Gonzo Awards: The Riot Games Award for “Great Game Balance & Development”

Games developers think microdosing acid makes them intellectual titans and yet they continually ruin their own products despite mere peons being able to see the problems ahead.

Previous Winners

🥇 2015: Valve introduces the R8 to Counter-Strike

🥇 2016: No Award

And the winner is… CS2’s Entire Existence

This very Substack launched with the news that Valve would be releasing their new version of Counter-Strike in 2023, that it would be called CS2 and that it would replace CS:GO as the primary version of the game moving forward. Once the dust had settled and some prominent YouTubers made fools of themselves publicly again it indeed transpired I was right and there was much excitement among the CS community for what was to come. It didn’t take long for that excitement to subside into cautious optimism before the floodgates opening on the mass psychosis every esports fandom is capable of at any given moment.

I published a four hour long video addressing the various delusions that have become accepted fact among CS2 players. It was a necessary undertaking as many players, broadcast talent and personalities have realised that all you have to do for attention and clicks is simply agree with the delusions. Yes, there are more cheaters than CS:GO. Valve totally don’t care about their products. They’ve even turned off VAC. The only bans that are happening are false positives. CS:GO was actually a perfect FPS game with the best netcode any competitive title has seen… Repeat this litany and bask in the engagement.

Of course there are criticisms based in reality about the game’s launch. First and foremost among these is the somewhat hasty nature of seemingly snatching away the earlier title when many of the previously available content and game modes have yet to be ported across. While it may very well be necessary in Valve’s eyes it stinks to high heaven for anyone even vaguely concerned with consumer rights. I mean, when CS:GO went free to play you got something back if you paid… Now CS2 has effectively overwritten and deleted a bunch of shit I already had what do I get for that?

A simple solution to that problem was to have CS2 on a separate build path until it at least had most of the functionality CS:GO did but instead for many players the shiny but bare bones of the new title has been underwhelming. The secondary issue is one that’s been pervasive across all of Counter-Strike’s history and that is a total blackout on communications. It’s frustrating for the old guard who know that Valve are always working on something related to the game and that they are more than aware of the problems the community insistently whines about twenty times a day. Still, you need to move with the times and the notion of a major games developer without a community figurehead for the purposes of addressing playerbase concerns puts Valve in the Stone Age. What does it say that since bringing it on to Steam Dwarf Fortress has managed player expectations better than the most played game on the platform?

I get not wanting to make promises but I’m sure the community would at least like to know some sort of vague road map as to where the fuck we’re all going. The twelve people who played it want to know if Danger Zone is coming back. We’d all like to know why you couldn’t predict the popularity of the Premier Leaderboard when it was specifically developed to encourage people to play. How about explaining how the fucking Elo system you’re using works or a rough date for when this experimental season is going to reset. How about a post about some ideas you might have for the economy now we’re playing MR12, probably the best thing that came with CS2. All of these things happen in other games as a matter of course and yeah esports fans are entitled babies that can on occasion reach the emotional maturity of toddlers if you coddle them but it really is time to revise the Valve method when it comes to community management. I don’t care how many funny anecdotes you can squeeze out of it at a games developer conference.

Honestly, in general the game has been a mixed bag with plenty of positives but there are some key components that are inferior to the previous titles and I say that as someone who played all of them including Condition Zero. It lacks polish and feels like a sludgier version of what has gone before and I say that as someone who doesn’t want to be aligned with the Tickcels and the VACsucks crowd. I know enough about Valve to know that the game will be the leading FPS on the market in a year or two but the deadline I’ve set in my mind is for the upcoming Major in March. If things that happen in the games I played happen at a World Championship it’s going to be a highly embarrassing failure that we’ll likely be talking about for next year’s awards.