SPUNJ begs Valve to allow 128 tick subtick servers in CS2: "I want to play on what's the best"

Retired IGL turned caster Chad "SPUNJ" Burchill has dedicated some of his time in the latest episode of HLTV Confirmed to argue that Valve should allow the game to run in 128 tick servers just like it was possible during the CS:GO cycle, even it's just for the top players.

If I was still a player at the top level, and not talking to Valve and being understanding to why they make those changes, I'd be pretty miffed about it.

For the longest time, we had 128 tick servers, and then they've gone. And they've gone 'OK, we don't want the player at home, in matchmaking, to have a different experience to what they're having on the highest level' when they brought out CS2.

One of the factors was obviously nades, but if you're playing Counter-Strike all the time as your profession, you can literally tell the difference between spraying your gun on 64 tick versus 128 tick, or [how it affects] movement.

And now, we don't have a choice [to play on 128 tick]. I think FACEIT made 128 tick sub tick servers in the start and Valve said 'f*** off or we will kill you'. That's obviously not what they said, but they didn't like the fact that FACEIT did that, and we kind of just accepted it because we don't have a choice.

What SPUNJ referred to is the fact that Valve seemingly hardcoded the CS2 tickrate to 64 tick ahead of the game's global release. So, not even third-party matchmaking platforms like FACEIT can run 128 tick subtick servers.

While the Australian caster understands why Valve has possibly done it and also praised the developer for the Majors and sticker money, he can't understand why top players have to play in subpar conditions like the casuals.

Valve are just enforcing it and they'll go from the angle of 'the majority of our users can't have 128 tick servers because their PCs are dogshit'. It probably still is true when you're talking about 1.8 million players.

[...] Why at the top end can we not have 128 tick sub tick servers? I don't care what the guy who plays matchmaking on a Friday night with his friends is playing on. I don't give a single f***. We're talking high-end elite-tier Counter-Strike.

I want to play on what's the best and if we can actually do it — play matches on it on LAN, or FACEIT, or whatever — why are we suffering and having a worse experience because some guy plays on a f****** Pentium IV? I don't care about that guy, but the high-end was always about pushing the game and tweaking the game, like Source had a plugin called Zblock.

This discussion is far from ending as CS2 still looks like an unpolished game in comparison to the final days of CS:GO. Much to SPUNJ's likely displeasure, it also doesn't look like we'll have a big CS2 update any time soon as the BLAST.tv Austin Major is nearing.

The latest CS2 update, which rolled on March 20th, only made a couple of small changes, for example. The last big CS2 update happened over 120 days ago when Train was added to the game.