Show HN: CS Weapons – Counter-Strike weapon data comparison app

There was that whole period last year where people discovered the SG and AUG were actually quite good, and then Valve nerfed them into the ground again.

Several years ago, the UMP was insanely accurate when tapping/bursting, and it was a great half buy and anti-eco gun. That got nerfed, too. The MP5 behaves somewhat similarly, but it's not really worth buying over the MP9 in a serious match.

There was a recent discovery with the Nova, where the first shot spray was found to be consistent, and you could hit headshots consistently from distance by aiming to the right of the head. That one's pretty fun, although the situations where you'd want that over a deagle seem niche.

I think the biggest missing with this site is that it's only comparing raw DPS/rate of fire numbers and not spread recovery. A big part of it is the "feel" of bursting/tapping guns while momentum cancelling, when in scenarios where you can't full spray.

eg. Clicking on the head with a P250 at medium range isn't super accurate, but if you manage to momentum cancel perfectly and trace, you actually have a pretty decent chance vs full armor. But I could also buy a five seven, which has better armor pen, accuracy, and sprays better.

What sort of analysis of map positioning and strategies are you thinking about?

I feel there's enough variation there (especially for "eco rounds" were people can't afford the top weapons) to find value in comparing them.

Nonetheless, you are correct on the majority and for sure that will be reflected in the usage of the site - a lot of the comparisons are going to be "Can the M4A4 kill with 1 shot to the head at range X" or similar.

Edit: before I got into CS I played a lot of Delta Force and got pretty good at it. I was very proud of my screenshots where I won matches with a 30+ point lead. My weapon of choice there was a heavier machine gun with a model I don’t remember. It wasn’t scoped and didn’t have great accuracy but due to the size of the hit boxes I could still spray and pray pretty efficiently at snipers from a large distance. I was never fast enough at close quarters but the fact that you could see a dot that you knew was a sniper and shoot them down before they got the chance to move while you stay on the move really did help.

I think there might be some value in adding a duration slider (as an alternative to shot count). Because most items you're comparing has varying rates of fire (e.g. P90 vs UMP45 vs Mac10), the slower weapons will often show more "damage" (over N shots), whereas the DPS might be similar or vary a lot.

It might also be interesting to have weapon selection filters based on cost -- e.g., comparing rifles and SMGs of similar cost, or things you can buy on the first or second round.

Edit: I also just went to the advanced charts section, encountered your buy-me-a-coffee link. While I personally don't like signing up for additional tiers of access, I think this was a very nicely done way of doing so.

Cue "SG was overpowered for five years and nobody noticed" (because real CS players use the AK, not the "cod noob gun").

The charts don't help me learn anything about the data more than the table, and the stats like RPM or deploy milliseconds mean nothing to me. If you ask CS players how they learn timing, it's usually mouse tapping a rhythm from some song.

The key takeaway is that you need creative ways to actually help me understand which weapon to pick in which situation.

    voice_enable 0

So, blocking communication is one thing you can do to help send a signal that this player is toxic. I guess eventually they start getting queued in lower trust factor lobbies but that's speculation.

I think that many players would gladly change CSGO with similar game (even non free), in which cheating is harder. Valorant seems better then CS in that regard, but for me biggest dealbreaker is unrealistic aspect of it.

> It's unfortunate that even today it is impossible to play without hearing 4chan racial slurs for the lulz. Very toxic community.

That comes with the territory. Edginess and homophobia are the hallmarks of male adolescence. The more value society places in a slur, the more appealing it becomes.

Games that skew younger and have more female players encounter this problem less. For example, Overwatch has much less of that kind of thing.

Is it human nature? Bad parenting? Cultural influences? Who knows. The good news is that most of these kids will grow up to be normal pleasant adults.

They show that data and you can practise there.

No surprise that Bungie made revolutionary games with Halo (series) and Destiny. Halo 1 was the basis of FPS on the console and Halo 2 was the basis for Xbox live

To elaborate, they didn't make it into the initial release as there's a substantial amount of work involved to tie that in dynamically with the data (as each shot is inherently dependant on all the shots before it and the time between them when firing multiple rounds).

I understand how much value this would add to the comparisons, so it's a top priority!

No multiplayer planned yet (besides what people can do with copy/paste and email) need to carve the niche first.

Seriously, try one of them. Sauer or xonotic would be a nice start. They are open source too,

I think that's the whole point, actually. The game itself is pretty known, as well as it's strategies; to get good, it really requires raw mastery and someone with a feel to know which strategy to apply when. The simplicity of CS is, in my opinion, it's main selling point.

Games like Arma can't really be compared to CS. They're completely different games with only superficial similarities (same camera angle, and the presence of guns).

> Maybe it's part of getting older, and if we're still going to play video games they need to be more of an extreme technical challenge for them to be fun for us.

This is definitely a factor. Games like CS, Street Fighter, etc are highly skill and knowledge based, but lean very very heavily on reaction times and stamina.

Even though there's absolutely nothing stopping older players from competing in those (and there are many that do), I think most people just don't find that's something they want to bother with as they age. I'm still in my 20s, but I'm finding the intense pace of CS hard to keep up with compared to when I was in my teens, even though the game hasn't changed (if anything, I'm more skilled today than back then).

It just isn't fun if I have an hour to play and I immediately die to someone who has played 18 hours/day for the entire lockdown and I permanently lose the item I worked several days to get.

Thanks for using the site! :)

That said, very few places in any official CS map have ranges that long. One would be on Train from Terrorist spawn to "Ivy" @ 3900 units (325ft).