UpdatesOct 10, 20266 min readCS2Sell

CS2 "The Real MVP" update (June 2024): first community maps, skill groups and MVP panels

On June 25, 2024 CS2 added its first community maps: Thera, Mills, Memento, Assembly and Pool Day. The update also reworked per-map skill groups, MVP panels and video settings.

On June 25, 2024, Valve released "The Real MVP", the update that put community-made maps into CS2's official matchmaking for the first time. Thera and Mills joined Competitive, Casual and Deathmatch, Memento and Assembly went into Wingman, and a remake of Pool Day became an Arms Race map. The same patch reworked per-map skill groups in Competitive, redesigned the MVP panel and added video settings advice. It added no new cases or items.

What the update added

Area	Change
Competitive, Casual, Deathmatch	Community maps Thera and Mills
Wingman	Community maps Memento and Assembly
Arms Race	Community map Pool Day
Competitive skill groups	Players redistributed; a per-map group now shows after two wins on that map
MVP	New MVP panel in all modes, animated MVP panels in Premier, new MVP conditions
Video settings	Settings recommendations, a Frame Pacing section and separate FPS caps for game and menus

From the Workshop to official servers

Map makers had been able to publish CS2 maps since November 2, 2023, when Valve opened the Maps Workshop. From then on anyone could upload a map and community servers could host it, but Valve's official servers didn't run any of them yet. In May 2024 Valve added Arms Race as a game mode for Workshop map submissions.

This update was the first time Valve took maps from the Workshop into its official map groups. Its post said that "community map mappers have been hard at work creating new experiences and updating some classics", and the five maps include both new designs and remakes of older maps. The release notes linked each map's Workshop page, and the credits below come from those pages.

The five maps

Map	Mode	Setting	Workshop creators
Thera	Competitive, Casual, Deathmatch	Santorini, Greece	FMPONE, MF_Kitten
Mills	Competitive, Casual, Deathmatch	A small village in the Netherlands	catfood
Memento	Wingman	An Italian wedding by a lake	MadsenFK, ynel, TwinN, g3om
Assembly	Wingman	An aircraft assembly line	A team of four
Pool Day	Arms Race	A swimming pool	Squall1997, leplubodeslapin, Wenceslas

Thera is a 5v5 bomb defusal map set on the Greek island of Santorini, which its Workshop page notes was classically known as Thera. The Counter-Strike Wiki describes it as a remake of Santorini, a map FMPONE co-designed that was one of the community maps in CS:GO's Operation Wildfire in 2016. Thera was first posted on the Workshop on December 23, 2023.

Mills is a defusal map set in a small Dutch village. Valve updated it to newer Workshop versions in August and October 2024, and the October patch also added localised names for its callouts.

Memento is a Wingman map set during an Italian wedding "with views of a great lake", in the words of its Workshop page. Valve updated it once, in July 2024.

Assembly is a Wingman defusal map in which Terrorists try to destroy an aircraft assembly line. Its creators promise "fast rounds with dynamic gameplay around and inside the aircraft fuselage". It was first posted on November 3, 2023, the day after the Maps Workshop opened.

Pool Day is a CS2 version of fy_pool_day, a custom map from the original Counter-Strike. This Arms Race build has no weapons on the ground and no bombsite. Its makers also built in a switch between the CS2 graphics and the old 1.6 version of the map; since an August 2024 update you trigger it by holding the use key on the clock while standing exposed in front of the pool. Valve shipped new Workshop versions of Pool Day on June 26, July 2 and August 14.

The Operation Wildfire Case and its two Covert skins, from the 2016 operation whose maps included Santorini

Map skill groups

In Competitive, CS2 keeps a separate skill group for each map. Valve's post said it had given these "an overhaul": players were redistributed across the skill groups, and the badges became easier to earn in the first place. The release notes spell out the second part. A per-map skill group is now revealed after you earn two wins on that map. Valve didn't publish how the redistribution moved players between groups.

Valve changed per-map skill groups again in January 2026, when it adjusted the underlying rank values and expired everyone's groups, as our Season Four article explains.

The new MVP panel

At the end of a round, the game usually names one player on the winning team as MVP, the round's most valuable player. The update replaced the MVP panel in every game mode, added animated MVP panels to Premier matches, and added "several new MVP conditions" while adjusting the old rules. The notes didn't list the new conditions.

MVPs are also what music kits react to. When you win MVP, your equipped kit plays its MVP anthem, and a StatTrak music kit counts the MVPs you earn while it is equipped. Our guide to music kits, graffiti and pins explains how kits work.

The NIGHTMODE box from February 2024 was the newest music kit box when the MVP panel was redesigned

Video settings

The update also added advice on display settings. CS2 now shows a Settings Recommendation popup at startup in three cases:

Your display's refresh rate is set below its maximum.
NVIDIA G-Sync is supported but not enabled.
G-Sync is enabled but V-Sync or NVIDIA Reflex is not.

Valve recommends turning on G-Sync, V-Sync and Reflex together where they are available. The notes warn that this caps your frame rate at the display's refresh rate or slightly lower, which Valve calls "usually the smoothest-looking and lowest input latency settings combination".

The Advanced Video page gained a Frame Pacing section. It shows whether G-Sync is active (the row may be hidden on the Vulkan renderer or a non-NVIDIA card) and has two sliders, Maximum FPS In Game and Maximum FPS In Menus, which set the fps_max and fps_max_ui console variables. The default menu cap rose from 120 to 200 FPS. Valve also removed the "Laptop Power Savings" setting, which the notes admit "has never actually been configurable in CS2", and took the two background scenery options out of Video Settings. They are still available on the main menu and the item inspect screen.

Other changes that week

Maps: C4 stuck spots fixed on Nuke, Ancient and Vertigo, holes in the world closed on Ancient, and grenade collision and clipping fixed on Anubis.
June 26: community servers can now load the latest Workshop version of a community map even when another version ships in the official map groups. G-Sync detection was fixed for non-windowed fullscreen.
June 26: Steam's Game Recording beta launched, and CS2 recordings get a timeline with markers for kills and deaths.
June 27: fixes for excessive stuttering for some players and for a wrongly coloured radar background.

Where it stands now

The first batch didn't stay long. On November 13, 2024, Valve removed Thera, Mills, Assembly and Memento from all game modes and replaced them with Basalt, Edin, Palais and Whistle, as covered in our Train update article. Pool Day wasn't on that list. Since then community maps have arrived in batches, each replacing older ones, for example in May 2025 and July 2026.

The update before this one was Fire Sale in May 2024. The next big one, in August 2024, banned Snap Tap-style input automation and added the Masterminds 2 music kits.