Cats And Dogs
After years of treating CS:S as the stepchild, ESL has now announced it will have a place on the Intel Extreme Masters circuit in 2011.
Journalists can generally be divided into two types, cats and dogs. The dogs are out all day chasing traffic and generally end up with little to show for all that effort except their tongues hanging out. Cats on the other hand get to lounge around while all their strories are served up on saucers with a fresh dollop of cream and a stroke under the chin. It is proof that effort doesn’t always directly translate to reward despite what people would want to have you believe. In e-sports at least I have the luxury of being one of the latter. For some reason people all want to tell me secrets, tell me what is really happening safe in the knowledge it’s all off the record and more than likely if I used any of it it’d cause such a resulting shitstorm I’d be chasing traffic for the rest of my days. It is a frustrating mix of concessions but it’s the nature of the beast(s).
This time however, I don’t know, the rumour being peddled as fact is particularly troubling as it seems to be having an impact on the way some people are behaving. Loads of people have been telling me it’s true, that it is the worst kept secret in e-sports and I should just announce it to the world, yet I can’t help but feel that if that were the case there should have been something official by now. Instead just a stony silence and a scattering of puzzle pieces for those who are bored of sodoku… To those minds something is clearly afoot and they are happy to say they have the answers. Yet, is it not just likely a series of coincidences, spun into a story by those with fertile imaginations?
The story I of course is that the IEM will be picking up CS:S in its next installment, a prospect that seemed completely insane six months ago, the fabrications of a Source fanboy determined to finally get one over the 1.6ers. Yet I have received several e-mails about it, the most convincing of which contained a chat log from a prominent 1.6 player talking about IEM picking up CS:S. He seemed to find the whole thing funny but it wasn’t clear, from the extract at least, exactly how much prominence the game would be given, whether it would still remain in the shadow of 1.6 – the most likely outcome – or whether it would be given parity with one of the world’s premier e-sports titles.
So that’s the rumour and many people will peddle it with some authority from all levels of the scene. I’ve even seen American CS:S players talking about it, geared up for a taste of the big time, something that has eluded them like a vintage Mohammed Ali since the collapse of CGS. The rumour hasn’t stayed confined to one scene, or even on continent, with everyone thinking that the second golden age of CS:S is lurking round the corner. There are some that have come back to the game simply because they think that this is the case, that the rewards will be worth the considerable efforts finally. If I didn’t know better I’d say this rumour was partly responsible for the sudden resurgence in the scene, new teams cropping up and old faces returning.
Not convinced? OK, well let’s start at the beginning, when my ears first pricked to the possibility. Reports of this possibility began back at the German EPS finals and quickly spread through the CS:S community, competitive players especially keen to get it out there. It is apparently the norm at the big German ESL events to take a survey about what events the spectators enjoy the most, so they can ensure that they are catered to at future events. Of course, at German EPS you will see hundreds, if not thousands, of spectators actually attend, as opposed to a dozen or so confused looking drunks at the UK EPS. Apparently for the first time ever the audience said they had preferred the CS:S event to the 1.6… It seems surprising that this would be the first time ever given the popularity of CS:S in Germany, however this is how the story goes and how the whole rotten business got started.
From there it was only a matter of time before someone interpreted that result into what it could mean. There were a few iterations of the story before someone dared to dream big… What if it meant that the ESL were going to start using the game for their big competitions? What if it meant 1.6 would finally be taking a back seat? The conclusion seemed to be that CS:S would find itself in the ESL’s Intel Extreme Masters, one of their premier competitions. Depending on who you spoke to it was either replacing 1.6 – completely unthinkable – or running alongside it in a separate competition, which while strange seemed the more plausible of the two.
The story snowballed and suddenly players were talking about is as if it was a certainty. While this seemed at loggerheads with the truth – after all, the games list for IEM had already been confirmed – it didn’t stop it taking root. Along the way, other things started to crop up that seemed to give the rumour even more credence. First it was CS:S teams that were currently without organisations were talking to big name orgs, supposedly both in and out of the G7, about possibly representing them in the upcoming IEM CS:S event. The top teams had all had a tip off you see, giving them time to approach what teams they wanted, with certain ones obviously being more appealing than others but if I was to believe everything I was told these organisations were happy to pick up mediocre teams just so they could be included…
Think on that for a moment. The idea that the biggest names in competitive gaming, associated with the most popular e-sports titles – WC3, 1.6, Quake, FIFA, DoTA and WoW – would somehow clamour to pick up any form of talent just so they could have a CS:S team in one extra event, one that would barely register in the grand scheme of things. The worst part is some of the players that have supposedly been in talks with them, players who haven’t come close to winning anything, yet all of a sudden are in with a shout of a view from the top by simply weathering the storm… Something just doesn’t sound right about it but whatever. It wouldn’t be the first time a group of players have been going around making up stories about what sponsorship offers they’ve had. At least these have genuine credentials, eh Audio Technica.CSS.
Then, of course mousesports and SK Gaming picked up teams for the German EPS, which although a completely separate competition and a move that in isolation makes absolute sense, was the final log on a fire that was already roasting like a Russian nightclub. The reaction was divided largely into two categories. On one side were the idiots who said things like “why pick up this team when they’re bad”, failing to acknowledge this was the way to have a guaranteed spot in the EPS without having to get into the ugly business of poaching and e-sports contracts… On the other were the people who proclaimed that it would be part of some G7 takeover of CS:S and that the game had the rosiest looking future it did since it had been beamed into the homes of the indifferent thanks to Eurosport. The people that had seen themselves as the Nostradamus of e-sports felt pretty smug and more and more started to believe the hype.
Here’s the reality… It’s simply a story that has had a few extra plot strands added to it that have given life to it like bolts of lightening animating a corpse in a mad scientist’s laboratory. And the more you think about it, the more you realise you’d have to be mad to believe any of it. Of course, I’ve seen a lot of crazy shit in e-sports in my time and have broken my fair share of stories, so I did the whole thing the courtesy of looking in to it. I’d like to report on a conspiracy that would allow me to drop the immortal “we’re through the looking glass” line but everyone seemed as confused as I was.
Although there was no-one affiliated with the G7 who wanted to give the rumours credence in an “on the record” capacity they did say I could use their quotes. On the issue of CS:S being added to the IEM games list one told me:
“It sounds like a very strange rumour to me. Even if it was true that CS:S is more popular to Germans than 1.6, this completely overlooks how global the game of 1.6 is. There are established followings worldwide, far more than CS:S and with good reason. It’d take a lot more than any one survey to make people suddenly revise this standpoint.”
And when it came to the matter of the teams being tipped off and told to pick up CS:S teams in advance another told me:
“I have heard nothing about CS:S being picked up by ESL for IEM. I think it would be a very strange move by ESL to do so. The game has never been played at a real top level, like CS 1.6 for example. Other things are that the community currently aren't able to fill up the slots at other events, so let alone that the game is big enough for a big league such as the Intel Extreme Masters.”
Of course, they would say that wouldn’t they… They’ve got something to hide, haven’t they, the lying bastards. I wanted to pin someone down who had a bit of authority on the matter and someone who would actually put a name on it. That of course serves two purposes, the first hopefully giving some weight to this screed, as without it the piece would be little better than the jackanory that fuelled it. The other part enables me to blame someone if they suddenly decide to bust out the twist ending and announce that new CEO of ESL is M Night Shyamalan. Not a bad move for him given his press as it happens and we’d all be better off if he was far away from Hollywood as anyone who has the misfortune to sit through The Last Airbender will be able to testify to.
So I went to a fellow e-sport stalwart in the form of Michal "carmac" Blicharz, who after cutting his teeth in e-sports journalism is now the Product Manager of the Intel Extreme Masters. Having played a significant part already in the progress that the ESL are making and in the continual development of the IEM as one of the greatest e-sports competitions in the world you think that he would have a thought or two about this whole business. Well, he maybe does and we didn’t go into it but he was happy to put his name on a quote that hopefully will put paid to the madness.
“We are always on the lookout for options that make sense and we keep several games on our radar. We are constantly looking at many games, not just CS, but that does not mean they'll make it into the Intel Extreme Masters.
The game list for the 5th season of the Intel Extreme Masters is complete at StarCraft II, Counter-Strike 1.6 and Quake Live. We will start thinking about whether or not to change something after the World Championship in 2011.”
So that hopefully puts paid to the gibberish once and for all, although facts have rarely got in the way of a good yarn in e-sports. I’m rarely the guy to stamp on something that’s trying to slither by, minding it’s own business, but there’s enough idiocy festering in our respective scenes without allowing the more grandiose examples of nonsense to exist unchecked. The other part is depending on how you assess the fullness or emptiness of glasses you could infer from that statement that there is still hope yet for the offspring of 1.6.
Things of late have been pulled back from the brink. More people are starting to play seriously, sponsors are looking at supporting the game again and Hidden Path are desperately trying to make the game something it never really was – fit for competitive play. But one step at a time folks. There is a future for CS:S but it’s an uncertain one and a long way from enjoying any sort of secondary peak. Anything else is just wishful thinking.