Courtesy of www.counter-strike.net

Today we are kicking off the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Beta. Players currently in the stress test will notice more maps, more weapons, and most importantly more players.

During this Beta, community feedback is really important to us. Counter-Strike has been around for 12 years and has been played by over 25 million players. We want to make sure to capture all of that experience and knowledge as we make Counter-Strike: Global Offensive the best version of Counter-Strike.

The most popular question we see posted, emailed, or tweeted is simple – how do I get access to the CS:GO Beta.

For us it is all about the community. Are you active in the community? Are you playing CS now? To reward the most active players, this week we are giving Beta access to the top 7000 active players around the world in CS:S and CS 1.6. We are also giving out additional keys to the top 500 players of CS:GO.

We also want to include the community at large so we are reaching out to prominent community sites and giving them keys to distribute to their communities over the coming weeks.

While we aren’t ready to give everyone access right now. We do have plans to get more people in the Beta. To help us select the next batch of players, we will be releasing a short survey in a few weeks that you can fill out and get on the list for a Beta key.

The first round of testing has already given us some great feedback. Today’s release has some changes we made based on that feedback. So keep it coming, CS:GO isn’t done.
Over the coming months we will begin to regularly share some of the data we collect from the game. Are maps balanced? Does the balance change based on player’s skill level? What strategies win the most often? What weapons perform the best on what maps? Sharing this data will help you understand our choices and changes. Let us know what data you would like to see.

So to all players currently playing Counter-Strike and to all of those who will be playing in the future,

Thanks,

The CS:GO Team

I’ve been playing the beta a fair bit recently on de_dust and found that the feel of Global Offensive is very familiar to what we’re all used to with Countestrike Source, obviously the updated Global Offensive is using a modified Source engine which I think gives a similar look and feel to the Left 4 Dead games but it is still Counter Strike ultimately.

Read more on my latest findings..

The crosshair is a large dynamic one, far bigger and thicker than most Counter Strike players would prefer but this said, you can set it yourself to a more traditional style from within the settings.

The game itself will be well playable and for me – someone who has over the last year or so become bored with CS:S, it’s a welcome update to the title and may draw me back in again.

I was a bit concerned at first that the player models weren’t solid (like L4D) but this is on casual mode and can be switched to solid players when set to Competitive Mode for all your boosting pleasure.

There’s been a re launch of http://www.counter-strike.net which we will be keeping an eye on as I think that this will be made into something like Battlefield 3′s Battle Log site with stats and things but I could be wrong, they might just stick with the Steam integrated gameplay stats etc.. Check it out anyhow as there’s a long list of Q&A’s which might answer some of your questions.

Good news is that the wider community WILL be able to host servers on windows and Linux and there WILL be a server browser in addition to matchmaking functions.

I’m not completely blown away at this point but as Counter Strike is an old favorite and our clan members love it, I hope that it might revive our match play, GunGame and Counter Strike servers in general.

We will be hosting multiple Counter Strike Global Offensive running different modes of play and will be making a big push towards the game and clan recruitment once it’s launched.

I’ll continue to update those that are interested as the beta progresses.. If you wanna try it, you are welcome to come round to mine and have a go.

Feel free to comment!

Cheers,

Dj.

Our Battlefield 3 server is now online.
All XVC Members have been added as VIP’s. Enjoy!
We are currently recruiting members so please register to request to join us

We will be handing out 10 free slots of Teamspeak 3 to anyone playing on our Battlefield 3 server.
We will trial this for a short time without requiring registration or password on the website

All we ask is that you use the same name in Teamspeak as in game and do not use the Teamspeak server when not playing our gameserver.
ts3.killercreation.co.uk:10187

OUT NOW!

There is another update for BF3 coming soon, update details can be found on Battlelog. It does bring a few interesting fixes and tweaks, like IRNV scopes only being effective at close range, and reducing the effect of stealth on jets.

DICE have just released a video from the upcoming BF3 Back To Karkand expansion pack. It’s from the Gulf Of Oman map and shows some of the gameplay, including various vehicles.

Check it out.

Today the guys at DICE have put out a large update to the game, this includes various changes to weapons and vehicles that should hopefully balance things a little, and also fix a load of crashes and other problem people were having. Full details can be found at the Battlelog news section, the link is below;

Hopefully this will ease the pain some people have been having with the game (DJ, I’m looking at you) and mean we can all have a little more fun.

Thanks

UPDATE – If you’re having problems getting the game to update, read my forum post here

 America: Ksharp – volcano – n0thing – fRoD – Storm
Europe: cArn – GeT_RiGhT – trace – zonic – lurppis

Brought to you by ESL TV with Joe Miller and midway at Intel Extreme Masters Global Challenge New York.

Here’s an hour of competitive action from the recent Extreme Masters Global Challenge Counter-Strike: Global Offensive contest between Europe and the USA, spotted on VG247. The contest takes place on Counter-Strike classic, Dust, showing off the updated Source engine and some of Global Offensive’s new gadgets, including taser guns and decoy grenades. The decoy grenades do very little to fool these seasoned vets. There’s a moment where one backs off and looks it it, puzzled for a moment. Then he resumes his kill streak without hesitation.

Watch the Hour long video of the match!

The Counter Strike: Global Offensive Closed Beta has been pushed back to address some feedback.

The closed beta was meant to begin in October but in an interview with ESEA News, Valve’s Chet Faliszek said that they had received gameplay feedback from Counter Strike expert testers who highlighted some issues.

When the closed beta does go up a maximum of 10,000 players will test out Counter Strike: Global Offensive, with the player numbers increasing in stages.

Once closed beta testing has been done, an open beta will launch for everyone. Chet, speaking about the open beta, said “It will be the release game that you’re just playing and then at some point we’ll say, ‘Okay, now we’re going to officially release it.’

A new release date for the closed beta is yet to be announced by Valve.

As we all know, Battlefield 3 is now live and most of us that have played it have found ourselves immersed in some of the best battle action that we’ve ever experienced, both graphically and gameplay wise.

The plan for the near future is to recruit some members for Battlefield 3.

We want as many people as possible playing Battlefield 3 so if you grab yourselves a copy, be sure to add us all in Battlelog!

You can let us know what your in game names are in this post