NEVER CHEER (for) LIQUID: TACTICAL FPS ESPORTS (counter strike et al)

King of Posters
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do yall counter strike i forget. idk if we have a dedicated thread but we should make one cuz esports good

Counter-Strike 2 - now in limited beta for pros + diehards

I think it’s very unlikely for anyone to get into the beta at this point. masterlink for info: Introducing Counter-Strike 2 | Limited Test

Major changes, tried to order in terms of interest to SB’ers:

  • Game is ported to Source 2, and maps redesigned as well, with different maps having different levels of remake. New map engine/editor for mapmakers to use, improved lighting system, potentially greater mod support etc.

  • Options to enable “follow crosshair” which shows the spray pattern of your gun. (Some claim it’s OP, sorry to link warowl)

  • Smoke grenades are volumetric (expand to fill map geometries) and able to be temporarily dissipated by frag nades or shooting (creates see-through holes). Smoke fills back in after a second or two. Major nerf to smokes and buff to nades, big impacts on gameplay.

  • Sub-tick accuracy - client sends timestamped actions to the server, which calculates order of precedence at a sub-tick level of accuracy. (Servers are not described as 64 tick or 128 tick but a secret third thing)

  • Other stuff:
    Molotovs are much prettier graphically but also much easier to see through.
    No more skybox barriers (cross-map grenades are back)
    Jump throws have a ~200ms window to hit consistently, with a sound effect indicating successful throw. (Jump throw binds made unnecessary - For now, double-binding keys is disabled)
    Anecdotally, pros claim that spraying feels different somehow.

Official videos:

I have been having an interesting time getting back into CSGO in the wake of this news, thoughts to follow!

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alright so, in the wake of the CS2 announcement I’ve been solo-queuing Matchmaking. Some notes:

Broken Rank System

Last time I regularly played matchmaking was 2015-era, my rank ranged from L.Eagle (pre-rank reset) to MGE ‘Double AK’ post-reset. So like 85th percentile-ish?

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Short matches (8 rounds per half) didn’t exist back then, nor did Trust Factor, nor did Prime matchmaking (the game was paid not F2P).* So everyone was largely in the same matchmaking pool. The player population has also declined significantly in NA East I heard, but I don’t have stats on that.

*

Terminology:
Trust Factor is an invisible social credit rating that splits the playerbase into “less trusted” and “more trusted”, aka new accounts vs long-lived Steam accounts with more valuable inventories. Prime matchmaking is a separate matchmaking pool for paid accounts that doesn’t exist for free accounts. Both are intended as anti-cheating tools.
It’s interesting to note here that Valve Anti-Cheat bans used to be done primarily by humans but are now done primarily (I hear) by algorithm, with supplemental player vetting thru the Overwatch system.

So the upshot is that between fragmented playerbase across different stripes of matchmaking, and declining NA playerbase, CSGO’s rank system in NA is insanely broken compared to other regions. This is supposed to be a bell curve, but instead the second-lowest rank is the most populated in the game. Contrast with Europe:

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Rank decay exacerbates the situation, where relatively medium-high level players come back from inactivity to see they’ve been put into Silver and so have all the players that were equally high level. I’ve been solo-queueing short matches on Nuke, Prime matchmaking, and the situation is ridiculous. I placed into Silver 4, briefly got up to SE before deranking back to Silver 3. Now maybe I’m just salty, I’m not up to date on 2023 meta and never learned how to play Nuke back then anyway, but on basic mechanical skill this shouldn’t happen. Silvers in 2015 just ran around with P90s and 3000 sensitivity every game, nowadays there’s players who are definitely mid-high-level in Silver 3, it makes no sense.

I can’t imagine being a new player nowadays. You go up against people who are hitting 90% of their counterstrafes and pre-aiming all the standard angles on every map, while you’re still trying to figure out how to not look at the ground or not move and shoot at the same time, let alone learn the maps and the economy etc.

Some prominent names have spoken out on this since 2020, Launders is a semi-pro and caster who’s noted it. Voo, one of the not-sucky youtubers, argues this is a problem faced by small regions like NA is nowadays:

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I’m really surprised that being one of the flagship esports and a leading Valve title in their home region, Valve let it get this bad.

anyways I barely talked about my recent games but maybe I will talk about that later.

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now this is the meta i’m interested in

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seems like a combo of competitive CS never being as popular in NA as it is in europe/asia (even back in 1.6 days i ran into mostly euro people on ESEA servers which also got griefed to shit all the time because americans love griefing in competitive games) and valve’s classic tendency to not fix problems until they literally break the game. it is extremely bizarre!

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american men specifically ruin all american esports, it’s so garbage. is NA good at any esport that’s played in other countries? (im aware you could say this about other sports but on the other hand, baseball basketball etc) it seems like whether it’s league dota or CS NA sucks. culture issue

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yeah my Personal Opinion is that americans suck at competitive games because we cant thrive under equal settings we love cheating and take no joy in being bested fairly. just look at how gamers gravitate towards 6 stacks they can bully and humiliate an unorganized team with, how angry they get when they lose, how quick they are to fall back on “skill issue”…

i always think about dellor streaming dayz and running around shooting unarmed freshly spawned people in the head keeping a kill counter like hes hot shit and then raging the second he gets killed by anyone who isnt defenseless

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Can you use a controller yet?

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you already can (if you’re okay with losing every round)

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right! it’s such an absolute rarity to find American gamers who really just are in it for the thrill of competition and not just some crazy ego trip. matchmaking teammates like that are worth their weight in gold.

it’s funny cuz that attitude seems to be drilled out of athletes in physical sports by coaching, but most players of esports who aren’t pro will never have a coach

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in the uk / europe i’ve seen esports turn both fps and fighting games scenes into dogshit so it’s not just america. as soon as a chunk of the playerbase starts to see competitive play as a vehicle to getting sponsorship or a twitch partnership or whatever it’s done

like as soon as the marketing managers infiltrated quakenet dming literally anyone half decent offers of free hardware etc. everything changed overnight

cs2 looks sick though

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For me, CS has always been a series that I just cannot do well in. I lack the twitch muscle and reaction time and ability to learn the maps. I cannot compete with a playerbase that has been playing the game nonstop/every day for nearly 25 years. It always looks cool but I am not built for the game.

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Last I checked 2 years ago controller support was still broken. Line you had to change biddings and sensitivity in consolle and they would reset on every map change. If you went looking on support…everyone was as dismissive as you that anyone would use a controller.

They’ve been promising to fix controller support for at least 10 years.

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I’m glad CS (still) exists but I have not been able to stomach CS gameplay since like… 1.1?

by which I mean de_

I still got hilariously, insanely indignant when I heard they changed long from T spawn on dust2

dust 2 is unimpeachable

anyway I spend my time now playing bad shootmans so props for sticking with a good one

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FWIW the tools for learning these things have come a long way. the older I get I have grown to believe that inability to learn things is usually not a question of innate ability but of pedagogy. Nowadays you have practice prefire maps like Yprac which give you a lot of ways to learn the angles and where people can be, as well as recoil training, aim training etc. practicing these site entry routes is really ingraining it into my muscle memory.

(knowledge and muscle memory > reaction time, most pros have quite average reaction time, it’s really that their crosshair placement is so good that enemies run into their bullets)

I’ve also signed up for a service called leetify that analyzes matchmaking games and gives you a dashboard on what to improve, the stats show for example that my counter strafing is good but my flashbang usage is not that hot. I’m pretty impressed with the quality of the free tier.

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practice methods is a whole discussion in itself but I think the experience of trying to learn a musical instrument is really helping me think about how to practice this. trying to break things down into their smallest component parts and then improving each part. it’s always a question of focusing - in the beginning you’re bad at everything, but you can’t practice everything, so you have to narrow down what you’re working, and then spend real hours on it before you see progress.

–

Right now I’m working on my map knowledge on Nuke, playing ramp on CT; general game sense; and my movement (KZ servers), Movement is the most underrated thing as feeling free in moving around in Source tends to translate to confident gameplay in a nearly tangible way.

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have changed the name of the thread to be more accepting and use modern terminology (altho i dare anyone to define ‘tactical fps’ in a way that includes CS-like esports but not, say, ARMA)

shots fired: every time i watch valorant it just looks like slow cs played exclusively by e-boys and e-girls

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Yes that’s correct, it’s CS by way of Overwatch which is like, ok, I understand why, but why

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Valorant is an exercise in how many ways a single group of people can think of ways of reinventing the flashbang and smoke grenade

occasionally a skill like “putting down security cameras” or “deployable turrets” sneaks through but ultimately they’re still about controlling space

I guess this is more interesting that OW, where the losing team can lose for several minutes until they all get their Q buttons and unbalance the game for 10 seconds

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yeah i have heard that utility is pretty much free in Valorant, compared to CS

this is a skill i’m not very good at in CS, knowing when to use my grenades and also being mechanically skilled enough to throw pop flashes and smokes/mollies effectively. i don’t have a good way of practicing that skill rn which is a shame, i want like a ‘pop flash trainer’ map

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skybox 3d kinda lit lol. ive been using it to review some pro matches on nuke, understand better how pro players position themselves. it’s got restrictions on the free tier and it’s a little clunky but a bajillion times better than CSGO’s built in demo viewer, which is really a crime against humanity

if you’re using the built-in demo viewer you absolutely need to add demo_index 1 to your autoexec, btw. way faster seeking - 5 seconds rather than 5 minutes

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CS2 has legs - funny looking but legs nonetheless

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