As per a report from CS2 pro Ryan “freakazoid” Abadir, Valve is aware of the current state of the subtick system in the competitive shooter, hinting towards potential changes being made in the near future.
According to freakazoid, Evil Geniuses Head of Gaming Soham “valens” Chowdhury had recently visited Valve’s headquarters. During that visit, the CS2 devs reportedly admitted that the current Subtick netcode architecture of the competitive shooter has several issues.
More importantly, he further claims that changes to the CS2 subtick system are on the horizon, and players might even be getting 128-tick servers.
“They’re aware of how bad subtick is right now,” freakazoid said in his stream. “They can’t make changes during the major obviously, [but] there’s gonna be changes coming since they know that this is not working well.”
“128-tick is on the table, though, according to valens because he went to their office and spoke with the people that are the devs there.”
For the uninitiated, CS2’s subtick system was introduced to replace the traditional tick-based netcode used in CS:GO. Instead of the server only registering actions at fixed intervals (every 15.625ms on a 64-tick server), subtick attaches a precise timestamp to each player action so the server can process the exact moment it happened, even between ticks.
In theory, this should let a 64-tick server feel as responsive as a 128-tick one, but in practice, pro players have complained for years that something still feels off.
This is certainly good news for CS2 players who aren’t happy with the current state of the subtick system. And with the Major now wrapped up, Valve no longer has a reason to hold off on changes, meaning fans could potentially see the new subtick update arrive as soon as Premier Season 5.
