I have zero interest in playing Counter-Strike 2, and yet I'm glued to the screen whenever a poster by the name of @duduckCS has something new to share. Unlike most Counter-Strike players I've ever known, who are primarily invested in their rank or the rarity of their Steam inventory, Duduck spends his nights combing through Valve's maps looking for holes in the world.
He's very good at it, too: Duduck's feed almost entirely consists of PSA-style videos depicting him surprising enemies by standing on abnormal ledges, overlooks, or tiny lips of geometry Valve never intended for players to climb. Many of these ghost platforms can only be reached by jumping on a teammate's head and "boosting" up a few extra feet.
My favorite Duduck posts by a mile, though, are his compilations of "bomb stuck" spots. A bomb stuck spot is what it sounds like: a spot or angle on a map where the bomb can be thrown and can't be retrieved. The borders of CS maps are typically fortified with invisible collision to prevent this from happening, but Duduck has a knack for spotting holes in the atmosphere where the box-shaped C4 charge can be nudged into narrow nooks, under wooden pallets, behind inaccessible alleyways, on the strut of an unassuming veranda, or even stuck on an invisible platform in the sky.
operation BOMB STUCK part 2 @AlmasJonas @iiTwinx @catfood_maps pic.twitter.com/Dwz47ZaR66July 18, 2024
I love the inherent comedy of a "bomb stuck" moment. You had the bomb, now you don't have the bomb, there's no way to get it, and your team is kinda screwed.
Most of these spots are so obscure that you're unlikely to see this happen organically in a match, but across the hundreds of thousands of CS2 matches played every day, I bet it happens more often than you'd think. All it takes is one bomb carrier goofing around by tossing the C4 into the air and catching it to accidentally kick it under a car or out of bounds. The round isn't unwinnable at that point, but your team is suddenly under a new pressure to kill the whole CT side or lose.
operation BOMB STUCK @catfood_maps @FMPONE @QuotingDev @iiTwinx pls fix pic.twitter.com/FvOfkvcMXZJune 26, 2024
That potential disruption in competitive integrity is probably why Valve takes these tiny map mistakes seriously. Duduck told me over DMs that Valve has quietly fixed several of the clipping mistakes and stuck bomb spots he's found, most recently a handful of holes on Vertigo, Nuke, Ancient, and Anubis sealed in a late June patch. Duduck has made a habit of tagging Valve developers in his videos to raise awareness, but he told me Valve has started coming to him.
"Recently the official CS2 twitter account also DM'd me to ask for help replicating a certain bug," he told me. "However it has not been patched yet, hopefully soon."
I was curious how Duduck, who told me he's logged over 10,000 hours in Counter-Strike since 2017, conducts his geographic investigations. The answer was more involved than I assumed. Duduck imports Counter-Strike 2 maps into Source 2 Viewer, a community-made tool used to analyze Source 2 assets in detail. In there, Duduck can literally see where level designers have placed invisible walls and hunt for potential gaps or overextended ledges (called "clippings").
"You can find clipping mistakes from there and try it in a private match," Duduck said. "However, some spots/bugs can't really be found just by looking at the clippings, and it basically requires lots of experience knowing how the CS2 player model interacts with the world/clippings and how it might possibly be exploited."
you're basically invisible behind this glass pic.twitter.com/d7Rws1SqJ6July 10, 2024
Interestingly, Duduck never put much effort into finding map bugs until Counter-Strike 2 surprise dropped last year. He didn't do the same in the CS:GO days because it "was really well polished and it wasn't really as easy to find things." The significant reworks to CS:GO maps with the transition to Source 2 introduced brand new bugs and growing pains.
"It's something I enjoy doing in my free time," he said.
Helping to make CS2 a more stable and consistent experience for everybody is a decent use of free time, I reckon.
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