Shanghai Major's Pick'Em, stickers and more in latest CS2 update

A couple of days away from the Perfect World Shanghai 2024 Major, Counter-Strike 2 gets its traditional Pick'Em and stickers update. The update also comes with team graffiti, allowing players to show support to their favorite team by equipping their graffiti which will be available until the Major runs its course.

While all players can participate in the Pick'Em for free, an activated viewer pass is required to earn rewards against the progress made. Following suite from the Copenhagen Major, players need to be precise with their picks, locking in teams through the 3-0, 3-1 and 3-2 brackets. The Pick'Em coin remains the same, following it's five year old design.

The stickers are once again borderless, resembling the ones from Stockholm 2021, Antwerp 2022, Paris 2023 and Copenhagen 2024 Majors. The viewer pass comes in two variants - one with three souvenir tokens to redeem redeem souvenir packages from concluded matches and one with just the viewer pass to earn rewards as one progresses the Pick'Em.

Valve acquired material for player autograph stickers in person for the Shanghai Major, countering delays and design discrepancies. The Copenhagen Major earlier this year saw big delays as the stickers arrived a day after the opening stage was completed. These new autograph stickers require players to produce an autograph similar to the one handed out physically to fans.

A new Perfect World music kit - "Ay Hey" rounds off the content for today's update as we dive into Valve's QoL upgrades and gameplay changes. A movement quantification parameter now prevents the game from acknowledging analog input and toggling game-rules (modes) without reloading the map is now flagged as "unsupported workflow".

Nade guides now support all types of grenades with an increased node limit for inputs (100 --> 300). Following Kilowatt case's renting feature, Valve now allows players to rent skins from all CS:GO weapon cases. Train receives various updates focusing on visibility and geometry fixes.

Valve's release notes for the update:

SHANGHAI 2024 MAJOR

• The Shanghai Major Hub is now available. Visit the hub to purchase tournament items, play the Pick'Em Challenge and more.

• Purchase a Shanghai 2024 Viewer Pass to receive an upgradable Shanghai 2024 Coin. With an active pass, you can upgrade your coin and earn extra souvenir packages by playing the Pick'Em Challenge. Additionally, you will show up on the Active Pass Leaderboard where you can compare your Pick'Em Challenge performance to your friends.

• All players with Prime status can place Pick'Em picks for free! However, to complete challenges and earn rewards from an event stage, you will have to activate a Viewer Pass before that stage begins.

MUSIC KITS

• A new music kit “Ay Hey” by Perfect World is now available for purchase in-game in standard and StatTrak versions.

GAMEPLAY

• Added "sv_quantize_movement_input" setting, enabled by default, to keep players from using analog binds to move at fractional speeds that the game is not designed to handle.

• In cases when servers toggle some game rules from competitive to deathmatch and back to competitive mid-match, the weapons will no longer disappear when dropped on the ground, but toggling game rules settings without reloading the map is not a generally supported workflow for community servers.

ANNOTATIONS

• Added support for turning off text background

• Added support for grenade types other than Smoke

• Increased node limit from 100 to 300

• Fixed annotation_delete_previous_node not cleaning up particle effects

MISC

• Added ability to rent weapons from all previous CS:GO weapon cases.

• Added policy settings to enforce client delta ticks order, namely sv_deltaticks_enforce and sv_deltaticks_log, which should help diagnosing configurations causing delta ticks out of order disconnects.

• Fixed a case where an unlocalized #SLOT prefix could appear in chat.

• Added a reference Counter-Strike Broadcast Playcast Webserver implementation: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Counter-Strike:_Global_Offensive_Broadcast#Reference_Playcast_Webserver_Implementation

MAPS

• Basalt

• • Updated to latest version from Community Workshop (Update Notes)

• Train

• • Fixed various gaps in map

• • Collision fidelity upgrades

• • Blockers added for train in B to avoid unfair angles

• • Various visual fixes