Shanghai Major: Champions sticker capsule released

In today's update Valve added the Champions autograph capsule for the Perfect World Shanghai 2024 Major featuring paper, glitter, holo and gold autographs of donk, sh1ro, chopper, zont1x and magixx. In a breath of fresh air, these champions autograph stickers contain a red border to stand out from from the normal stickers.

The update has also added the 2025 service medal which players can claim upon reaching Global General (rank 40). The medal can be claimed starting on 1st January 2025. Train receives further fixes to it's geometry and clipping, hinting that we're getting close to playing Train in the active duty map pool.

Kill-feed entries are now adjusted to more accurately convey the flash effect on a player, meaning which the feed now doesn't display the blinded icon if the enemy is not entirely blinded by a flashbang. A cooldown has been added to team switching and upon doing so, the player no longer drops their weapon, improving server stability.

A list of commands have been added to community server admins for better control and the 'give' command now actually gives the weapon to the player instead of dropping it on the ground at the player's position. Map guides now have official support in the steam workshop allowing uploads and downloads.

A new setting has been added, allowing players to set their CPU cores usage preference between default and performance cores. The AK-47 gets a new inspect animation as an alternate inspect, which the community has received with a grain of salt. StatTrak counters now look more vibrant and shiny, improving readability.

Here are Valve's release notes for the update:

SHANGHAI MAJOR

• Shanghai 2024 Major Champions Capsule is now available for purchase. The capsule features autographs for each member of the winning team in paper, glitter, holo, and gold. 50% of the proceeds go to the players and organizations.

GAMEPLAY

• Adjusted the threshold at which death notice displays attacker as "flashed".

• Explosions will now more reliably throw weapons around even if multiple weapons are dropped on top of each other.

• During warmup, weapons will no longer drop on the ground when changing teams.

• During warmup, changing teams now has a two second cooldown.

• Added server settings controlling which items drop on the ground during warmup period: mp_warmup_items_drop_policy, mp_warmup_items_nocost, mp_warmup_items_nocount_policy. Community servers that run with free non-droppable weapons during warmup can set these settings as follows: mp_warmup_items_drop_policy 0, mp_warmup_items_nocost 1, mp_warmup_items_nocount_policy 251.

• Give command will now always drop the held weapon if the given weapon needs an empty primary/secondary weapon slot to be used. For legacy behaviour, which would drop the new weapon on the ground, developers can use "-keep_gear" flag, e.g. give weapon_awp -keep_gear

MAPS

• Train

• • Improved collision fidelity on various props

• • Updated and fixed surface types on several props

• • Adjusted wetness levels on some surfaces

• • Fixed various gaps in map

MAP GUIDES

• Map Guides are now supported in the Steam Workshop for submission and subscription.

• Added a selector to pick which map guide gets loaded in practice mode.

• Annotations nodes are now visible in the radar.

• Added a tool (via console command "workshop_annotation_submit") to submit a map guide to the Steam Workshop.

MISC

• Added a setting for CPU Cores Usage Preference to control how high performance and power efficiency cores are used by the game on CPUs with variable cores.

• Fixed a case where graphics driver could render a corrupt graphics image for weapons in inventory item tiles.

• Improvements to weapon inspect animations.

• Improvements to display of extra-long custom weapon names in UI.

• Stability improvements.

• Added all-new 2025 Service Medal which will be available starting January 1st GMT

• Workshop Tools - Fixed bug on shadows for low sunlight angles