A Purposeful Practice Project in CS:GO — Spray Training
Welcome back!
Last night, I did research on one of the most basic mechanics in CS:GO: spray patterns. When a player is standing still or crouched, spray patterns, the way a weapon’s bullets go when you hold the left mouse button, are the same and there’s practically no randomization as to where a bullet is going to go. So, the CS:GO community has already tracked and publicized every weapon’s spray patterns online to make it easy. I found all of the spray patterns here: http://csgoskills.com/academy/spray-patterns/
As I said last time, I wanted to learn three gun patterns: the P90, the M4 variants, and the AK-47. For this session, I instead decided to do the P90, the AUG, and the M4A1-S. Generally, the spray patterns for every weapon in CS:GO follow the trend of kicking upwards to a certain level and then moving right and left from that position like this:
To practice spray patterns, I started a private match against bots on the map Dust 2, activated cheats in the console by pressing the ~ key, kicked the bots, gave myself infinite ammo, and turned on bullet hit detection to show me where my bullets land. Being in the CT spawn area, I went up against one wall and shot at the other while trying to make all of my shots land as closely together as possible. I spent about 45 minutes on this, half of which was on the M4A1-S and a quarter each spent on the P90 and the AUG; I spent more time on the M4 because it’s more used in higher levels of play.
For the M4A1-S, I was able to get ten of the twenty bullets in a clip to stay within a head-sized area. I also learned that the first four shots barely deviate from the center of the reticle, meaning bursts of 2–4 shots are best depending on distance. Spray control got a lot harder after ten shots because that’s when the spray deviates to the right. The AUG was a very similar story: I could get about ten shots well and burst-firing with 3–5 shots was optimal for farther ranges. the P90 was interesting because its’ spray pattern goes up a little slower but zig-zags more towards the end of the clip. I probably did the worst controlling this one, but I also observed that moving and shooting with this gun is still fairly accurate at the close distance intended to use it at.
After I spent 45 minutes practicing, I wanted to try out the three weapons against real players, so I hopped into a deathmatch server, spending an entire round on each weapon. I definitely felt the improvement on the M4A1-S. Usually, my aim is garbage with it, but disciplining myself to stop and shoot in bursts at range instead of moving and shooting helped loads; I went positive in K/D. When I played the round with the P90, I actually won! I know the P90 isn’t a weapon I should use into the higher ranks for a myriad of reasons, but it’s especially effective with lower skill and against lower skill opponents.
Overall, I felt like this was a good practice session where I learned a good deal about how spray patterns work in CS:GO and I learned even more about efficiently shooting by stopping movement and burst-firing. Next time, I’ll be doing more competitive matches as the first performance session!
See you next time!
