As an ex-pro CS player (circa 2003-2007), this is pretty neat. Unfortunately, even though CS might have a fairly deep weapon pool, only a very small subset of weapons are actually used in competition (I'd wager 85+% of gameplay mostly involves the M4, AK, AWP, Deagle, and USP/Glock). Situationally, a few weapons would be interesting to compare (the MAG-7 and Scout come to mind), but the tool isn't particularly useful outside of a curiosity.
Even though I don't really follow the pro scene much anymore, I'd personally be more interested in a tool that analyzed map positioning and strats. Cool site nonetheless, solid work!
Agreed. It's a neat site, though! There has been some variation in weapon use in recent years, but I don't know if this site would have really helped in revealing those details.
There was that whole period last year where people discovered the SG and AUG were actually quite good, and then Valve nerfed them into the ground again.
Several years ago, the UMP was insanely accurate when tapping/bursting, and it was a great half buy and anti-eco gun. That got nerfed, too. The MP5 behaves somewhat similarly, but it's not really worth buying over the MP9 in a serious match.
There was a recent discovery with the Nova, where the first shot spray was found to be consistent, and you could hit headshots consistently from distance by aiming to the right of the head. That one's pretty fun, although the situations where you'd want that over a deagle seem niche.
I think the biggest missing with this site is that it's only comparing raw DPS/rate of fire numbers and not spread recovery. A big part of it is the "feel" of bursting/tapping guns while momentum cancelling, when in scenarios where you can't full spray.
eg. Clicking on the head with a P250 at medium range isn't super accurate, but if you manage to momentum cancel perfectly and trace, you actually have a pretty decent chance vs full armor. But I could also buy a five seven, which has better armor pen, accuracy, and sprays better.
I played CS very non-professionally right at that same time. My go to weapon was the AUG/Bullpup. It seemed to me to have the best combination of spread/range/firing speed/damage. Curious why it didn’t make the cut.
Edit: before I got into CS I played a lot of Delta Force and got pretty good at it. I was very proud of my screenshots where I won matches with a 30+ point lead. My weapon of choice there was a heavier machine gun with a model I don’t remember. It wasn’t scoped and didn’t have great accuracy but due to the size of the hit boxes I could still spray and pray pretty efficiently at snipers from a large distance. I was never fast enough at close quarters but the fact that you could see a dot that you knew was a sniper and shoot them down before they got the chance to move while you stay on the move really did help.
While this is certainly the case overall, at least in today's meta the variety isn't that bad. For example, if you scroll down on https://www.hltv.org/stats?event=5728 you can see a breakdown of what was used in the Dreamhack Masters tournament which was on this weekend.
I feel there's enough variation there (especially for "eco rounds" were people can't afford the top weapons) to find value in comparing them.
Nonetheless, you are correct on the majority and for sure that will be reflected in the usage of the site - a lot of the comparisons are going to be "Can the M4A4 kill with 1 shot to the head at range X" or similar.
+1 .. came here to say exactly this. While this site is great for finding out what others weapons exist, I don't think any weapons outside of m4, ak, awp are actually used.
I really do wish that eSports broadcasting of CS would improve. Instead of focussing on the first person view, if it primarily showcased an overhead view clearly indicating positioning and movement it would be more engaging for viewers.
I think the most useful feature is the damage fall off at range. It would be nice to visually see how far away a target is when you adjust the feet away/units away.
Professional e-sport tournament payouts for Counter-Strike now total nearly $100M; players have everything from huge salaries to sport psychologists, but still no good way of visualising game data.
CS Weapons provides information and comparisons on Counter-Strike weapons, featuring real time analysis and calculation of weapon data.
Simulations are performed live in the browser and are scenario reactive, dynamically updating based on the part of the body hit, your range from the target and more. Alternate modes such as burst fire and silencers are all supported. Modelling additional aspects like recoil and accuracy with customisable shot intervals is underway.
Technical and design highlights:
- Data-driven Vue PWA.
- Installs to supported devices for a native app experience and works offline; a Service Worker notifies users when an update is available.
- Clean URLs that populate application state to support linking directly to comparisons.
- Device sharing experience using the Web Share API.
- Dynamic SVG charts that react in real time and are fully responsive.
- Immersive chart viewing experience with the Fullscreen API.
- Supporters are rewarded with additional features; as a "Jamstack" application, CS Weapons utilises AWS Lambda to query a membership API using "serverless" functions that are triggered through an Auth0 authentication rule.
- Custom material design built on Vuetify, with its colour palette, typography and user experience lovingly pruned and cared for.
- Blistering performance and load times.
On a personal note, I'm trying to do my best as a new dad, so building this during my free time on top of that, full-time work and a house move has been really challenging and if I'm honest with myself, probably not that healthy. Still, after chipping away at this for so long it feels great to finally put it into the wild across the game's community this week.
This looks really great, and shows a lot of polish in its interface. I liked how you had different preset ways of filtering the data (SMGs, Rifles, etc), as well as linkable results pages. Being able to select armor and hit-locations seems to just be a scaling factor, but also was a neat touch.
I think there might be some value in adding a duration slider (as an alternative to shot count). Because most items you're comparing has varying rates of fire (e.g. P90 vs UMP45 vs Mac10), the slower weapons will often show more "damage" (over N shots), whereas the DPS might be similar or vary a lot.
It might also be interesting to have weapon selection filters based on cost -- e.g., comparing rifles and SMGs of similar cost, or things you can buy on the first or second round.
Edit: I also just went to the advanced charts section, encountered your buy-me-a-coffee link. While I personally don't like signing up for additional tiers of access, I think this was a very nicely done way of doing so.
> Professional e-sport tournament payouts for Counter-Strike now total nearly $100M; players have everything from huge salaries to sport psychologists, but still no good way of visualising game data.
Cue "SG was overpowered for five years and nobody noticed" (because real CS players use the AK, not the "cod noob gun").
It's cool that you market it as material design and sharable and having a fancy stack... but all I care is whether I get useful info about CS:GO. The ugliest maps programmed for training are more useful imho.
The charts don't help me learn anything about the data more than the table, and the stats like RPM or deploy milliseconds mean nothing to me. If you ask CS players how they learn timing, it's usually mouse tapping a rhythm from some song.
The key takeaway is that you need creative ways to actually help me understand which weapon to pick in which situation.
Disabling voice chat makes the game so much better. Can't do that if you're playing competitively, but if you do play comp without a team you're going to have a bad time anyways.
> It's unfortunate that even today it is impossible to play without hearing 4chan racial slurs for the lulz. Very toxic community.
That comes with the territory. Edginess and homophobia are the hallmarks of male adolescence. The more value society places in a slur, the more appealing it becomes.
Games that skew younger and have more female players encounter this problem less. For example, Overwatch has much less of that kind of thing.
Is it human nature? Bad parenting? Cultural influences? Who knows. The good news is that most of these kids will grow up to be normal pleasant adults.
Some recent changes were made around people who frequently get blocked being auto-blocked for you when you join the game. They have highlighted red names like "Dalmatian" and "Flamingo", etc. If you un-block them, you swiftly find out why.
So, blocking communication is one thing you can do to help send a signal that this player is toxic. I guess eventually they start getting queued in lower trust factor lobbies but that's speculation.
As others said, toxic players can be easily blocked. Unfortunately, sometimes that is not enough because they continue to abuse other players (with friendly fire, friendly flashes etc…) To be fair, players like that are very rare. In my experience, much bigger problem are cheaters. From those who don’t even hide it to very leery ones.
I think that many players would gladly change CSGO with similar game (even non free), in which cheating is harder. Valorant seems better then CS in that regard, but for me biggest dealbreaker is unrealistic aspect of it.
I imagine what would totally sell me on it is interactivity with a live game. Imagine if you could hook into the game and show live data on the last kill, where you hit him, how much damage you inflicted and why. Would be really cool, but probably not allowed without getting banned.
This probably sounds like an old man but Halo 2 weas doing this back in 2004 when you could immediately after the game get detailed game reports, even available via Rss.
No surprise that Bungie made revolutionary games with Halo (series) and Destiny. Halo 1 was the basis of FPS on the console and Halo 2 was the basis for Xbox live
I'm one of the primary engineers behind tracker.gg. If I could offer some constructive criticism:
- You probably don't need individual pages
- You're polluting my browser history as a result, not very user friendly. :)
- I shouldn't have to navigate away from the "direct" view to add weapons
- The "direct" view and the "table" view are functionally equivalent. You should figure out how to combine these into a single optimal view - shouldn't be difficult since they do the same thing.
- Your "winning" cell highlighting isn't really clear. Yes it's lighter, but that's not really an effective indicator of "best" (on tracker.gg we use gold highlighting to accomplish the same thing in our view: https://battlefieldtracker.com/bfv/profile/origin/Z1nYoRiTa/...)
- Your various filters/modifiers should probably be colocated with the selected weapons, they're all filters.
- With a single table there's probably room to split the view in half to show graphs/detailed breakdowns to the right of the main table. Your "direct" view uses an inordinate amount of space. (I'm thinking something like our Valorant match viewer: https://tracker.gg/valorant/match/a06b84a9-bdd2-4509-90ca-fa...)
Overall pretty cool, I could see something like this being popular with Valorant too.
Important factor not shown is avg shot spread, minimum burst till max spread, and how kneeling affects spread, spread after 2 shots, 3 shots, spread while moving. Those are important especially for AK vs other weapons.
Thanks; absolutely! Modelling these additional aspects like recoil and accuracy with customisable shot intervals is underway.
To elaborate, they didn't make it into the initial release as there's a substantial amount of work involved to tie that in dynamically with the data (as each shot is inherently dependant on all the shots before it and the time between them when firing multiple rounds).
I understand how much value this would add to the comparisons, so it's a top priority!
Kind of off topic, but I've really lost interest in a lot of "traditional" FPS games like CS and even CoD over the course of lockdown. Myself and my friends who played Halo for years have since migrated to more tactical and realistic games like Arma and Escape from Tarkov. EFT especially offers a lot more depth than these types of games. CS just felt formulaic after a while and there was an element of discovery that was missing. EFT is still in Beta and this analysis would be pretty cool to see for that eventually (site is gorgeous btw), though there's a lot more weapons combinations available in that game.
Maybe it's part of getting older, and if we're still going to play video games they need to be more of an extreme technical challenge for them to be fun for us.
> CS just felt formulaic after a while and there was an element of discovery that was missing.
I think that's the whole point, actually. The game itself is pretty known, as well as it's strategies; to get good, it really requires raw mastery and someone with a feel to know which strategy to apply when. The simplicity of CS is, in my opinion, it's main selling point.
CS is basically an alternative to the Quake formula of arena shooters, yet both types of game are still arcadey arena shooters.
Games like Arma can't really be compared to CS. They're completely different games with only superficial similarities (same camera angle, and the presence of guns).
> Maybe it's part of getting older, and if we're still going to play video games they need to be more of an extreme technical challenge for them to be fun for us.
This is definitely a factor. Games like CS, Street Fighter, etc are highly skill and knowledge based, but lean very very heavily on reaction times and stamina.
Even though there's absolutely nothing stopping older players from competing in those (and there are many that do), I think most people just don't find that's something they want to bother with as they age. I'm still in my 20s, but I'm finding the intense pace of CS hard to keep up with compared to when I was in my teens, even though the game hasn't changed (if anything, I'm more skilled today than back then).
Games like Tarkov, ARMA mods (DayZ, breaking point, etc), and EVE are just not fun for casual players though.
It just isn't fun if I have an hour to play and I immediately die to someone who has played 18 hours/day for the entire lockdown and I permanently lose the item I worked several days to get.
If you liked OW or UT (or any arena fps), maybe you would like Quake(and 2 and 3), Openarena, Xonotic, Sauerbraten or Assault Cube.
Those are nearly free these days ;) (at least the online part). Maybe not current AAA quality, but nothing better than the raw speed and fraggin everything you can see (and where the crosshair sees it) with no waits and respawning every time...
Seriously, try one of them. Sauer or xonotic would be a nice start. They are open source too,
I'm making an FPS game right now that is comparatively an extreme technical challenge for players. You're a first person tentacle monster with a mechanical typewriter, and the words in your heart, as your weapon.
No multiplayer planned yet (besides what people can do with copy/paste and email) need to carve the niche first.
I wish that the big studios would find a market for games with more depth. There is soooo room for innovation! Imagine what a AAA budget could do for a game like EFT.
This confirms my suspicion that the Negev is the best gun in the game and all the others are a waste of money. Although I understand that competitive players need to keep the game entertaining, which is why they use different guns during tournaments.
I think the weapon comparison needs some style adjustment. I compared 3 weapons and my eyes are having so much trouble following the lines that I thought some of the rows were misaligned. I think that effect is due to the highlighting feeling like it's actually alternating row colors. After I figured out what was going on, I started looking at the cells that stood out because I figured those must be the best numbers. Except that's backwards from my intuition too. To me the darker background draws my attention because the contrast between that and the text is higher.
Really well done! Playing around with it a little, the only thing I noticed was it was difficult to see which color meant "better" when comparing values. Maybe add a little checkmark or something if one stat is higher?
Other than that, I love how you don't just compare raw values, but have the ability to select armor/range/etc. That's something I see missing in a lot of similar "comparison" applications.
I know this is CS specific but it's a resource that kinda finally confirms why I always use some machine gun vs a shotgun in many games. Shotguns are fun in some games because they cause things to explode close up, but in general the DPS is just super low at any distance compared to a machine gun/assault rifle.
How can it be faster to shoot 50 rounds with the MP7 when compared with P90 since the MP7 has a magazine of only 30 rounds and the P90 50? Also, I'm pretty sure that I can hit a target at 333ft away with a P90.
Fun fact: while I don’t quite remember the actual name of those weapons (English is my second language), the buy short cut was deep in my muscle memory, my favorite: B13, B41(T)/B43(CT), B46, B51 and O3
Lot of websites have been doing that for a long time, I don't really like your UI compare to the popular for example: https://sym.gg/?game=bfv&page=charts
[+] [-] dvt|4 years ago|reply
Even though I don't really follow the pro scene much anymore, I'd personally be more interested in a tool that analyzed map positioning and strats. Cool site nonetheless, solid work!
[+] [-] mafuyu|4 years ago|reply
There was that whole period last year where people discovered the SG and AUG were actually quite good, and then Valve nerfed them into the ground again.
Several years ago, the UMP was insanely accurate when tapping/bursting, and it was a great half buy and anti-eco gun. That got nerfed, too. The MP5 behaves somewhat similarly, but it's not really worth buying over the MP9 in a serious match.
There was a recent discovery with the Nova, where the first shot spray was found to be consistent, and you could hit headshots consistently from distance by aiming to the right of the head. That one's pretty fun, although the situations where you'd want that over a deagle seem niche.
I think the biggest missing with this site is that it's only comparing raw DPS/rate of fire numbers and not spread recovery. A big part of it is the "feel" of bursting/tapping guns while momentum cancelling, when in scenarios where you can't full spray.
eg. Clicking on the head with a P250 at medium range isn't super accurate, but if you manage to momentum cancel perfectly and trace, you actually have a pretty decent chance vs full armor. But I could also buy a five seven, which has better armor pen, accuracy, and sprays better.
[+] [-] IgorPartola|4 years ago|reply
Edit: before I got into CS I played a lot of Delta Force and got pretty good at it. I was very proud of my screenshots where I won matches with a 30+ point lead. My weapon of choice there was a heavier machine gun with a model I don’t remember. It wasn’t scoped and didn’t have great accuracy but due to the size of the hit boxes I could still spray and pray pretty efficiently at snipers from a large distance. I was never fast enough at close quarters but the fact that you could see a dot that you knew was a sniper and shoot them down before they got the chance to move while you stay on the move really did help.
[+] [-] vercadium|4 years ago|reply
I feel there's enough variation there (especially for "eco rounds" were people can't afford the top weapons) to find value in comparing them.
Nonetheless, you are correct on the majority and for sure that will be reflected in the usage of the site - a lot of the comparisons are going to be "Can the M4A4 kill with 1 shot to the head at range X" or similar.
[+] [-] krat0sprakhar|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] publicola1990|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lifescape|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZephyrBlu|4 years ago|reply
What sort of analysis of map positioning and strategies are you thinking about?
[+] [-] vercadium|4 years ago|reply
CS Weapons provides information and comparisons on Counter-Strike weapons, featuring real time analysis and calculation of weapon data.
Simulations are performed live in the browser and are scenario reactive, dynamically updating based on the part of the body hit, your range from the target and more. Alternate modes such as burst fire and silencers are all supported. Modelling additional aspects like recoil and accuracy with customisable shot intervals is underway.
Technical and design highlights:
- Data-driven Vue PWA.
- Installs to supported devices for a native app experience and works offline; a Service Worker notifies users when an update is available.
- Clean URLs that populate application state to support linking directly to comparisons.
- Device sharing experience using the Web Share API.
- Dynamic SVG charts that react in real time and are fully responsive.
- Immersive chart viewing experience with the Fullscreen API.
- Supporters are rewarded with additional features; as a "Jamstack" application, CS Weapons utilises AWS Lambda to query a membership API using "serverless" functions that are triggered through an Auth0 authentication rule.
- Custom material design built on Vuetify, with its colour palette, typography and user experience lovingly pruned and cared for.
- Blistering performance and load times.
On a personal note, I'm trying to do my best as a new dad, so building this during my free time on top of that, full-time work and a house move has been really challenging and if I'm honest with myself, probably not that healthy. Still, after chipping away at this for so long it feels great to finally put it into the wild across the game's community this week.
[+] [-] gknoy|4 years ago|reply
I think there might be some value in adding a duration slider (as an alternative to shot count). Because most items you're comparing has varying rates of fire (e.g. P90 vs UMP45 vs Mac10), the slower weapons will often show more "damage" (over N shots), whereas the DPS might be similar or vary a lot.
It might also be interesting to have weapon selection filters based on cost -- e.g., comparing rifles and SMGs of similar cost, or things you can buy on the first or second round.
Edit: I also just went to the advanced charts section, encountered your buy-me-a-coffee link. While I personally don't like signing up for additional tiers of access, I think this was a very nicely done way of doing so.
[+] [-] formerly_proven|4 years ago|reply
Cue "SG was overpowered for five years and nobody noticed" (because real CS players use the AK, not the "cod noob gun").
[+] [-] pyentropy|4 years ago|reply
The charts don't help me learn anything about the data more than the table, and the stats like RPM or deploy milliseconds mean nothing to me. If you ask CS players how they learn timing, it's usually mouse tapping a rhythm from some song.
The key takeaway is that you need creative ways to actually help me understand which weapon to pick in which situation.
[+] [-] sabas123|4 years ago|reply
At a high level everything becomes so highly dimensional that any analysis on this level falls short compared to intuition.
[+] [-] hnnnnnnng|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] airstrike|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gustavo-fring|4 years ago|reply
It's unfortunate that even today it is impossible to play without hearing 4chan racial slurs for the lulz. Very toxic community.
[+] [-] bogwog|4 years ago|reply
> It's unfortunate that even today it is impossible to play without hearing 4chan racial slurs for the lulz. Very toxic community.
That comes with the territory. Edginess and homophobia are the hallmarks of male adolescence. The more value society places in a slur, the more appealing it becomes.
Games that skew younger and have more female players encounter this problem less. For example, Overwatch has much less of that kind of thing.
Is it human nature? Bad parenting? Cultural influences? Who knows. The good news is that most of these kids will grow up to be normal pleasant adults.
[+] [-] gtsteve|4 years ago|reply
So, blocking communication is one thing you can do to help send a signal that this player is toxic. I guess eventually they start getting queued in lower trust factor lobbies but that's speculation.
[+] [-] ubavic|4 years ago|reply
I think that many players would gladly change CSGO with similar game (even non free), in which cheating is harder. Valorant seems better then CS in that regard, but for me biggest dealbreaker is unrealistic aspect of it.
[+] [-] mhh__|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] porcc|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mjs7231|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gustavo-fring|4 years ago|reply
No surprise that Bungie made revolutionary games with Halo (series) and Destiny. Halo 1 was the basis of FPS on the console and Halo 2 was the basis for Xbox live
[+] [-] maxvu|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mhh__|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lwansbrough|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NicoJuicy|4 years ago|reply
They show that data and you can practise there.
[+] [-] lwansbrough|4 years ago|reply
- You probably don't need individual pages
- You're polluting my browser history as a result, not very user friendly. :)
- I shouldn't have to navigate away from the "direct" view to add weapons
- The "direct" view and the "table" view are functionally equivalent. You should figure out how to combine these into a single optimal view - shouldn't be difficult since they do the same thing.
- Your "winning" cell highlighting isn't really clear. Yes it's lighter, but that's not really an effective indicator of "best" (on tracker.gg we use gold highlighting to accomplish the same thing in our view: https://battlefieldtracker.com/bfv/profile/origin/Z1nYoRiTa/...)
- Your various filters/modifiers should probably be colocated with the selected weapons, they're all filters.
- With a single table there's probably room to split the view in half to show graphs/detailed breakdowns to the right of the main table. Your "direct" view uses an inordinate amount of space. (I'm thinking something like our Valorant match viewer: https://tracker.gg/valorant/match/a06b84a9-bdd2-4509-90ca-fa...)
Overall pretty cool, I could see something like this being popular with Valorant too.
[+] [-] m3kw9|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vercadium|4 years ago|reply
To elaborate, they didn't make it into the initial release as there's a substantial amount of work involved to tie that in dynamically with the data (as each shot is inherently dependant on all the shots before it and the time between them when firing multiple rounds).
I understand how much value this would add to the comparisons, so it's a top priority!
[+] [-] remarkEon|4 years ago|reply
Maybe it's part of getting older, and if we're still going to play video games they need to be more of an extreme technical challenge for them to be fun for us.
[+] [-] Sebb767|4 years ago|reply
I think that's the whole point, actually. The game itself is pretty known, as well as it's strategies; to get good, it really requires raw mastery and someone with a feel to know which strategy to apply when. The simplicity of CS is, in my opinion, it's main selling point.
[+] [-] bogwog|4 years ago|reply
Games like Arma can't really be compared to CS. They're completely different games with only superficial similarities (same camera angle, and the presence of guns).
> Maybe it's part of getting older, and if we're still going to play video games they need to be more of an extreme technical challenge for them to be fun for us.
This is definitely a factor. Games like CS, Street Fighter, etc are highly skill and knowledge based, but lean very very heavily on reaction times and stamina.
Even though there's absolutely nothing stopping older players from competing in those (and there are many that do), I think most people just don't find that's something they want to bother with as they age. I'm still in my 20s, but I'm finding the intense pace of CS hard to keep up with compared to when I was in my teens, even though the game hasn't changed (if anything, I'm more skilled today than back then).
[+] [-] 650REDHAIR|4 years ago|reply
It just isn't fun if I have an hour to play and I immediately die to someone who has played 18 hours/day for the entire lockdown and I permanently lose the item I worked several days to get.
[+] [-] huachimingo|4 years ago|reply
Seriously, try one of them. Sauer or xonotic would be a nice start. They are open source too,
[+] [-] MrLeap|4 years ago|reply
No multiplayer planned yet (besides what people can do with copy/paste and email) need to carve the niche first.
[+] [-] 0xFACEFEED|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] girvo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bogwog|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ziml77|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] professorsnep|4 years ago|reply
Other than that, I love how you don't just compare raw values, but have the ability to select armor/range/etc. That's something I see missing in a lot of similar "comparison" applications.
[+] [-] coding123|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Black101|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whoevercares|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Waterluvian|4 years ago|reply
What I want more than anything is a dynamic diagram showing the bullet spread depending on how fast I shoot. Maybe even let me click for shots.
[+] [-] favadi|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsuelzer|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Thaxll|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fireattack|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wombat23|4 years ago|reply