- Different server tick rates might be affecting the weapon accuracy while spraying in CS:GO.
- Evidence by multiple CS:GO users shows a noticeable difference in weapon spray pattern.
- No official statement has yet been made by Valve on the topic.
The CS:GO community has been demanding 128 tick servers for a long time now. While the reasons associated with the switch to 128 tick servers might not have seemed urgent to the developers at the moment, the recent revelations by two CS:GO users may make this a priority if it turns out to be true.
CS:GO community members Zool (@ZooL_Smith) and u/kinsi55 have come out with substantial evidence which proves that tickrate affects the accuracy of a weapon in-game. The outcome of their personal experiments has led to the same conclusion that tickrate is directly proportional to the accuracy of the weapon i.e. higher the tickrate more accurate is the weapon.
CS:GO - Server Tickrate Affects Recoil Pattern
The first person to bring this theory to light was CS:GO Twitter personality Zool who via a Tweet stated that “It seems higher tickrates makes guns more accurate. Might be a bug in how they calculate accuracy stuff.” Though he was the first to point out the difference in accuracy the same weapon (M4A4) displayed on servers with different tickrates. He was not certain of this problem and concluded that it might have been a bug.
The images shared by him showed that if a user was to spray with a weapon, then the weapon would come back to its stationary accuracy faster on a 128-tic server. The conditions under which Zool carried out the test were as follows,
- He maintained a distance of 896 Hammer Units (HU) away from the wall in both the scenarios.
- weapon_accuracy_nospread 1
- sv_showimpacts 3 (server-sided impacts)
- The recoil pattern on a 64-tick server is represented in black while that on 128-tick server is shown in green.
After multiple experiments, the user concluded that there was indeed an underlying issue as there were minor alignment differences in the recoil patterns due to shots being simulated at different times/ticks depending on the tickrate of the server. Despite this, the user states that the difference was so minor that it was unlikely that a player ever missed a spray because of this particular issue, “Not impossible, but unlikely.”
Both Zool and u/kinsi55 have done a fantastic job at finding out something that might turn out to be a major flaw in the system. The visual evidence at our disposal seems to be hard proof that backs up their conclusions, something that the majority of the users seem to agree with as well.