon comparisons if it turns out that people want them.
He’s also working on Classic Offensive and as part of the team developing the game! His work isn’t in the current build but you can expect it to feel his influence in later updates. The question I had was: how different will they be? Won’t both projects overlap, borrow things from each other and eventually become two variations of the same thing?
But he reassured me that they’ll remain very different. His Weapon Balance Mod has been a learning experience for himself, and as a way of showing the community that their requested changes are possible in the game, right now. Like when he reworked pistols to make eco and pistol rounds less random. He hopes that his work has also helped Valve. He would love to work with (or for!) Valve to help make CS:GO the best that it could be.
Classic Offensive on the other hand is intended to be closer to the experience of 1.6… but not an exact replica. The mod’s creator, Zool, realised early on that it simply wasn’t possible to create 1.6 using CS:GO so has instead taken the mod down a slightly different route, retaining what was nostalgic about 1.6 but at the same time keeping it its own thing. Sloth is using his knowledge to bring back the strong wallbangs and tagging, among other changes that would complement Classic Offensive’s nostalgic style nicely.
I then asked him if Valve has ever implemented suggestions of his. Of the 3 weapon updates in 2016, he believes that he played a part in 2 of them. The first was in this patch, where Sloth was credited directly. And the second was the ‘second shot update’ which improved tapping and bursting. This is one of his favourite updates that CS:GO has ever received. Not only for improving tapping and bursting (which was something CSGO needed for a long time), but also because the new variables that it introduced could also be used by him to improve his own mod!
He also likes how they ended the post, as he says it hints towards more changes in the near future. But it’s already been half a year since then. Because Valve time.
The final update was to the jumping accuracy model while in the air. He likes this one as well, and since they released it in a beta branch first, Sloth was able to find some bugs, to alert Valve to them and to have them fixed before the update was rolled out to the official game. In other words, the beta did some good!
Sloth really feels that Valve’s 2016 updates introduced new mechanics, rather than to tweak existing ones so the balance of the game in general has gone pretty much untouched for a year. He’d like for them to start tweaking the weapon balance or to revamp pistols, which he still feels are a mess.
He’s also discovered a few things recently that are quite interesting. The CZ’s reload time varies a tiny bit depending on the animation used and the deploy animation for the M249 when it has no reserve ammunition is only 1 second, instead of the standard 1.1 seconds. He’s been investigating 1.6 and has discovered that there’s so much misinformation about the ‘good old days’ that he’d love to clear up and to set straight at some point. Perhaps 1.6 isn’t as infallible as (some of us) think it is!
I asked him how he felt about the attention his mod gets. He’s very happy with the attention it’s received. Of course, it’s disheartening when people judge it without trying it for themselves, but then he this goes both ways. Many people perhaps like it just because it’s popular to do so, or because it represents change and improvement… which is something they want from the game in general. Overall he’s very happy with the attention it’s got. it.
I asked him if he saw the future of CS:GO as heading towards a perfect balance, or whether it would be better to forever rotate the balance between the weapons to keep the game entertaining and fresh as an esport. He didn’t know, and said that Valve are nearly impossible to predict. But if FORCED to predict stuff, he thinks a UMP nerf is a possibility and wouldn’t be surprised if they introduced a new weapon. He’s personally against change for the sake of it and would like for existing issues to be tackled, like the randomised nature of pistol rounds. Of course, including his Weapon Balance Mod into the game for real would solve everything! He didn’t say that though. I did.
Sloth hopes to continue making content for the CS:GO community. Classic Offensive has just been greenlit and he hopes to start that Youtube career in what little spare time he has remaining after everything else! You can check out his channel here, so when he does get around to it, you’ll be the first to know.
Like I said before, his balance mod is already being hosted over on the servers which you can also find in this video’s description. Thank you to Pulse Servers for their continued support in hosting these. The giveaway has ended now, I have a list of winners and will be contacting each of you shortly… but first I’ll be attending Katowice, in case anybody wants to stop by and to say hi. Have fun!