I can by no means cover every problem, however I will attempt to include as many as I can find which have reliable solutions. These solutions are not my own, I merely wish to make it easier for everyone to find them and help you execute them (in some cases) in the right order.

This guide is part of a series in which I try to combat all of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive most common issues and provide you with the most common solutions. All of my guides are included here and posted at the top. Smaller less often occuring issues are down below with possible solutions directly included in this guide.

To easily navigate through this guide simply use the different sections on the right hand side, each section addresses one issue!

• Game crashes
  
• FPS drops, stutter lag, low FPS on high end systems and capped FPS
  
• Game won't launch or stuck at preparing to launch
  
• Microphone not working
  
• Internet connectivity issues
  
• VAC authentication errors (cannot play on secure servers)
  
• Video/Game settings being overwritten every time
  
• Can't find a match & long queue times
  
• Pure server: client file does not match server
  
• Steam client not up to date or unable to update
  
• Waited XX ms for SteamNetworkingSockets lock

Did I miss something? Did I get something wrong? Or perhaps something is not clear enough in your opinion? Wrote your own guide to fix an issue and want to have it included? Feel free to comment suggestions, I would love to keep updating this guide to include more fixes or remove those which aren't fixing anything anymore.

Thanks for reading! See you in the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Steam Discussions! :)

https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1907675935

https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2203518412

https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1911087875

https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2203437337

Check this guide written by Pourya to troubleshoot internet connectivity issues:
https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2509626671

Alternatively you check out valve's articles on the matter:

• How do I diagnose and report network problems?
  
• Troubleshooting Network Connectivity
  
• Troubleshooting Lag

If you have suggestions, feel free to add me!

VAC errors are pretty common and can have many different causes. Steam did a great job by covering many potential causes and their fixes in this article. Although it is a good article and I refer to it quite often I still feel like we can try some other things and add to the article.

The possible solutions listed below are not a complete replacement of the steam article! read everything in this article as well!

Validate your game files
In the article they jump from restarting your PC to repairing the steam service straight away. What you can also do is simply validate your game files:

1. Go to your Steam Game Library
   
2. Right click on Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
   
3. Click properties
   
4. Navigate to the local game files tab
   
5. Click verify integrity of game files

Reinstall the game completely
Somehow, sometimes validating game files is not enough and you might want to consider reinstalling the game completely.

Check your virus scanner
Are you using a virus scanner other than the default windows defender? Check if it might be blocking either something to do with steam, the game or VAC. If you simply disable it and the problem is gone you got your answer. If you don't feel like keeping it disabled you need to allow it manually. How this is done depends on the virus scanner and you should be able to find answers on google.

Reinstall steam
If repairing your steam service (from the article) did not work, you might want to consider reinstalling it completely. Taken from this support article you can reinstall steam without losing all your games.

The Steam installer can be downloaded here: (http://steamproxy.com/steamstore/about/) and reinstalled to the same location where it is already installed.

This may fix potential issues with Steam client and service files. Installing into same location will preserve all installed games.

WARNING! Uninstalling Steam through any other method will delete all game and userdata content.

Update Windows and drivers
Keeping your system up to date is always a good idea and when you are slacking behind on a lot of updates this might cause issues.

1. Press the windows start key
   
2. Type Update
   
3. Click on Windows updates
   
4. Check and install any updates
   
5. Reboot Computer
   
6. After rebooting keep repeating this until there are no updates left.

More advanced system repair
In the last section of the article they will explain to you how you can repair your system files. However this might not work, or perhaps something else is broken, you can fix more issues by doing the following:

1. Open the windows start menu
   
2. Type cmd
   
3. Open the windows command prompt as administrator
   
4. Type DISM /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth and press enter

Reinstall your system
If you tried everything from the article and everything else included here and the issue still persists, you might want to try just reinstalling your system completely. When you do try not to install everything right away. Perhaps some other software is interfering with your game and this a great chance to find out what it is.

Nothing works!
If you tried everything from the article and this guide and still the issue persists. You can send an email to valve (taken from this reddit post).

If this is affecting you, can you please send email to [email protected] with the subject line "VAC Authentication Error".

Make sure to include:

1. A link to your steam profile
   
2. How long this has been affecting you
   
3. Any steps you might've attempted to remedy the situation

Always first reboot your PC and validate your game files. These two steps should be your default first action when something goes wrong with the game - whatever that may be. To validate your game files:

1. Go to your Steam Game Library
   
2. Right click on Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
   
3. Click properties
   
4. Navigate to the local game files tab
   
5. Click verify integrity of game files

Check Steam status
You can check if Steam or CS:GO is having issues[steamstat.us] before you try to debug the issue. Steam also schedules maintenance at least once a week (usually on Tuesday between 1-3 PM pacific time) and you can find more information about it in this article. If that is the case you just have to wait for a bit.

Change your max ping
The max ping setting is there to make sure you connect to servers close to you, instead of servers which are far away thus giving you high ping. When you set this very low and depending on where you live it might not be able to find any games. You can change this by opening your developers console and use the following command:

mm_dedicated_search_maxping 100

Replace 100 with the max ping you want to set it at, you can also use this command to check what your current ping is set at.

Check firewall and/or virus scanners
Your firewall or virus scanners might be blocking some connections your game tries to establish with the servers. You can easily debug this by disabling them temporarily. If this turns out to be the issue you might want to add manual rules to both your firewall and virus scanner to allow the game to establish connections to the servers.

Restart Router
Perhaps something is wrong with your connection or your router is having issues, you can try restarting it to see if it resolves the issue. When you turn off your router (disconnect the power cable) remember to keep it disconnected at least 30 seconds to give it some time to cool down.

Depending on how you set up your game and how you change settings some issues might occur. You can always simply delete everything, but perhaps only a small fix is required.

Where are my configs?
First, where are you configs actually saved? Since some time the CS:GO settings are saved in your steam userdata which means you can have different settings for each account. It might still be possible that your configs are in the old location (your game installation) if your PC is older and haven't made any changes to it (your appcache, to be more precise).

First, at your game installation.

1. Go to your Steam Game Library
   
2. Right click on Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
   
3. Click properties
   
4. Navigate to the local game files tab
   
5. Click browse local files
   
6. Open the csgo folder
   
7. Open the cfg folder - here are your settings

If there is no config.cfg there you can check your userdata:

1. Go to your steam installation folder (default location is C:\Program Files(x86)\Steam)
   
2. Open the userdata folder
   
3. Open the folder with your account ID (ID can be find in your profile URL)
   
4. Open the folder called 730
   
5. Open the local folder
   
6. Open the cfg folder - here are your settings

Check for read only
Go to your config location described above and check if the video.txt or config.cfg files are not made read-only. If that is the case the game cannot change them - so untick the option. (Right click on the file -> properties -> uncheck read only).

Check launch options
Check your launch options and make sure neither -autoconfig nor -safe are present. These commands are used to automatically determine settings or run in safe mode (minimal settings). These are useful for debugging only!

External software
External software like GeForce experience or AMDs Gaming Evolved are known to interfere with your game settings and might 'optimize' your settings, disable or remove those. If you have any other software which might do something similar disable those as well.

Use host_writeconfig
If you often change settings in your console, you need to run host_writeconfig to make sure these settings are saved to your config file. This is a command you might want to add to the bottom of your autoexec as well

Using an autoexec
If you already have an autoexec, perhaps that file is just making changes to your game - check the locations described at the top of this section and change/delete whatever you need. Many players use an autoexec to change all their settings to whatever they prefer each time they launch the game, this is much easier because you can also easily use it on other accounts, other computers or make easy backups.

Creating an autoexec file is pretty easy and I suggest you follow the guide below. It shows you how to set it up and gives some examples of useful binds and commands you can try out:
https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1337049778
Video settings reset after GPU driver updates
This happens to me quite often and I have no clue why or how to fix it.. it does not happen every time - just sometimes. If anyone has a fix feel free to share it with me so I can include it!

Updated in this update back in april 2020.

– sv_pure servers will now kick clients that have loaded asset files into game memory from files not present on game server filesystem.

Delete some files & validate game files
The following fix was found by a player called 2eggs and seemed to work for most people. Although the original twitter post I found is not available anymore, the fix should still work.

1. Go to your Steam Game Library
   
2. Right click on Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
   
3. Click properties
   
4. Navigate to the local games files tab
   
5. Click browse local files
   
6. Open the csgo folder
   
7. Delete the materials and models folder

After you deleted those folders validate your game files so steam downloads the correct version of those files.

1. Go to your Steam Game Library
   
2. Right click on Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
   
3. Click properties
   
4. Navigate to the local game files tab
   
5. Click verify integrity of game files

Reinstall the game completely
If this still did not work, you can reinstall the game completely, you could do this instead of the steps above but it will take some more time.

The issue still persists
If you still have the issue after following the steps below you can send an email to [email protected]. Be sure to address the subject line as "sv_pure kick" with any steps you have taken to fix the issue and your steam profile.

This is not really an issue just related to CS:GO however I do see it being posted quite a lot so I will cover it here as well.

Opt in to the Steam beta client
Many users have reported that opting into the Steam beta version fixed the issue, I found a good guide explaining it all for both windows and MAC: https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=182912431
Troubleshoot update and installation issues
It might be that something went wrong or somehow you cannot update at all. Steam has a great article which includes many potential causes and fixes, I suggest you follow them!

I saw this issue being posted a few times already in quite a short time. Not sure if this is an issue which will stay around, regardless I found fixes on both reddit and posted them in the steam discussions before (and saw others post it). It is important to note that this 'issue' in itself is not necessarily a big problem although people have been reporting FPS drops because of the error spam in console, hence why this fix is included.

You can paste this in your console:

sdr_spew_level 0;net_droponsendoverflow 1;net_client_steamdatagram_enable_override 1

Alternatively you can add it to your autoexec:

sdr_spew_level 0
net_droponsendoverflow 1
net_client_steamdatagram_enable_override 1

Important: This disables most logging for your game, if you encounter other issues and want to know more debug information from your console, you need to enable the logging again which is this command:

sdr_spew_level 1