Another update has come out. After the recent patch with fixes to the smoke exploit, Valve has delivered another update regarding the problem with utilities: smoke grenades, HE grenade, Molotov & incendiary. From this update on, smokes, grenade explosions, and fire display are now consistent for all players.
This update is meant to respond to a recent Tweet by a CS:GO player telling about a command in the game which let players change the shapes of smokes as well as Molotov, Incendiary, and HE grenade explosions, giving the player the upper hand with these utilities. This is very likely to create a one-way smoke, which let one player see through the edge of the smoke while the opponent doesn't.
The problem has been discussed for a long time. Smokes in CS:GO are displayed differently for each player, also different from the viewers' perspective. That has been the controversy that people talked much about. One smoke can be too random, and "lucky" player can see through part of it while others don't. It seems so unfair when you rely too much on luck to play one competitive game FPS game like CS:GO.
One famous team which manipulated smokes really well is Astralis, the current best team in the world. There were controversies about the team's overly good capacity to shoot through smokes. Even one pro player: Nikola "NiKo" Kovač publicly accused the team when the NVIDIA setting could help players to see through smoke some months ago. Later the cased was solved. Yet the problem with smoke manipulation still remained.
However, it is all gone now that smokes and other grenade explosions display are the same for all players on the server thanks to the announcement of Twitter and the update to CS:GO
[GAMEPLAY]
– Smoke, HE Grenade explosions, and fire are now always displayed consistently between all players.