Something feels wrong with Counter-Strike 2. But nobody knows quite what, if anything. My one wish for next season... for Counter Strike to improve their gameplay and their sub-tick if they want to stick to it NiKo, CS2 professional Game developers have a lot of tacit and explicit knowledge about their titles. They know the systems and the interactions between them, and what results they produce. But players of a game have a tacit feel about the game.
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For those who enjoy Counter-Strike community servers, the situation in Counter-Strike 2 is rather dire. An avalanche of spam has rendered the server browser unusable. The transition from Global Offensive killed multiple small communities. And large server providers have taken advantage of these problems to monopolise the market. Trying to find a server either involves capitulating to these big vendors, or trawling through a trench of spam. Scraping the server browser allows us to have some insight into the state of the market.
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Recently, CS professionals STYKO and EliGE have shared the fact that they have employed the services of aim coaches. Such moves are relatively new to Counter-Strike: while aiming is considered an important aspect to Counter-Strike, professionals usually improve their skill in this venture with deathmatching, or training with Counter-Strike maps such as "aimbotz", or full bespoke suites such as Refrag (EliGE partly owns Refrag, after acquiring it from ESEA). CS, as is typical, is late to the party.
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The mundanity of seeing online CS during the pandemic has electrified a transition that was already happening - the end of tier 1 online events. The leagues were the last victims, with FLASHPOINT's last event setting the framework for future online events. But the pandemic also unearthed a deeper scar tissue within the scene - the economics stopped making sense a long time ago. The industry has tried to paper over this with agreements such as the Louvre Agreement - tournament organisers would sell a fixed number of slots, which would guarantee you access to tier 1 offline events.
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North American Counter-Strike is dead, or in the middle of dying. Team Liquid, the prototypical NA team, now fields a primarily European roster, while Cloud9's roster is Russian. The remaining stalwarts in Complexity and EG are not competitive internationally. This death of the national team is framed as a problem endemic to North America. But one only needs to look in Europe to see that the concept as a whole, is withering away.
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CS:GO Majors are supposed to be a raucous celebration of the game. The place where the best teams duke it out, in a desperate bid to establish themselves as the apex predator. There is no such as a free round within this theatre. Yet Boston 2018 was the last CS:GO major final to ever reach 3 maps. 7 consecutive major finals, where the loser could not muster one map. What is going on?
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Counter-Strike events seem to have less energy than ever. There are no concrete statistics to back this up, but the symphonies of Counter-Strike sound more like a small chorale. The crowds have gone from ecstasy, to gentle applause. If this is the case, pointing to a single cause is difficult. To list a few changes: - The makeup of teams has changed, with fan favourites such as NiP, SK and fnatic having all disappeared from the high levels of the scene.
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