Peeker’s advantage is a factor to take into consideration when playing CS2 more than you have ever done in any previous Counter-Strike game, according to players with access to the beta.
A lot of players have been saying it’s borderline impossible to simply hold angles the way they were used to doing in CS:GO. This is because they claim the player who is moving actually sees the player who is holding the angle first and therefore has a higher chance to kill them.
“I always react faster than an enemy does, like all the time, but in CS2 it’s completely the opposite,” one player wrote on Reddit. “I can not catch anyone faster than they catch me, it’s impossible. People will just appear on the screen and headshot me, I can not even react.”
The way to avoid getting killed in that fashion is to jiggle peek, which makes sure that your model is always moving and therefore becomes a tougher target—and you can also spot an enemy coming your way.
To jiggle peek, you have to constantly press “A” and “D” when you want to hold an angle. Of course, peeker’s advantage already existed in CS:GO and players already had to jiggle peek, but there were some angles you could just hold tight and grab one or two free kills. The way that peeker’s advantage works in CS2 is making a lot of players think about VALORANT.
Personally, I dislike the way I have to play CS2 because I’m an old-school player who learned the basics of Counter-Strike with CS: 1.6. Although I jiggle peeked some angles in CS:GO to be able to smoke choke points, for example, I’m still a fan of sometimes just sitting tight in late-round situations to grab some free kills if the opponents don’t pre-fire my angle.
It’s not only casuals who are having to adapt to CS2’s peeker’s advantage but also professional players like Tsvetelin “CeRq” Dimitrov, who is one of the highest-rated CS2 players in Europe.
“It’s impossible, you shouldn’t hold anything honestly,” CeRq said in an interview with HLTV on Sept. 12, when asked about how CS2‘s peekers advantage works for an AWPer like him. “In CS2 you have to be so quick and you can’t fall asleep for a second.”
There’s also a big talking point that peeker’s advantage is working like this in CS2 because of the quality of Valve’s servers and the game’s net code. Professional players have already said the game was better when they played on FACEIT servers, because the servers there ran on a 128-tick rate, but Valve is forcing everyone to play on a 64-tick rate after the Sept. 13 update.
One way or the other, though, we all have to adapt to the CS2 meta as it remains unclear if Valve will fix how peeker’s advantage currently works before the game is released.
